1) What is the surest way to distinguish a misunderstanding from an understanding?

2) What is the surest way to distinguish non-understanding from nonsense?

The answer to both: Someone tells you that you do not understand.

If the fact that you already understand proves to you that you understand, this is proof that you do not understand understanding. If this sounds like nonsense to you, you’ll just have to take my word for it that there is something here to understand.

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If you trust your gut, the world divides into two parts: stuff you already know and bullshit.

The convection current of history: Intelligence makes people more powerful. Power makes people stupider.

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The powerful don’t have to listen. They dictate terms. They do the talking.

The powerful don’t have to understand anyone. Everyone flatters their misunderstandings. Everyone fears straining their patience or embarrassing them. The powerful invest their power in forcing the world to assist their decline. They forget how to respect, and gradually become contemptible in the presumptuous belief that any challenge to their perspective is presumption.

They already know what needs knowing. They stop listening and stop learning. What they forget they cannot replenish. They forget what they’ve forgotten, and nobody can remind them.

At points they become vaguely aware of what is happening to them. They try to augment their intelligence with advisers. By now, however, they have become too imperious to be advised. They dictate what they will be taught. They demand that everything flatter their atrophied perspective. If it is difficult to learn, it isn’t worth learning.

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The powerful will learn a fact, but will not suffer an insight. An insight that is not yours doesn’t make sense until you come to understand. The powerful always already understand. What makes sense to them makes sense, and what doesn’t make sense to them is nonsense.

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Only vulnerability can cure the stupidity of power.

Only vulnerability to an other can reawaken the intellect.

The need to know how to evade or influence a powerful other leads to the pursuit of insight.

Pursuit of insight is very painful — we only do it when we have to.

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Individuals, couples, cliques, organizations, companies, classes, parties, nations — every unit of every scale of human culture is vulnerable to hubris.

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A different kind of stupidity afflicts the weak: moralism.

Moralism praises us for not asking the most basic questions about how we ought to live. One simply behaves as one should behave, which is selflessly, altruistically — against one’s own strength, in favor of the interests of the powerful.

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A horrible thing to witness: As the powerful become increasingly decadent and stupid and base,  the upper and lower elements of society become less distinguishable. Suddenly the moralistic weak find the powerful easy to identify with. They imagine catching a game and enjoying a beer with their powerful buddy who’s just like them, except he’s worked harder and maybe been luckier.

Then, instead of awe for a distant and unattainable ideal, the weak masses adore and idolize a reflection of themselves. The powerful soak up this adoration, and swell up with the inrush. They strike bold poses and make declarations. Crowds cheer, mandates are declared, action is taken, etc.

The whole thing explodes into a narcissistic fireball of self-worshiping mob idiocy.

When humble learn to shed their humility through the miracle of mob, all sorts of world historically terrible things become possible.

When the absurd is contained within the boundaries of one’s own mastery — that is, when the absurdity is situated and contained within an understood whole — the absurdity is laughable, and the relationship is comic.

When the absurd breaks into the boundaries of our own mastery — that is, when absurdity overwhelms understanding, and submerges all involved in perplexity — and reason is no longer a reliable guide, the relationship is tragic.

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With levity one has rises above a tragedy, gets over it, gains a higher perspective on it, is no longer caught up in it.

We are no longer subject to the absurdity. We’ve become detached, gained critical distance, and see things more more objectively. From the new perspective, the absurdity is no longer such a threat. Now we can look back and laugh.

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Comedy can mask tragedy. We try to rise above painful situations with black humor. People affect superiority by laughing at things that make them anxious or insecure —  things they don’t understand, and hope never to understand.

Mockery treats a matter as understood to be not worth knowing.

Mockery of a person means that their perspective does not need to be considered. We only consider other people’s perspectives when we need to — either we need a new perspective (rare), or we wish to share perspectives, or the other person is in a position to force us to consider their perspective, or we know the other person’s actions will affect us, and we need to understand how they see things so we can predict or influence their behavior.

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Jack Handey: “It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

What of a scene is known through perspectival change? — Look at the scene from different standpoints and perspectives. Circumspect. Circle the scene and look from multiple standpoints and notice what is concealed behind. Move closer and further. Particular objects enlarge and recede, individually but always in obedience to the whole. See what is so subtle it is invisible from a distance. See what must be taken in from a distance to be seen at all. See how one perspective shifts into another as you move.

What of a scene is known through illuminative change? — Illuminate the scene with different lights and at different angles, or with several different lights at several different angles. Diffuse the light, direct it. Concentrate it and spotlight particular regions. See what features of the scene stand out, and how the scene as a whole is affected by how it is illuminated.

What of a scene is known through manipulative change? — Move the objects in the scene around. Decompose. Dissect. Disassemble. Analyze. Recompose. Hold objects in your hands and inspect them. Take objects apart and see how they’re made. Put it all back together.

What of a scene is known through intermediary change? — Looking at the view through a different lens. Look through different diffracting, diffusing, distorting, focusing and coloring filters. Compare. Take in less, take in selectively, and take in more.

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Seeing from multiple perspectives gives a person a different perspective on perspectives. Seeing in different lights illuminates illumination. Manipulation decomposes compositions into composed composable elements. Intermediated vision interposes an intermediating awareness of intermediation that can never be completely removed.

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Perception always adds and subtracts. It is precisely these modifications that distinguish perceiving something and staring into chaos.

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If the scene is known strictly in terms of the objects that compose it, what is lost? What sneaks in?

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Imagine a stationary spectator observing the scene. What could you show him of the scene that he doesn’t already have?

We could bring him different lenses to look through.

We could carry certain objects to him and allow him to inspect them.

We could spotlight certain parts of the scene, show them in different colored lights, or illuminate the whole scene as evenly as possible.

We could hold up a mirror and show him how the scene looks standing at various standpoints.

What exactly gets shown in each of these examples, and what remains hidden?

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What do scientists show us? Poets? Painters? Friends? Authorities? Philosophers? Novelists? Researchers? Biographers? Autobiographers?

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If you hold up a mirror to show the spectator a view of the scene that includes himself observing it, what does the spectator learn? What does he learn about the scene, about himself, about being a spectator, about observation?

When he looks at the scene in the mirror, does he see the scene as he would if were observing it from the mirror’s standpoint?

The unknowable and the as-yet-unknown are experientially identical. Both are experienced as nonsense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in making known, what is knowable is shown to be knowable in its becoming known.

The understood and misunderstood are experientially identical. Both are experienced as sense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in questioning, what is known is shown to be not known in its becoming questionable.

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To be clear, it is not isolated facts that are knowable or unknowable, understood or misunderstood – it is the taking of facts together with the rest of our knowledge, so the whole is organically integrated. The act of trying to understand is alternating between analysis (from Greek analusis, from analuein ‘unloose,’ from ana– ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen’) synthesis (sunthesis, from suntithenai ‘place together’), until the idea is understood as a concept (from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take’), which means not only that the parts of the idea are rendered known (related to the rest of one’s knowledge), but they are related in familiar modes (tacitly through analogy or explicitly through categories or logic) to the rest of one’s knowledge and made familiar in part and whole.

Through understanding, we integrate particular facts into the whole of our knowledge. Exterior facts are drawn into the interior of our intellects. We chew on them, break them down, analyze them into intelligible bits — which can be absorbed within our own body of knowledge. We analyze in order to synthesize.

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Some facts and ideas we find distasteful, and we refuse them. Other facts and ideas we find very agreeable, and we consume them almost without thinking. Some people have definite tastes in knowledge. Some don’t, and have no sympathy for picky eaters.

Some facts and some ideas are inedible to certain people. They simply cannot digest them at all without disrupting their whole system. Others find all-too-digestible facts bloating and painful. They need something to raw and rough and unprocessed to break down or they go into a stupor, lose their appetite or even need to throw up.

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The Truth. The facts. The Way Things Are. Realism.

This attitude toward knowledge nearly always means forced membership in the intellectual Clean Plate Club. Eat what’s before you. But what’s before you is a meal someone has served up. How was the food chosen?

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We stabilize our total sense of things — what has been called a meaningful totality — which is not a mere sum of known facts but also the understandings by which facts are known, which means knowing in principle — through treating the as-yet-unknown as unknowable and the possibly misunderstood as obvious and unquestionable.

We stabilize our meaningful totality by acting on the belief that whatever is knowable is in principle already knowable and everything else is either pointless speculation or nonsense. Of course, we will never know every fact, but that’s no problem. What matters is that we are equipped to understand things in broad outline, and ready to understand and respond to whatever comes our way.

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What does it feel like to question something familiar and obvious and discover its uncanniness? What does it feel like to confront something uncanny but unmistakably relevant to us? Not-yet-understood, but demanding understanding?

It fills us with anxiety. When we try to understand beyond our limits we get a taste of what makes infants cry in their cribs: chaos.

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The impatience of the executive is how he maintains stability of totality. He intimidates those around him with his aggressive brusqueness, and prevents anyone from saying anything to him that he cannot digest effortlessly. He is never confronted with his own limits.

The elevator pitch. The executive summary. These forms flatter the philosophical limits of the business world.

To make yourself perfectly understood in under 5 minutes means to operate within the limits of the easily known.

The etiquette surrounding executives preclude anything new being said. And that is entirely the point of the etiquette. (– and perhaps of all etiquette?)

CEOs are like kings surrounded by flattering courts, who don’t exactly lie, but don’t tell the complete truth out of fear of offense. And, again, it’s not the fear of disclosing particular unpleasant facts — that is actually valued by CEOs, because this allows them to demonstrate openness. What is impermissible is embarrassing a CEO with anything beyond his intellectual horizons, which is the shared horizon of the business world.

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“Don’t waste my valuable time” actually means “Don’t remind me that I am not god.”

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The old business horizons are breaking down rapidly. The old shared vision of modernity is no longer inspiring. The high hopes of postwar America are a joke to some and a matter of piety to others, and all that separates the two is whether one instinctively  ridicules or worships the senseless. Modernity and its objective realism has become boring and tedious and it has thoroughly worn out its welcome in our lives. And boredom, far more than refutations spell the end of a thing. (Nothing bears scrutiny except that which we do not wish to scrutinize.)

Intuitions are, in regard to thoughts, often arrogant.

When an intuition encounters an articulate thought, it sees only the engendering intuition, not the accomplishment of articulation. It treats the articulation as superfluous, and arrogates the thought as a whole as one it has had, too. The expressible thought is redundant.

But intuitions, until they are articulated (in word or form) are mute. How can any intuition signal its existence to any other intuition, when it is locked in silence? Perhaps the same mute intuition sits undetected side-by-side in uncomprehending darkness in myriad minds until it is illuminated with words. In the moment of illumination it glimpses what appears to be its own reflection.

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Articulating intuitions is a thankless task — unless you articulate intuitions who have grown so painfully lonely that they’ve striven for form and struggled for recognition and company, and consequently have come to appreciate the difficulty of saying what hasn’t been said.

When a thoroughly lonely intuition is given words, it welcomes them with deep, binding gratitude.

It appears that meaning arises only at the right velocity.

A story-teller will work out the parts of a story until the parts flow freely and smoothly, with momentum. The goal is to allow the parts to not be perceived separately. If, in the telling, the story is frequently interrupted, in order to scrutinize details, the whole degenerates into parts — the plot remains as a string of facts, but the story is gone.

The steps of a dance have to be practiced individually until they’re second nature, then they have to be practiced together so they flow together as continuous motion. As long as they remain conscious steps to be reproduced, prevent the dance from emerging from a performance. Until then, there is no dance — only steps.

The same is true with music. A child practices a piece of music on the piano, concentrating on more difficult parts, playing it slowly, carefully, note by note, until it can be performed through at the proper tempo. Music played too slowly becomes a sequence of individual sounds.

And of course, this is also how morality works. We begin by following individual rules of conduct until we are habituated to a certain moral state, and then our behavior flows spontaneously from a moral vision, not law-by-law but by heart.

Finally, thoughts: We can learn intellectual movements, different styles of interpreting experience, practice them in reading and understanding, slowing down, combing sentences into words and analyzing each one, then rereading the sentence, the passage, the book rapidly. Eventually the speed of our interpretation matches the speed of life and we can understand more and more of life as it happens, and see our world differently — perhaps not precisely as the author sees it, but certainly by his influence. As we learn this way we gain freedom to take responsibility for reality as we live it.

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Chuang Tzu:

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year-because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month-because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

When we taste something, that which we taste is about to be incorporated into our being.

When we smell something we preview taste, and based on this preview either avoid what we smell or approach it, and possibly really taste it.

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Taking taste and smell metaphorically, taste is subjective and smell is objective.

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This last statement may make no sense to you. This is an opportunity to catch a glimpse of what hermeneutics (the practice of interpretation) is, and perhaps see how it is done. I will demonstrate the process.

Objective? Doesn’t that mean knowing what is really out there in the world, with as little distortion of our own opinions, feelings, errors, etc. as possible? And subjective? — isn’t that precisely those opinions, feelings, intuitions, etc. that we seek to see through when we attempt objectivity?

How is seeing and smelling any different in terms of objectivity and subjectivity? They’re both subjective and objective to the same degree in the same way.

75% of readers will say “huh” and just move on, neither understanding nor misunderstanding. 20% of readers will understand perfectly well, and assume error on the part of the writer, never realizing they’ve misunderstood the sense of the statement. 5% will take a hermeneutic approach and ask: “In what sense does the author mean ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’? Is there another way to conceive these terms, one that is analogous to the relationship between tasting and smelling that will reveal a different understanding of objectivity and subjectivity?” And once you re-conceptualize those terms, which are so fundamental to the popular metaphysics of our time — in all likelihood, you share it — if you can hold on to this way of seeing long enough to look out on the world through it, you’ll also understand the word “holistic” in a new sense.

Thomas Kuhn says it well:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

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Through hermeneutics, reading becomes a source of nourishment. Instead of flitting about scenting out new possibilities and longing for an otherwise, we can actually experience an otherwise, actualize it and enrich our lives, and in the process gain justice in understanding other people.

We should be grateful if we feel grateful for life.

A lonely intuition will be a thought.

Knowledge is knowing facts.

Understanding is knowing how to know.

We can have knowledge of understanding if we have acquired new understanding. Then we know how to know it.

If we have knowledge only from one understanding, we do not know how to know understanding.

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If you do not understand the above, consider the possibility that this might be an example of not knowing how to know.

Entertaining this possibility means to feel anxiety in the face of dread. Dread is why babies cry.

Generally, we just know with whatever understanding we happen to have. That is, we misunderstand. We follow intuitive impulses away from anxiety to preserve the understandings we have, which keep us sane — which in fact are our sanity. We choose misunderstandings over understandings to avoid the trauma of birth.

The ability to recognize the experience of not-knowing-how-to-know is the key to acquiring new understanding.

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To know that you do not know is good — but to act in faith that you might one day understand and know is much better. This is the sole value of humility. All other kinds of humility are submissiveness, practical responses to weakness, or fear of responsibility.

Engineers (including those social engineers called “managers” and “administrators”) think about things and use. Marketers think about media and message.

Neither of these perspectives are sufficient. The mid-point of average of these perspectives is not sufficient. Both of these perspective added together is not sufficient.

Only a deeper perspective that accommodates both and relates them in terms greater than either is sufficient.

That deeper perspective is intersubjective and phenomenological, and it is already well on its way to wrenching control of the world from the hands of the objective minds who have dominated the practical world since before Newton, and also the romantic reactionaries who have defined themselves against this tendency who celebrate intuition and feeling at the expense of the rational.

User experience, inside-out branding, new approaches to “human resources” (a term whose days are numbered if there ever was one) such as ROWE, a new appreciation of the importance of “why” (as opposed to “how” and “what”)… It’s taking over because we’re realizing that our biggest problems are subjective, not objective.

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Incumbents fall when they fight the new war with the old strategies that won them their predominance. And that’s what they do, and history’s convection current perpetually churns down the old, and churns up the new.

To see a dark room, the first thing we usually try to do is turn on the lights, or open the windows.

Sometimes we have to feel around in the dark to find a light switch, which works best if we already know something about the room’s layout, and about what kind of switches and window latches we can expect to find (otherwise we might not recognize what we are looking for even when we feel it). In this kind of case we rarely stand in one place. We walk around the room, and explore it by feel before we can explore it by sight.

Sometimes, if we are lucky enough to have (or discover in our groping) a flashlight or lamp, we can direct light to different areas of the room, in search of the room’s own light sources. If such light sources do not exist, or if their light is dim or casts dark shadows, we will explore the room by the light of our own lamp.

Generally speaking, we prefer to see a room by its own light, and failing that we examine it by our own light. And if no light is available, we are forced to explore it by feel. And often we treat these preferences as discrete modes. We EITHER find the light and look around, OR we just point our flashlight at various points in the room to see what’s there, OR we feel around. But the most thorough examination involves all three: seeing the room from its usual perspectives in its usual mode of illumination, looking at the room from as many perspectives as possible, illuminating the shadowy areas with our own light, touching and experimenting with the objects of the room. Further, we can move these objects around, turn them in our hands or walk around them, viewing them from various angles.

And then a whole other world of possibilities opens when you of viewing images or maps of the room made by others, or hearing about the room from others. And nearly all of what was outlined above presupposes knowledge of rooms, windows, lights, etc. But now the metaphor is fuzzing up, so we’re probably violating its terms of use…

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I think what I’m doing here is feeling out a possibility of a formal relationship between metaphors of illumination, metaphors of perspective, metaphors of uncovering, metaphors of feeling out. I’ve had a vague sense, in the form of slight anxiety around some of my own favorite terms (perspective, horizon, insight, clarification), that perhaps I’ve been conflating or confusing concepts of understanding. I’ve been really irritable about the use of the word insight (which I think is perspectival knowledge on a subject’s sense of objectivity) for gaining facts about other people (which treats people as objects with attributes). And I have a hunch that clarifying these relationships will help me understand the variety of research methods better.

There’s a big difference between matters that are not clearly understood because nobody has looked at the matter closely or systematically enough, versus matters that have been looked at very closely but not from an angle that reveals what is most relevant or productive, versus matters that are essentially discovery of an angle of view versus knowing about the objects viewed from that angle (and I think this is the essential difference between qualitative and quantitative research), versus matters that are being overshadowed by considerations that perhaps obscure what most needs seeing.

Dig?

WARNING: This post is a process of understanding, not a product of understanding. That means it will cause anxiety, not relieve it. I am opening questions I do not know how to close.

Isn’t openness exciting, though? Isn’t openness liberating? Hell no, openness is not exciting or liberating. It is oppressive and dreadful until it is closed again, and closed better.

True openness allows the primordial chaos to flood back in and submerge us in dread. This is the infant’s element. It is what makes babies cry when left alone in a dark room. A philosopher’s proclivity to open what best remains closed — to welcome back chaos — is the real reason philosophy is hated by those who already know enough. The experience of being born is dreadful and none of us want to relive it, but reliving birth is the very business of philosophy.

What makes us feel liberated is to re-ask a question whose answer has overwhelmed us or paralyzed us or depressed us, and to re-answer it more compactly or more productively or affirmingly. (I’m reminded of Thomas Kuhn’s criteria of theory choice: Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness.) We feel liberated when we replace unsatisfactory answers with good ones. And if it seems that we like to re-open questions, it is only for this.

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Some metaphors for the unknown:

• concealed
• disguised
• unnoticed
• microscopic
• dark
• in darkness
• invisible
• distant
• beyond (over the horizon)
• forgotten

Many of these metaphors (like metaphors in general) are visual.

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For any particular event of vision to occur a number of conditions must be met:

• a subject of vision (the seer)
• a capacity for vision (sight)
• a medium of vision (light)
• an object of vision (the seen)
• a situation in which all the conditions are present in specific relation to one another

The situation in which an event of vision occurs contains a number of relationships:

• the situation is finite; it is understood that things are outside the situation
• the subject seeing is characterized by possessing sight (to count them as separate — suspicious?)
• the subject has an objective presence in the situation he sees: he is situated as an object among the objects of the situation
• the subject seeing relates to the objects seen in a perspective, where closer objects are larger, and more distant objects are smaller, and the most distant objects disappear
• in relation to the seer and to peer objects, objects closer to the seer may obscure more distant objects
• light also has an objective presence in the situation, in that some object or objects in the situation emits the light by which things are seen
• light relates to the objects seen in illumination, where objects closer to the light source are brighter, and more distant objects are darker, and the most distant objects are no longer visible
• in relation to a light source and to peer objects, objects closer to the light source may cast shadows on more distant objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• multiple light sources may illuminate shadows from other light sources
• objects may reflect light onto other objects, and behave both as light sources and objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• the seer and sight is always one; where light sources and objects are always at least one, but potentially multiple

Of course, some objects in an event of seeing are respected as fellow seers, but strictly speaking, to “see” this into the metaphor is to confuse it. A fellow seer is to be heard, and what one hears might change what one sees.

Some truths can be possessed, mastered, memorized and remembered.

Some truths are silent companions. They are always there for us, and, when needed, without a word, leap to action.

Some some truths come and go as they please. We can try to recall them, but they do not always answer, and when they do return to us, it is the furthest thing from an act of obedience. We invite them to return. We keep the door open and the room clean. We welcome them home, dote on them, and hope they choose to stay with us.

Cynicism is the sound of the loveless whistling in the dark.

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To use one’s own direct experience to prove the nonexistence of something certainly succeeds in proving the nonexistence of something.