Present — ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin praesent– ‘being at hand,’ present participle of praeesse, from prae ‘before’ + esse ‘be.’

The metaphysical continua of time, space and spirit (a.k.a. mind) converge in what some have called the metaxy, or middle — as here, now and I. It is striking that the word “present” can be used to designate any of the three. This point in time is called the present. The things around me are present. And when I am aware and available in the moment, I am present, not absent.

*

Some species of spiritualism claim that here and now is all there is. Others claim that here and now is a means to a posthumous end.

Some people attempt to appropriate whatever others have. Others renounce whatever they do not already possess.

These apparently opposite attitudes share a deficit.

*

To accept the reality of metaphysics means to give relevance to the surrounding unknown and validity to the unknowable.

To accept the relevance of the surrounding unknown means not only to acknowledge the fact that others exist differently but, but to live according to a faith that one can be taught and can learn to exist differently. It is by teaching and learning that reality is shared.

But what is the substance of the teaching and the learning? Most people think of teaching and learning as transfer of facts or skills. Some are able to see it as the transmission of vision. But does sharing mean giving another that which one possesses — whether this means handing it over, or duplicating it or dividing it? Sometimes, but not always.

In fact, what is sometimes taught and learned is a relationship to that which is beyond. And when this occurs, what is shared is belonging to something common that is greater than its parts. One feels the beyondness, but one feels the importance of one’s own participation through playing a part in an exceeding whole.

Then, without rejection of the other’s otherness, and without attempting to appropriate the other’s otherness, one says: “I subsist in our We.”

*

Two quotes:

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.’ ”

“Love and duality. — What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours? If love is to bridge these antitheses through joy it may not deny or seek to abolish them. — Even self-love presupposes an unblendable duality (or multiplicity) in one person.”

We question reality: we are skeptics.

We find multiple visions of reality: we are pluralists.

We choose one vision to advance: we are pragmatists.

We forget the difference between vision and reality: we are conservatives.

Some quotes on the sense of smell…

One by Benjamin (From “The Image of Proust”):

No one who knows with what great tenacity memories are preserved by the sense of smell, and smells not at all in the memory, will be able to call Proust’s sensitivity to smells accidental. To be sure, most memories that we search for come to us as visual images. Even the free-floating forms of the memoire involontaire are still in large part isolated, though enigmatically present, visual images. For this very reason, anyone who wishes to surrender knowingly to the innermost overtones in this work must place himself in a special stratum — the bottommost — of this involuntary memory, one in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefinitely and weightily, in the same way as the weight of his net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell — that is the sense of weight of someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu [lost time]. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous effort to raise this catch.

Two by Nietzsche:

“The mediating sense. — The sense of taste has, as the true mediating sense, often persuaded the other senses over to its own view of things and imposed upon them its laws and habits. One can obtain information about the subtlest mysteries of the arts at a meal-table: one has only to notice what tastes good, when it tastes good, what it tastes good after and for how long it tastes good.”

“Odour of words. — Every word has its odour: there exists a harmony and disharmony of odours and thus of words.”

Two by Heraclitus:

“In Hades souls perceive by smelling.”

“If all existing things were smoke, it is by smell that we would distinguish them.”

*

Here is the bit from my Dictionary of Critical Theory that compelled me to read Benjamin:

Benjamin is a fascinating writer, but he is not an easy one, mainly because of his conviction that theory cannot be expounded in isolation… and that factuality is already theory. One-Way Street does not expound any theory, but its constellations of images, aphorisms and juxtapositions are intended to be a form of thinking-in-pictures (Bilddenken) from which understanding emerges without having to be expounded. Benjamin claimed that he had nothing to say, ‘only to show’.

*

The unifying thrust of all my various interests, both private and professional, is the pursuit of the background philosophies that unconsciously shape our worldviews, and bestow on them unifying and particularizing meaning. It is the background philosophy that projects a sense of relevance on the world and causes us to perceive phenomena around us in some particular self-evident way — and to miss completely alternative ways to perceive. And perceptions are understood in conceptions, and the conceptions affirm and reinforce the perceptions, in a circle. And our responses are formed by our conceptions, both in the ideals that direct the responses as a whole and the strategies and tactics we employ in pursuit of our ideals, and this also moves in a self-affirming, self-reinforcing circle. And finally, how we feel pervades our perceptions, conceptions and responses, animates them, and is the momentum driving the cycles and epicycles of the soul. Our perceptions and conceptions mutually and centripetally attract; our erotic attraction to otherness drives us outward centrifugally, and we whirl out loops and circles and spirals as we move in infinity looking for the comfort of some definite truth, some universal definitions, some definity. Yet, once we have definiteness we immediately yearn for infinity…

And how do we learn about these background philosophies? There is nothing to study directly. We study the forces as they act on particulars. We listen to how the other articulates, defines, connects meanings. We observe behaviors — both bodily behaviors, but also intellectual movements. Our background philosophies draw chalklines around us, and our minds and bodies obey their invisible limits. And we key into the logic of meaning — attune to moral priorities — resonate consonantly for and dissonantly against, nodding, smiling frowning with the other like two women mirroring gestures in a restaurant. Is there a fixed technique? There are techniques for uncovering certain illuminating particulars, but on the whole, the researcher must proceed by instinct — almost by sense of smell.

When I read the authors I love, what I am searching for is this background philosophy. I read, knowing the language by which I understand my authors, is precisely the site of change. How is he using this word? How are these thoughts connected? When I understand this word in this slightly shifted sense, what happens to all my previous understandings, understood by way of the shifted word? And what happens to all the thoughts I ever had, limited by my old use? What does this new definitional possibility open to my thought as a whole? And as I read, pursuing limits outside my own, I expand and change and my world changes. And my world changes because I have allowed the author in. I offer the author my life, and many have taken it. I read philosophy to enlarge that background from which I think.

When my work is good, I am researching people to discover their background philosophies, which reveal the unities and particularities of their worldviews, and where they may desire some clarity, some definition, some definiteness where it is lacking, or some reinforcement of some notion that has become exposed and questionable — or perhaps where a grain of infinity might be welcome… What foreground images, words, ideas, behaviors will serve the background of this person’s being?

And brands — those are also background philosophies. We would love to bring them into the foreground and make them concrete and definite. We want to define them, possess them. But what I love about brands is precisely their defiance of reduction in any foreground terms. Brands generate foregrounds. They manifest, in the proper sense: manifestare, from Latin, ‘make public,’ from manifestus ‘obvious’. But what makes brands fascinating is their ability to work out of the background to produce works of unsystematic coherence, unpredictable inevitability, and unformulaic continuity — in other words, it has the properties of genius.

And of course those who know religion know also that the explicit doctrines, the moral codes, the formal customs — as much as they are the manifestation of religion are not the religion itself.

*

I’ve talked about background philosophy, but even that is not at the core of being. It isn’t even close, but it is closer than the thoughts we have when we think. Behind the background is more background, and it fades from merely unintelligible to inexperienceable blindness. Metaphysics says existence continues much further. Phenomenology says, “maybe, but so what?”

Whatever it is that stands behind background philosophy, it seems to generate diversity seeking unity, and unity seeking diversity, so it seems to me that seeking a unified background we all can share is equally futile and necessary.

Many words have been used to indicate this background that all of us carry about us that projects out around us an intelligible universe, but as fast as the words are used, they are reduced to definition and drained of their meaning. They take objective form — become entities with defined edges, that our minds can wrap their comprehending fingers around and hold-together. But the background is not definite. It is not finite. It is the infinite penetrating the finite. Because the infinite must penetrate the finite to be infinite.

We need a word that undefines definitions and changes them back into their proper infinite form.

The infinition of soul would be: the world that envelops every point that beholds it.

Some other words that need infinition: religion, tradition, culture, brand, author, human.

When we learn to think in infinitions as well as definitions, then we can discuss atheism.

*

One more from Nietzsche:

In the writings of a hermit one always hears something of the echo of the wilderness, something of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and night, from year’s end to year’s end, alone with his soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave — it may be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine — his ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight-colour of their own, and an odor, as much of the depth as of the mold, something uncommunicative and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passerby. The recluse does not believe that a philosopher — supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse — ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us? — indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have “ultimate and actual” opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss [Abgrund] behind every ground [Grunde], beneath every “foundation” [Begrundung]. Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that he [the philosopher] came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper — there is also something suspicious in it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.

I don’t care about designing and building cool stuff.

I don’t care about inventing ideas for cool stuff that can be designed and built.

This is boutique bullshit.

*

I don’t care about messages and images, in isolation or combined in a coherent and compelling whole.

I don’t care about communicating to customers and changing their perceptions and behaviors.

I don’t care about channels, media, or demographics.

This is advertising bullshit.

*

I don’t care about making highly functional stuff.

I don’t give two shits if something is useful and usable if it is just a refinement of what everyone else is doing.

This is user experience bullshit.

*

What I care about are insights and their practical consequences.

I care about understanding particular people and particular brands, and discovering possibilities of relationship.

Then… consequently, I become interested in ideas that help start, develop and substantiate that relationship.

Then I care about messages, images and function… and about channels and media, and the best way to use them in concert.

Then I become urgently concerned with the details of design, because those details are faithful to the relationship, or ignore it, or betray it.

And I want to see that design built, because I want to see the relationship work out.

I want to play brand matchmaker.

If you have no use for someone the last thing you should do is assign a use.

*

Confusion can arise from confusing circumstances or from a confused mind. In both cases, the circumstances are confusing.

Clarity can arise from understanding circumstances or from misunderstanding them. In both cases, one understands.

*

When one is clear on things, one doesn’t understand everything — only what is relevant.

When one is confused, what is relevant and what is irrelevant has not been clarified.

*

To come to an agreement with another person means to agree on what is and is not relevant.

In the late 90s I went to work for an IT consulting company that had just acquired a renowned design shop, and was attempting to integrate the two cultures. I joined at the precise point where the honeymoon ends and life together begins, and was privileged to witness a universal trauma of human life. (Young fiances think they will append the happiness of togetherness to their respective lives. Perhaps later they will add the happiness of offspring to their couplehood. The metamorphosis of child to lover, lover to spouse, and spouse to parent, etc. is psychologically violent and painful, and for good reason. [* See note below.])

The software engineers were excited about the addition of creatives and what later came to be called “user experience (UX) professionals” added to the mix. They knew their user interfaces could be made more user-friendly, and were eager to collaborate. But then the reality of the situation hit.

The addition of UX did not constitute an addition at all, but a challenge to the whole vision and practice of IT. There was no way to maximize the value of UX in the software development process by simply adding capabilities to an existing process.

The whole enterprise had to be rethought, from top to bottom. First there was a distressingly deep change in how the product of the work was conceived. Many of the software designers thought of what they were producing as code, and the code needed to function solidly. Others placed more focus on the user interface, and thought of what they were producing as software that had to some degree a quality of usability. The UX vision, however, shifted the focus away from the artifact. What was being created at the most radical level (as it appeared at that time) was an experience, and not only the code, but the user interface were just means of delivery of this experience.

The entire field of software development was shifted from an ontic vision (conceiving truth in terms of things) to a phenomenological one (conceiving truth in terms of subjects encountering and making sense of phenomena). This shift did not invalidate the importance of code or of good user interface design, but it certainly put it in a new context with new considerations and new priorities, and to address these consideration, the processes of software development had to be reconsidered.

This is what is meant by paradigm shift. The way things are seen changes on the whole, this new vision makes new, previously unnoticed or dismissed considerations relevant; to accommodate the new vision and new considerations, new practices become necessary, and these new practices force a reordering of the overarching approach, which in turn changes existing practices. And of course, this also changes where each role fits into the work.

[Note for nerds: It could even be said that UX represents the emergence of  a pop phenomenology, a practical echo of an earlier poetic popularization, existentialism.]

Of course, these types of shifts are complex and slippery. The human mind finds it extraordinarily difficult to transcend an ontic perspective. We prefer to think about discrete, definable things we can point to and say “this word signifies that.” When a super-ontic perspective gains cultural power, the power itself becomes attractive especially to ontic minds which wish to acquire some of that power. So what tends to happen is the language of the movement is adopted and remapped to the old, unchanged ontic perspective, which gains some exciting new synonyms. So now, when you think about the user interface that you’re designing, you don’t call it a “user interface”, you call it an “experience”. When you do your requirements gathering, instead of just talking to people inside the company you also interview people outside the company and gather “user requirements”, and this activity is called “user research”. Not only that — you can also QA your new user interf… er, “user experience” with usability testing. And all this new vocabulary and techniques distinguish you from competitors who still don’t know these new words and techniques. They have not experienced the “paradigm shift”.

What happens in these cases, is you have a set of people who have some to see by the new vision, and use the new vocabulary and methods because these are the logical and practical extension of seeing this way, and you have a much larger group who become also “fundamentalist” converts, who change opinions and behaviors and become among the most fervent advocates of this new way, but who remain at bottom unchanged in their vision and values, and unaware of that fact.

And this process happens constantly. The whole notion of emotional design and brand experience is in collision with the UX world, and has put UX practitioners in the position software engineers were put in a decade ago. In 1999, everyone wanted to be the one who got to do the wireframes. There was great prestige to doing them: you were a jewel in the crown of the New Economy. (The romantic intensity of this position was a hundred times that of social media today, as hyped as it is. Social media borders on mania, Information Architecture was full-on manic.) People talk about wireframes very differently now, and those who do them have gone from feeling pride in their task, to being tasked with something slightly onerous. They may love designing experiences, but they hate what it means to be a designer of the specifics of experiences, and so they seek to escape it (into “strategy”) for the sake of social status, and further, anyone else who pursues something beyond experience design is also seen as a status-seeker. Everybody wants to be a strategist, because that is “higher”. If only it were lower so only those fit for the role would want it.

I remember a friend explaining to me that coders were becoming like plumbers. Now experience architects are plumbers.

But why do we have so little respect for plumbers?

*

Why do we respect plumbers so little? (And don’t say you do respect them, then become angry if someone calls you a plumber.)

But also, if our standard for prestige is to function at the most radical level of understanding, why do we have so little respect for philosophy? Philosophy, after all, is precisely the discipline of discovering and settling the most radical level of understanding!

We want to avoid doing philosophy. But we also want to feel superior to philosophy. But perversely, we want the status of one who has philosophized.

We want to work like plumbers, refining a known discipline and excelling at it, but the status of craftsperson is too low for us.

*

But it is easy to know when you have transcended another perspective. You can see the limitations of the other’s thinking almost like edges, in the form of what they fail to consider. (This is known in phenomenology as a horizon.) However, what does this look and feel like from within the horizon of one transcended? It looks like a bunch of irrelevant and complicating concerns being imposed on a situation that is already well-understood. It looks like theoretical hair-splitting. It looks like obfuscating language. It feels like venturing into undefined territory for no good reason. It feels irritating and anxious. It feels like pointless frustration.

It is the feeling of popular conservatism.

*

Reading philosophy is the discipline of confronting superior perspectives and rising to know them and in the process deepening one’s vision of the world. In the process one plays the part of lower in relationship to higher, and then higher in relationship to one’s former lower self. One can then speak etically of one’s former emic existence, which means to acquire a new emic existence to transcend. And one acquires a taste for surpassing greatness.

*

Thomas Kuhn, the popularizer of the term “paradigm shift” effected a paradigm shift in our understanding of scientific progress. Before him, science was understood to be a linear accretion of scientific facts. The body of knowledge was supposed to grow in spurts, and the spurts were scientific revolutions. Kuhn showed that, in fact, science progresses rapidly, stalls and stays stalled until significant and deep conceptions of current scientific thought are questioned, challenged and finally rejected. The body of knowledge needs frequent pruning to keep growing. Perhaps because we are mammals we look upon a pruning of the body of knowledge with horror as if it were amputation or castration. At any rate, we are hostile enough this state of affairs to rewrite our science books after each revolution to maintain an appearance of steady, additive progress.

Nobody minds learning new facts. It is the unlearning of facts that we hate, especially facts that orient us to our world, constitute our sanity, and endow us with the aura of expertise. We have to die to an old reality, forget what we know, wander through darkness suffering the darkest perplexities, faithfully resisting the compulsion to look back, until we come out the other side with a new way of seeing the world.

We want to acquire a new vision without suffering the pain of doubting, then losing then living without the old one. But “only where there are tombs are there resurrections.”

*

[Note: I remember as a kid reading a review of American Werewolf in London, where the reviewer remarked on the insightful treatment of the transformation experience. 29 years later, I am still fascinated that  the reviewer remarked not on the technique of the special effects, but on the significance of the intention and the success of the attempt.]

I keep repeating this idea, but I want to say it right:

We remember in wholes. Some fragment is identified as a member of a whole memory which comes back to mind as a whole out of memory. Within the remembered whole the details become available to us, almost deductively.

We recall feeling and mood associated with a memory. An event occurred in the past, and at that time we responded with feeling and mood. But our response itself is not in our memory, only the images and facts of the event — and among them is the fact of our response. But when we remember, if the quality of the remembrance is sufficient the memory calls to the same feelings, and the feelings are re-had.

We recollect in parts. We rummage through memory, and collect fragments hoping that if we gather enough of them we will remember the memory to which they all belong, and perhaps also recall the feeling and mood of the memory.

When a mood is recalled, or occurs in response to life, within that mood we sometimes reminisce. Our present mood resonates with our memories and moves us to recollect details of our lives at the time when the mood predominated.

Why is the idea of social engineering so alarming to people, and haphazard piecemeal replacement or displacement of organic life being with engineered activities so unworthy of concern?

For someone who has watched the User Experience profession evolve from calling itself Information Architecture, to an array of User Experience roles, and is now beginning to question the term “user” as it considers the importance of the non-functional, emotional and story, the language of this passage from Walter Benjamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” is startlingly relevant:

Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. In turn, there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand.

There is much to contemplate in this passage related to information, experience and brand, and the evolution of our commercial culture.

In his essay/letter “Some Reflections on Kafka” Benjamin shares a striking quote from Stanley Eddington:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

We are subjective beings, living in subjectively significant worlds, but our minds think in terms of objects and remember only objects.

*

Only through remembering objectively do we recall subjective experience.

Only through imagining objectively do we evoke subjective experience.

*

The source of our valuing is beyond the grasp of our minds, but we depend on our minds for access to what we care about.

The source of our valuing can be apprehended but not comprehended.

We feel it at our fingertips, but our hands cannot close around it, because it lacks edges.

So we close our fingers around what reflects our valuing and allows us to value things.

*

The finite is defined when its outer edges are felt out. The infinite cannot be defined, because outer edges are the one thing infinity lacks.

But in a very strange sense each individual bears the image of infinity through experience and its horizon of blindness. Our experience is to us infinite because we cannot define it. We define within it.

Alternatively, perhaps we only learn the meaning of infinity through experiencing our former finitude retrospectively by expanding our present “everything”. Seeing the old boundless “everything” whole against a new background of boundless “everything”, one knows his former blindness. Not only the expanded “everything” is seen. More importantly, one is aware that this new boundlessness is bounded, and learns to make a distinction between our own finite “everything” and infinity. It can take more than one experience of finitude to recognize this fact. The first can look a lot like transcendence from a world of illusion into the world of truth.

*

We seem to be made in an image of infinity, but the image is so convincing that we can confuse the image for the real thing. And this confusion is deeply pleasurable, so we’re less motivated to dispel it (by actively seeking out how we may be wrong) than to reinforce it (by demonstrating how we are right). Some confuse their individual being with this image. The real danger, though, is collective being, because then the consensus of relevant opinions confirms each individual’s error, and there’s nobody to correct the error except those whose opinions are irrelevant.

Brand: the systematic attempt to outfit an organization’s or individual’s Who — which is never essentially a What — with a suitable, representative and compelling public What.

Brand planning: the systematic attempt to understand a public’s What-receptivity, in order to present an organization’s Who to it — that is, their brand — as suitably, representatively and compellingly as possible.

“No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.” — Hannah Arendt

*

“The basis of man’s life with man is twofold, and it is one — the wish of every man to be confirmed as what he is, even as what he can become, by men; and the innate capacity in man to confirm his fellow men in this way. That this capacity lies so immeasurably fallow constitutes the real weakness and questionableness of the human race: actual humanity exists only where this capacity unfolds. On the other hand, of course, an empty claim for confirmation, without devotion for being and becoming, again and again mars the truth of the life between man and man.” — Buber

*

Brand positioning: the systematic attempt to outfit an organization’s or individual’s Who with a suitable public What.

Singing sonar songs, we flit in the dark, not even flying, bouncing words off invisible ears arrayed in space, ascertaining where this other stands relative to ourselves in reality.

*

“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.” — Heraclitus

“What Homer says of it is so true and so terrible it pierces us through: ‘the muse loved him dearly and gave to him good and evil; for she took from him his eyes and bestowed upon him sweet song.’ — This is a text without end for the thinker: she gives good and evil, that is her way of loving dearly! And everyone will interpret for himself why it is we thinkers and poets have to give our eyes in exchange.” — Nietzsche

“The life of human beings is not passed in the sphere of transitive verbs alone. It does not exist in virtue of activities alone which have some thing for their object. / I perceive something. I am sensible of something. I imagine something. I will something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human beings does not consist of all this and the like alone. / This and the like together establish the realm of It. / But the realm of Thou has a different basis. When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object. For where there is a thing there is another thing. Every It is bounded by others; It exists only through being bounded by others. But when Thou is spoken, there is no thing. Thou has no bounds. / When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation.” — Buber

“Our fellow men, it is true, live round about us as components of the independent world over against us, but in so far as we grasp each one as a human being he ceases to be a component and is there in his self-being as I am; his being at a distance does not exist merely for me, but it cannot be separated from the fact of my being at a distance for him. The first movement of human life puts men into mutual existence which is fundamental and even. But the second movement puts them into mutual relation with me which happens from time to time and by no means in an even way, but depends on our carrying it out. Relation is fulfilled in a full making present when I think of the other not merely as this very one, but experience, in the particular approximation of the given moment, the experience belonging to him as this very one. Here and now for the first time does the other become a self for me, and the making independent of his being which was carried out in the first movement of distancing is shown in a new highly pregnant sense as a presupposition — a presupposition of this ‘becoming a self for me’, which is, however, to be understood not in a psychological but in a strictly ontological sense, and should therefore rather be called ‘becoming a self with me’. But it is ontologically complete only when the other knows that he is made present by me in his self and when this knowledge induces the process of his inmost self-becoming. For the inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between the one and the other, between men, that is, pre-eminently in the mutuality of the making present — in the making present of another self and in the knowledge that one is made present in his own self by the other — together with the mutuality of acceptance, of affirmation and confirmation.” — Buber

I might have to reorganize my library by the metaphysical attitude of the authors. I’d have poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, businessmen, design theorists, anthropologists, artists, historians, sociologists, theologians, etc. all grouped together by philosophical like-mindedness, liberated from their inadequate categories (or maybe benevolently imprisoned by my own).

My primary consideration would not be the usability of the system, but rather, what would it be like to sit in my chair, surrounded by my books organized this way?

(Experimental pano shot of my untidied office.)

Maybe Jungian type describes attitudes one takes toward the yaos (What, How, Why) in one’s daily functioning, where the Enneagram indicates focus of interest on one or several of the yaos. In other words, maybe the triad can serve as a unifying structure. Just a thought.

Who is the way one approaches the questions What? How? and Why?

To wonder how another person approaches What? How? and Why? is to regard that person as Who? instead of as an answer to one of your own questions — as a thing, or a means, or a projection.

*

“Thou” is the proper name for “Who?”.

I can’t decide which vision is more damaging: the Fall or Progress. The former results in attitudes of resignation or ignorant reactionism, the other leads to complacence or reckless utopianism.

The controversy of Darwinism / Creationism / Intelligent Design owes its intensity to the conflict between the Fall and Progress. Each vision wants its mythical embodiment taught to the young.

*

Meliorism is the way out of this conflict, but meliorism requires proper education. Unfortunately, in our mania to quantify education we’ve lost all sense of paideia. Only banausos (facts and skills) can be quantified, and we are far too poorly educated to know how to approach that which resists quantification.

We teach only the doing of one’s determinate duty, not reflection on duty.

Consequently, our society is more and more like an autonomous, self-building machine without an operator.