Category Archives: Ideas

Escapism

Ideas

As far as I can tell, most lives are divided between toil and entertainment — and both are forms of escapism.

From what are we escaping? Awareness of life beyond escape.

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Deeper understanding and better ways of living are impossible under the tightening spiral of harassment of automatic contemporary existence.

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Those with time waste their time; those who need time are wasted.

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The purposeless have the power to impose on those with purposes of their own.

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You and I inhabit different worlds.

From mine, your world looks too small to accommodate my purpose. From yours, I am useless. Yet, you can find a use for me.

Concrete and back

Ideas

Truth becomes concrete to us when:

  1. Our theory is self-consistent, so we find little self-contradiction in its internal logic.
  2. Our theory is consistent with our experience, so we find little gap between our theoretical interpretations and our (relevant) perceptions.
  3. Our theory is consistent with our practice, so the theory is consistently useful in actualizing intentions.
  4. Our theory is consistent with our language, so we do not have to think about speaking when articulating our theory theoretically, perceptually or practically.
  5. Our theory is consciously believed and advocated by those around us.
  6. Our theory is matches the perceptions of those around us.
  7. Our theory is matches the practices of our collaborators.
  8. Our theory is embedded in the language of our culture.
  9. Our theory is generally accepted as an accurate image of objective truth.
  10. Our theory doesn’t exist at all, because it is simply reality itself.
  11. Reality is challenged by malcontents who claim there are multiple realities.
  12. Our theory is challenged by malcontents who claim their theory more accurately reflects reality.
  13. Our practice is challenged by malcontents who claim their practices will improve our reality.

Cartographic meditations

Ideas

A map represents a situation, seen from a distance, in overview. It provides a representation of the spatial relationships of entities in the world — how they are located in space. Maps often provide the name of each entity, as well.

Maps also (less directly) represent all possible spatial situations within the bounds of the map, and this is actually the main purpose of a map.

Maps viewed as objects are one thing; maps used as instruments are another.

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If a navigator were able to see himself from the distant vantage of the map, and if he knew where he was trying to go, a map would not be necessary.

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A map by itself does not indicate where on the map the navigator is located, nor does it give the navigator his orientation. Only if the navigator discovers where he is located and how he is oriented on his map, he can understand the positions of the entities depicted on the map relative to himself. And then he can find the correspondence between the situation he sees around him  and what he sees depicted on his map. Then he can navigate.

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It’s interesting to note that the word “navigate” comes from navis ‘ship’ + agere ‘drive.’

Old maps of oceans were charted from extremely sporadic points. These maps were not constructed atomistically, by systematically inventorying grids of space. They were made by spatially relating separate discoveries. But between these, who knew what was there? Most of what is shown on such maps is distances — mere potential for traversal and occasional discovery.

Beyond the charted discoveries, nobody knew how large a piece of paper would be needed to chart all possible discoveries.

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Once a navigator has located and oriented himself on the map, he now has an objective representation of the situation he is in.

The navigator’s situation surrounds him. He situated inside it, and is oriented within it.

The navigator’s map allows him to get an outside overview of what he is inside.

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Situating oneself within reality,  through situating oneself on a map, and vice versa, so the two correspond — that’s a pretty interesting transformation of knowledge and perspective. We relate an outside, distant view with an inside, involved view.

The map view vs the immersed view (or 3rd-vs-1st person view or maze-vs-labyrinth), does more justice to the objective-vs-subjective dichotomy than the usual thinking-vs-feeling or fact-vs-opinion or inner-mind-vs-outer-world or especially the actual-vs-arbitrary dichotomies we habitually employ when thinking on this theme.

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Does a map show someone where he really is? Or does “being there” provide the map its reality?

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A compass rose on a map shows us how the situation it represents is oriented within reality, so if we orient ourselves in reality we can also orient the map.

A navigation tool such as an astrolabe, sextant or GPS situates us within reality, making us locatable on a map.

A compass orients us within reality, making us orientable to a map.

A map, when used in conjunction with observation of reality, can also give us our situation and orientation in reality.

But the same map can also be misunderstood and give us only misinformation, despite its correctness.

[fading out…]

Triad: ought-am-is

Ideas

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IS constrains us.

OUGHT compels us.

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IS belongs to all of us.

OUGHT belongs to each of us.

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IS manifests as the possibility or impossibility of actions and states-of-affairs.

OUGHT manifests as values (the degree of better or worse) of actions and states-of-affairs.

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IS governs what I am able to do in my situation.

OUGHT governs my response to my situation.

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The truth of IS — the domain of objective truth — limits what can and cannot develop (by the compulsion of OUGHT).

The truth of OUGHT — the domain of subjective truth — compels us to develop some possibilities and prevent the development of other possibilities (within the limits of IS).

The convergence of these two truths determines one’s worldview: 1) I am here, situated in a situation; 2) I am perceiving this situation; 3) I am responding to my situation; 4) I am (me), that is, I exist for others who, like myself, inhabit the place of I in a different but shared worldview; 4) I am changing, changed and changable, which means there is something at stake in this situation: my OUGHT pertains not only to what the world IS to become, but to who I am to become.

IS and OUGHT converges as a worldview with AM at its heart.

Buber’s heir

Ideas

I dislike WordPress more and more. This post was originally written in 2010. I was digging through old posts on Buber, looking for comments I might have made regarding experience and use of things (in the mode of I-It), when I happened upon this old post. I say a misspelling and corrected it. When I saved the post (on 9/16/2024), it obliterated the original date and published it as new. I’ve tried to correct it.

I need to rant again: in autumn of 2011, the world entered the Dark Ages of design, with speed prioritized over all else, in the mad rush to out-feature and destroy one’s commercial enemies. I mourn the loss of WordPress, Adobe and Apple as design exemplars. I respected and loved these organizations and their products, but they adopted the product management malpractices of Eric Ries, the disastrous blind-leading-the-blind guru, the anti-Jobs who undid twenty years of design progress with one ill-conceived book.

I’ve heard people say that Emmanuel Levinas is the heir to Martin Buber’s tradition (insinuating that a thinker can skip over Buber, directly to the fuller development of Levinas). I find the experience of reading the two almost directly opposite. Levinas makes the world feel heavy with overwhelming obligation, where Buber makes the world feel alive but steady with opportunities for responsibility. Levinas is valuable, and I think he says many true things (he might only say true things) but the spirit I must accept to make his work intelligible makes life unbearable. Whether this signals something wrong with him or with me is practically immaterial. It does not seem that Buber’s thinking necessarily leads to Levinas, even if it can — there must be other consequences that can be drawn.

Worldviews

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.

What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.

“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”

The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)

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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)

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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.

The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.

In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.

Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.

  • Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
  • Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
  • Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.

Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.

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  • Note to nerds:

What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.

Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of  one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.

Migraine

Ideas

I had a big migraine yesterday.

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For each of us, in the beginning, there is chaos and the potential of articulation.

What is chaos? It is raw being, pure all-there-is, void of finitude, void of category, void of recurrence, void of quantity, void of quality — but it is not empty. It is too full. Because it lacks finitude, it is infinite. It overwhelms.

What is articulation? Literally, articulation means “to divide into a joint”. Articulation introduces entities to raw being; it puts a contrasting “something” against all-there-is everything; it defines a finite something against infinity, as an exception to all.

Articulation is recognition. The first recognition is of twice, or thrice, or myriad times. Recurrence retroactively creates the occurrence of once.

With recurrence, what comprises the recurrence also recurs: the recurrant’s essential qualities. And in the gaps, the times the entity with its constituent qualities do not recur, they are now not there, and there as a shadow of lack, as a possibility not actualized, as empty absence of the entity, a soothing zero.

But even as innumerable finite entities are articulated, the chaos is still there, and infinity is not diminished. We are surrounded on all sides, above and below, by chaos where even (and especially) zero is nonexistent. And when we look closely at what we think we have, what feels solid in our hands, we find chaos, there, too. And most of all when we approach one another, we discover chaos right before our own eyes — but not only in the other, but in the world, and in ourselves.

When we hate, it is this chaos we hate: darkless, zeroless, nothingness that surrounds and permeates our familiar cloud-world of category-things.

Chaos hides everywhere in plain sight, like blind-spots in our eyes which are not even dark, nonexistent visitors from beyond our peripheral vision.

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Conviction displaces faith. Conviction believes in beliefs, and it calls these beliefs “faith”, for it knows no alternative. To conviction, faith is nonexistent, which means it is not even missing. Faith is filled in like a blind-spot with “faith” in beliefs.

Conviction prefers explanations to that which it explains, and it fails to question one fundamental(ist) assumption, that the explanation causes what it explains rather than describes. And conviction fears the refutation of its explanation and the dispelling of the condition it explains. The believer thinks the planks constituting his boat-bottom will vanish from beneath his feet and he will sink into chaos and drown there.

Faith plants its feet on what is. We stand here and we do not sink. We can ask why in myriad ways, and we can consider any answer, and all at once. Explanations that accurately describe what is are true as far as they succeed in describing, and describing accurately. But faith does not attribute to explanations any magical causality.

Faith is free, but conviction is enslaved to its idol, knowledge.

Actors and poets

Ideas

Some people talk about things, but what they talk about is secondary — merely an opportunity to speak. The object of the speech remains in the old light, while the speaker is illuminated by his manner of speech and choice of words.

Other people talk about things and concentrate on them entirely. The object of the speech is illuminated in a new, revealing light, but nonetheless the speaker is also known, but differently — as illumination.

Other strange hybrids illuminate their object in revealing light, but their object of choice is themselves, and there are still others who pose as illumination.

Etymologies

Ideas

The most abstract words are rooted in concrete concepts. Break down the etymologies and you find simple actions like pushing, throwing, pulling, taking, placing, climbing, looking, going, and coming and simple relationships like over, under, back, across, together, apart, away, toward. All this simple roots converge as words like twisted filaments in continuous strands of thread, which also converge as the fabric of sentences, paragraphs, texts, canons. This fabric is draped over chaotic and formless experience and drawn tight to give life tangibility, form and continuity.

I like to think mythically about the roots of words as corresponding to simple, chaotic animal impulses of the spirit, which are drawn out, twisted and spun into coarse and fine strands of intelligence, which form the cloth of culture as the threads are interwoven, unraveled, combed out, knitted and knotted, torn, sliced, ripped, stitched, patched over, braided, embroidered and embroidered upon. And the articulate threads are only the weft, woven into a warp of colorful, unspeakable feelings and tacit actions waiting on the loom as the background of language and ourselves.

We often confuse formless and chaotic experience with our own tacit forms of response, and fail to notice that intellectual order and verbal articulation are not identical.

Inconceivable dimension

Fructivism, Ideas

Last week I had an unusual number of conversations with artists about the nature of art. I want to try to summarize what I understand about the being of a (romantic) artist, based on what I took from these conversations.

For a variety of reason, artists today are necessarily romantic artists. Romantic artists attempt to create outside of what already is, as opposed to affirming or revitalizing the culture to which they belong as members. There is no vital high culture left to preserve in our time. Even so-called conservatives invent by reanimating formal corpses with newish notions through the black magic of revisionism.There is just flat, sea-level philistinism: discrete, mutually exclusive working hard and playing hard. Nobody’s going to exert for anything that won’t earn him a dollar.

Romantic artists are cultural mutants. They have mutated individuality; they developed differently as individuals and have a different conception of what individuality is. They do individualism differently. Certainly this mutated individuality/individualism can give them a conspicuously different appearance (which is all most people perceive) but the more essential difference is imperceptible: Artists inhabit mutated worlds. And they inhabit these worlds partially or entirely alone.

So far, what I’ve described includes romantic artists, but it also includes visionaries of all kinds. A romantic artist is a visionary who responds to his vision by creating cultural artifacts that affirm and reinforce his vision. This occurs both through the practice of creative activity (by which he lives differently), and through the artifact (by which he establishes a more meaningfully-orienting environment). What is lacking at the start, — with genuine romantic artists, invariably — which philistines are incapable of imagining, is what it is like to be the solitary member of a culture. Cultures are shared. An unshared culture is a psychic vacuum, and that vacuum is the profoundest loneliness, which crushes proportionally to its difference, and threatens the survival of the mutant. Very, very few cultural mutants survive, much less reproduce their vision, much less change the nature of human-being.

Regarding mere survival: everything that threatens the continuous activity of the artist (that is imposes displacing, depressing and exhausting alien tasks) or imposes environmental disorientation on the artist threatens his particular cultural existence, if not his biological existence. And since an artist identifies more with his particular cultural existence than even with his biological being, this threat reaches beyond individual death to the extinction of one’s own species.

I am assuming what I mean by “inhabiting a world” (as opposed to perceiving the world) is pretty obvious to anyone for whom this line of thought is relevant. In case it isn’t, here is a mythical evolutionary analogy. Imagine the first appearance of eyes in an eyeless species. That first eyed mutant probably looked pretty strange, not that anything else was around to see it. But what was much stranger was what happened to its existence as a result of the acquisition of the faculty of sight. This organism lived a visual existence in a visible world unlike that of anything that preceded it. Its world deepened in an extra inconceivable dimension.

* Adolescent rant…

Continue reading Inconceivable dimension →

Not-seeings

Ideas

The uncanniness of the visual blind spot: nothing is missing.

If you imagine what a blind spot is, you will likely conceive it in terms of sight, as a kind of darkness. In a sense this is true. Blindness and darkness are both conditions that prevent the seeing of objects. Here, however, the similarity ends. Darkness itself is seen; blindness is not. Blindness, though it pertains to sight, falls outside the terms of sight. Blindness is nothingness. There is no missing something; there is only nothing.

The only way to know what a blind spot is to experience it practically by performing an experiment and experiencing a deeper contrast. There is not-seeing for lack of light, and then there is not-seeing for lack of sight.

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The uncanniness of the ontological blind spot: nothing is missing.

If you imagine what ontological blindness is, you will likely conceive it in terms of understanding, as a lack of knowledge. In a sense this is true. Ontological blindness and lack of knowledge are both conditions that prevent the knowing of information. Here, however, the similarity ends. Lack of knowledge itself is understood; ontological blindness is not. Ontological blindness, though it pertains to understanding, falls outside the terms of understanding: ontological blindness is nothingness. This means there is no missing something: as far as you know you’ve know everything you need to know. This is what is meant by “horizon”.

The only way to experience an ontological blind spot is to experience it practically by reading hermeneutically, and acquiring a new mode of understanding against which the non-understanding or (more likely) misunderstanding can be perceived, so you can experience a deeper contrast. There is not-knowing for lack of information, and then there is not-knowing for lack of understanding.

Such insight makes a person cautious and humble, not because he is scared and not because he thinks little of himself, but because he knows well what nothingness is like.

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What if a person refuses to perform the blind spot experiment until someone explains to him precisely what he will learn from it?

What if a person refuses to listen and hear someone out until it is explained to him precisely what he will gain from the effort? What if everyone is like this? What if everyone has always been like this? It takes thousands of years to teach the world anything.

Challenging challenges

Ideas

Rising to a difficult challenge is easily confused with submitting to a difficult demand.

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When all difficulties are euphemistically categorized as “challenges” it becomes impossible to discuss the difference ennobling and degrading difficulties.

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If all problems are challenges, and therefore growth opportunities, why not passively accept anything circumstance throws at you? Why have career goals, when whatever you are assigned can only help you better yourself? Isn’t it true that even boring tasks are challenging to those clever enough to see them as interesting?

I suppose it is possible to challenge these points, but all that would come of it is boring the hell out of people with pointless argument and being perceived as a problem.

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Investing energy in a strength yields more strength than investing energy in a weakness.

A person in a position of strength picks his challenges. What he picks are those problems that help him develop and maximize his strengths. The stronger he becomes the more he determines what he does or does not do — and also what others do or do not do. He shunts unwelcome, weakening problems away from himself and “challenges” others to overcome them.

Leaps and steps

Ideas

Faith arrives in a great intuitive leap but departs in tiny and ever diminishing logical geisha steps.

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Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, as related by Aristotle: “That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”

This paradox is a lot more daunting before locomotion begins than after the goal is reached. If we simply reach the goal then turn around look back on the finite space we traversed, we see that it takes no more time to traverse one point than ten million. But to think about traversing each of ten million points can take a lot of time. And to report our arrival at each of these infinite midpoints — even if the report took ten-millionth of a second — makes progress impossible.

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Here is how it goes when the full burden of proof is placed on the new:

The question is asked: “Why the new? Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”

And a minute into the answer another question is asked: “Why put all this effort into answering ‘Why the new?’ Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”

And a minute into that answer yet another question: “Why put all this effort into answering ‘Why put all this effort into answering “Why the new?”‘ Shouldn’t we just follow best practices?”

And so on. Why(Why(Why(Why(Why(…))))).

x = Why (x)

It takes an infinite amount of time to justify the new.

Continue reading Leaps and steps →