We need to stop acting as if we make a decision to get married. Fact is, marriage is a collaborative change in being of two people. That change is subjective, but it is a subjective fact. There is no luxury of arbitrary invention in marriage. A marriage is discovered to have begun, and once begun it can be cultivated, or left alone, or starved, or killed.

The same is true for anything spiritual in nature, including the creation of art, the education of a child and the establishment of a brand. These entities, and the processes by which they become, are subjective facts — true or false to some real degree.

There are plenty of formal arrangements of people erroneously called “marriages”, formal arrangements of aesthetic elements erroneously called “art”, facts and skills acquired and correctly recited and performed erroneously called “education”, and formal arrangements of symbols erroneously called “brands” — and to the objective eye, they are indistinguishable. The protest “but what are the formal, measurable criteria by which we can judge the authenticity?” begs the question. Subjective truths exist, despite the fact that they cannot be judged by formal, measurable criteria.

*

So, faced with the painful “squishiness” of subjective truth, how do we satisfy the demands of objectivity? We institutionalize these things, act as though they are essentially institutional and lose the question of their subjective existence altogether. The institutional certification is the truth.

When this happens the subjective truths are lost. The solidity and outer appearance is gained at the loss of the inside essence. The outside “fact” gains honor and attention while its inner content suffocates in the dark and decays away.

Whether these objectively certified truths persist or perish, they do not live or function or bring any real good into the world. Nobody can really care about them, at least not intrinsically. But caring is yet another subjective fact.

*

A women who loses herself to her husband doesn’t have a husband and is not a wife. A man who ruins himself satisfying his wife’s demands doesn’t have a wife and is not a husband. There is no actual marriage to end or annul. What was called “marriage” was in fact only an institutionally certified arrangement of two separate individuals. It may be possible for the couple to recognize the error and become married. Or it might be necessary to declare the mistake irredeemable.

*

How is a subjective fact measured? It can’t be observed directly and it cannot be measured. It can only be detected indirectly through how it manifests in behavior.

*

We’ve got to get serious about understanding subjective truth, or our culture will lose its subjective core and stop experiencing it as intrinsically valuable. Our culture itself will become a big empty certified institution, even if it outwardly looks the same.

The inner difference will manifest in behavior: we will stop working to preserve it for future generations.

Thoughts are clothed intuitions.

*

An intuition seems more miraculous than a thought for the same reason that a 1-day-old baby seems more miraculous than an 80-year-old man. But in both cases there have been significantly more of the former than the latter.

Another way to talk about the triad is to express it as kinds of problems — or dimensions of a problematic situation:

• A moral problem involves values: Why does this situation matter?
• A practical problem involves behavior: What actions are possible in this situation and what are the consequences?
• A theoretical involves cognition: What is this situation on the whole and in part? What is essential to this situation, what are its constituent elements, how do the elements relate to one another and to the whole of the situation?

These problem dimensions are deeply interrelated. A change in any one of dimension changes the others.

The moral modifies the practical: If something has no moral significance, we lack all motivation to respond to it, or even to examine it. We only think about and act upon situations with some direct or indirect moral significance. When something has moral significance we are intrinsically compelled to respond to it.

The moral modifies the theoretical: Whatever it is that makes a situation matter to us is also what makes us regard some facts and features of the situation intensely significant and others negligible. (Consider “media bias.”)

The practical modifies the moral: Our practical responses to a situation change the situation, and reveal new aspects of it. Just as importantly, our practical response to a situation can also change us, or it can reveal new aspects of ourselves to ourselves. Whether the change is actual or perceptual, and whether concerns us or the situation as a whole, doesn’t matter: the moral situation is now a different one. A situation might escalate or resolve, or we may gain new insights into the situation. We might become worn down to the point of unconsciousness, or become hyper-alert. We might become so caught up in a situation that “we are no longer ourselves” or we might orient ourselves to the situation and figure out how to be more authentically ourselves in it. Or we might have new insights into our own moral responsibility which change how we relate to the situation. In all these cases the moral situation has essentially changed. (Think about what happens to soldiers over the course of a war.)

The practical modifies the theoretical: Besides the obvious fact that practical action is the primary way we learn (we make discoveries), our practical aims determine what we see and how we see. We concentrate on different things in our environment, and different characteristics of things stand out, depending on what we are trying to accomplish. We see through a functional lens. (When we are baking a cake, the fact that a bag of flour can serve as a doorstop doesn’t occur to us, but when we need to hold a door open, it becomes obvious.)

The theoretical modifies the moral: What we know and do not know about a situation can drastically change its moral meaning. (This is why we feel manipulated if someone omits facts when trying to persuade us of something.)

The theoretical modifies the practical: The relevant facts of a situation determine how we respond to it. (Missing facts are one major source of mistakes.)

*

My belief:

Our culture has gotten extremely good at generating theoretical and practical knowledge, and at coming to agreements on theoretical and practical matters — where moral agreement already exists.

However, when moral agreement does not exist and the moral disagreement manifests as theoretical and practical disagreement — this is precisely how moral disagreement shows itself — we try to treat the disagreements as theoretical or practical, because that is where we have our best success.

This is our age’s characteristic way of fucking up.

We are happy to theoretically acknowledge differing perspectives — in terms of “I have my taste and interests, you have yours.”

We are also more or less comfortable with treating morality as either a matter of belief (as essentially theoretical) or of obedience to laws (as essentially practical) — but we are deeply resistant to understanding morality as something greater and irreducible to theoretical or practical truth. (Think about getting into Heaven. You have to have believed the right facts and disbelieved falsehoods. You have to have done the right actions and refrained from the wrong ones to get in.)

Few of us, however, have actually moved our intellectual bodies from one part of reality’s room to another and seen what actually happens to what we see.

We have not inhabited multiple moral perspectives.

This is a whole different order of practical knowledge from the simple acquisition of new skills and new experiences we call “being experienced.”

Consequently, we are unaware of how different moral perspectives modify theoretical and practical reality. We lack the theoretical apparatus to conceptualize or discuss morally-rooted theoretical disagreements, and we have no constructive practical response to morally-rooted practical disagreements. We see what we see — and we assume we are seeing reality as it is, while the other is looking through subjective goggles and seeing things in a distorted, self-interested, and possibly depraved way.

And we congratulate ourselves that we know nothing but what our blameless, sinless, moral way of life has shown us. And when others have been blameworthy, sinful and immoral — whether they’re a criminal, lawyer, liberal, fascist, hypocrite, scribe or pharisee — it is to our credit that we lack firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be that way. We can read the law, recognize what is evil, and throw rocks to our heart’s content.

*

Very few people have practiced the spiritual nomadism advised by Nietzsche and seen for themselves that rigid adherence to moralistic law preserves the delusion that we possess morality, and is often upheld precisely for the sake of preserving that delusion.

Fact is, we are horrified at the possibility that the world we look at through our own moral perspective — our own knowledge of good and evil — does not give us an unconditioned God’s-eye-view of reality.

We remain completely unreceptive to the importance of disagreements in showing us our own limitations and orienting us to what is greater than ourselves, and the source of all moral significance — value — or to use a thoroughly-abused word: love.

This is the kind of insight philosophy gives us, but we hate philosophy because it is this kind of insight we do not want. Philosophy shows us how invisible our ignorance is, and it makes us permanently humble and prepared to discover that we are wrong where it never occurred to us wrongness or rightness could even exist.

To think dialectically means to move beyond the conceptual dichotomy of true versus false, and to think more in terms of degrees of truth. An assertion can be outright false, but an assertion can also be true in some sense, but insufficiently true.

To adopt this way of thinking is not to reject the dichotomy of true versus false, but rather to recognize it as insufficient, since the most consequential and controversial disagreements are rarely done justice when approached in those terms.

*

An individual is not obligated to question every one of his beliefs. Very few beliefs can withstand serious scrutiny, and this includes useful beliefs that allow us to live good, productive lives. However, if a belief becomes problematic — we know it when it happens — then we are not free to ignore the belief or to answer it however we please. We have to question the belief until we have a satisfactory answer.

Finding a satisfactory answer often entails finding a more satisfactory question than the one originally answered with the old belief.

*

Is it possible that the point of answers is questions? That answers are what give us access to our questions? That the intelligibility of the world comprises the questions we know how to ask?

*

Respecting another person means not only finding validity in the positive content of his beliefs, but in the negative content of his questions, doubts, criticisms.

*

A group is not obligated to question every one of its beliefs. Very few beliefs can withstand serious scrutiny, and this includes useful beliefs that allow a group to exist as a cultural entity. However, if a belief becomes problematic — we know it when it happens, because controversy breaks out — then we are not free to ignore the conflict or to answer it however one group or another pleases. We have to question the belief until we have a satisfactory answer.

*

Irresolvable conflicts — individual and social — require dialectic.

*

“True, but not true enough” is far more common, more disturbing and more difficult to resolve than “false.” True and false are objective, factual matters. “True enough” and “true, but not true enough” are a perspectival matter, and they cannot be resolved by purely objective means.

A delusion in the theory of revolution. — There are political and social visionaries who hotly and eloquently demand the overthrow of all orders, in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity would then immediately rise up on its own. In these dangerous dreams, there is still the echo of Rousseau’s superstition, which believes in a wondrous, innate, but, as it were, buried goodness of human nature, and attributes all the blame for that repression to the institutions of culture, in society, state, and education. Unfortunately, we know from historical experience that every such overthrow once more resurrects the wildest energies, the long since buried horrors and extravagances of most distant times. An overthrow can well be a source of energy in an exhausted human race, but it can never be an organizer, architect artist, perfecter of the human character. — It is not Voltaire’s temperate nature, inclined to organizing cleansing, and restructuring, but rather Rousseau’s passionate idiocies and half-truths that have called awake the optimistic spirit of revolution, counter to which I shout: “Ecrasez l’infame!” [“Crush the infamy!” In his letter to d’Alembert on November 28, 1762, Voltaire was referring to superstition.] Because of it, the spirit of enlightenment and of progressive development has been scared off for a long time to come: let us see (each one for himself) whether it is not possible to call it back again!

I take theoretical possibility for granted: any truth can be re-conceived in myriad true ways (and infinite false ways).

But theoretical possibility is much broader than practical possibility, which is narrowed by a number of limiting factors. One of these limiting factors is social possibility. If nobody feels dissatisfaction with things as they are, many possibilities are never even glimpsed, much less entertained, explored, pursued or actualized.

Dissatisfaction and deep diasagreement is the opening up of social possibility.

Arrogance – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare; from ad– ‘to’ + rogare ‘ask.’

*

A person can think he is the best at something and not be arrogant. The question is whether he values superiority enough that he would acknowledge and honor a superiority that he cannot claim for himself. If so, he is not arrogant, but excellent.

A person can think he inferior but not be humble. The real question is whether he values superiority that belongs to someone else or resents it because it is not his own. If he resents superiority because he knows he is inferior, his “humility” is actually self-loathing.

*

Arrogance and self-loathing are  two sides of the same coin: the incapacity to love superiority for its own sake, regardless of whose it is. Both love only what can be claimed as one’s individual, exclusive property. Whatever exceeds it is denied.

*

What bothers us about both arrogance and self-loathing is neither is prepared to allow anyone to manifest his own particular form of superiority, in service to others or even themselves, if that threatens its own sense of being unsurpassed.

*

Incidentally: Rogue – ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (denoting an idle vagrant): probably from Latin rogare ‘beg, ask’.

*

Individuals can be arrogant, but nothing is as arrogant as a populist mob. And who do the populist mobs attack? Those they resent. They “go rogue” and indulge in a mass-solipsist arrogance. All mob violence is preceded by invalidation of viewpoints outside of the mob view, denial of any obligation to converse or understand, and finally revocation of human status of the other.

Thesis: Academia should be a haven from the world of business.

Antithesis: Academia should become more like business — be more results-driven and efficient.

Synthesis: Academia and business should be more like each other. Academia should continue to cultivate theoretical ideas, but apply, test and actualize the ideas in the practical realm — but business should also make itself more hospitable to intellectual life, starting with revisiting its fundamental theoretical and moral presuppositions.

Being blind to the existence of a problem is altogether different from seeing a solution. But when is “I don’t see the problem” ever said as a confession of ignorance?

There’s also the common case of sensing the presence of a problem, and trying to answer it before the question is really understood, like a child trying to feel out the answer of a barely grasped math problem.

Compared to recognizing a problem clearly defining it, inventing solutions is trivial — which is precisely why everyone wants to bypass the problem and skip straight to ideation. And, of course, denial is easier still.

Big positives and big negatives drive people to action. People are inspired and energetic and/or 2) feel an urgent need to make a change.

A big zero keeps people in habitual non-action: a situation drains people of the energy and inspiration to change it, while remaining just barely tolerable. Dullness is as stable as death.

For some, cleaning up means moving a mess from plain view to another place where it cannot be seen. For others it means putting the mess in order, so the mess stops being a mess and becomes organized material. Either way, the mess goes away.

The same is true for solutions. For some, a solution is something that makes a problematic situation stop feeling problematic. The problem is put away in an answer, and the matter is settled. For others, a solution means clarifying a problem — putting a problem in order so the material becomes intelligible and manageable.

But with both cleaning up and solving a problem, one must have a place to put things. In cleaning up, one needs shelves, drawers, closets, boxes, jars, etc. In finding a solution, one must have concepts that can organize and accommodate the relevant features of the problem.

Where messes and problems persist, it’s often the same culprit: things don’t have a place, and we don’t know what to do with it all. Things get stuffed wherever there’s room until nothing else fits, and things quickly get out of control again.

Despite appearances, he real work is not essentially moving the mess to some other place. It is working out where things should go so they can be accessed, used, put away and kept orderly throughout. But for many people thinking and “getting to work” are two entirely different things. They jump straight to moving stuff around. This is true with organizing physical messes, but it is doubly true for organizing intellectual messes. Thinking about how to think is exponentially more painful than the already onerous task of intellectual reflection. So, most people just use the categories they already know and automatically start stuffing facts into them until they no longer see a problem.

It takes time and willingness to think to really organize and systematize. In most situations there’s little time, many distractions, and the pressing need to maintain appearances. And also, we get overwhelmed by messes, and prefer to avoid them. But it is this anxiety about messes, and desire to hide them that is the seed of sloppiness, both physical and intellectual.

The ad hominem argument is our chief means of muting the humanity of others. It strips others of the most human quality: the capacity to teach.

*

When we take an objective stance toward another person, this means is we are not open to being taught by them.

We might learn from the other, but we are trying to learn through observing behaviors, as physicists learn about the behavior of matter and energy. The other’s speech is interpreted as one more kind of behavior, which we comprehend in the terms of our own understanding.

When we pursue being taught, we allow the teacher to convey to us his terms of understanding.

A teacher’s understanding manifests most concretely in how he comprehends, and so, the attempt to comprehend observable aspects of reality as the teacher does is one of the more reliable routes to understanding. The teacher shows us something, tells us what he sees, and we try to conceive it so we see for ourselves what he has described. But when we see, we conceive it our own way. To stop conceiving our own way means to temporarily open ourselves to chaos so a new understanding can be born in us. It means braving anxiety, perplexity and dread for the sake of new insight.

For this to happen a student must be aware that some aspects of truth are fixed and invariable, but other aspects of truth are variable. The fixed aspects provide us points of reference in coming to share the variable aspects, just as we use fixed landmarks to direct a friend to a meeting-place. It is the variable aspects of truth that make it matter to us. Sharing the variable aspects of truth with others makes togetherness palpably real.

*

A fact is acquired by understanding. Insights are the acquisition of a new way to understand.

Some insights are partial, like scientific paradigms. Philosophy aims at the deepest and most comprehensive insights. Philosophy voluntarily wrangles with perplexity. Reading philosophy is submitting to being taught, dying to outworn insights and being inhabited by new insights, again and again.

*

Between the bit of reality we readily grasp with our minds (the already-conceivable) and the realities that are altogether beyond the grasp of human intelligence (what is inconceivable on principle) is a strip of reality that could be grasped on principle if we knew how to grasp it (the potentially-conceivable). We’re comfortable with the already-conceivable and the inconceivable, but that middle region is terribly uncomfortable.

*

Reality can be sliced and diced innumerable ways. Many articulations of reality are valid (though this does not mean that all articulations of reality are valid).

A pizza can be sliced into 4, 6, 8 or 12 slices, and none of these ways are wrong. However, to someone who has only seen pizzas sliced into quarters, a slice of pizza can come to mean not only a division of a whole, but specifically a one-fourth division — mainly because no other division had ever been considered. If someone speaks of a pizza sliced into twelve, which is still somehow, miraculously, still only one pizza, despite having 3 times as many slices as a normal pizza. It is at once a single pizza, but also, somehow, three.

If we mistrust the person telling us about this 12-slice pizza, we reject his claim out of hand.

If we trust him, we might take it on faith that in some mysterious way beyond human comprehension, this pizza exists simultaneously as one pizza that is also three pizzas.

Both of these responses preclude teaching and learning.

Both of these conclusions show no faith in the other as a teacher.

If you think about it, most of the words we use to talk about subjectivity have the character of being situated in some particular situation. Our personalities are described in terms of dispositions, attitudes, orientations, understandings, perspectives, and points-of-view and stances on various topics (from Greek topos, ‘place’).

Subjectivity has a locative relationship of in, and the word “in” is very frequently used to describe subjective states. We are “in love” or “in a mood” or “in turmoil” or “in a bad place”.

In a subjective relationship, there is no distance between knower and known: the relationship is between whole and an involved part of that whole. The knower participates (takes the relationship of a part within a whole) in what is known. Even the act of knowing falls inside what is to be known. The understander and the understood change one another in the act of understanding, in a feedback loop *.

An objective relationship is fundamentally different. Objectivity is characterized by distance (dis– ‘apart’ + stare ‘stand.’) between knower and known. The knower knows what is known from a distance and is not affected and does not affect what is known.

*

When we think about subjectivity as something that is in our head, and our head as something that is in space that ultimately contains it, we “objectify” subjectivity and deprive subjectivity of what it essentially is. Subjectivity is not shaped like any object, it actually shapes the objects within it and puts them into meaningful relationship. Subjectivity has the shape of the entire world, and it concentrates itself precisely in that part of the world that is relevant and significant to us as we think objectively.

Objectivity and subjectivity are not side-by-side opposites. There is no distance between subjectivity and objectivity. Objectivity stands inside subjectivity, and is a product of subjectivity. But that does not make objectivity “merely subjective”. Much of the apparent irrationality and arbitrariness of subjectivity is a product of its being misframed in objective terms. Logic still holds, because logic is subjectivity itself, following its own laws of thought.

*

Part of the reason we prefer to think objectively is that it is much more natural. It is relatively easy to comprehend an object. We can “wrap our minds around it”.

But subjectivity is a kind of being that not only wraps itself around us, but is in part, actually who we are — perplexes us, fills us with a sort of dread that we find difficult to live with.

Is it any wonder that when we think about the universe, or our own planet, our culture, a marriage, a friendship, a conversation, or even a garden — these things that exceed and envelope but include us — we almost reflexively remove ourselves and view them as something set apart? But in doing this, we expel ourselves from who we really are. We self-alienate in order to feel a godlike comprehensive comprehension of all-that-is.

To “know” subjectivity we need to know a more humble intellectual relationship. We must orient ourselves within it, relate out to it, and give over to its involving superiority over and within us.

*

Interhuman relationships are not essentially objective. Not only is every Other ultimately mysterious to us — our own relationship with the Other reveals things about who we are that would otherwise remain unknown. When we gather in mutual understanding, we participate in a third and greater kind of being present who moves us as the conversation has itself through us, and we are more ourselves than when we were alone.

*

In one sense a seed grows and becomes a tree. In another sense, a bit of garden, a seed, organizes more and more of itself into a tree.

—-

* NOTE on feedback loops: A student of chaos theory may recognize that this implies that a subjective understanding, being nonlinear, is radically unpredictable. The outcome of even the simplest mathematical nonlinear processes, despite proceeding in a perfectly ordered and inevitable way, cannot be predicted. In a nonlinear process the only way to know what will happen is to let it happen.

An answer is true only in reference to a question.

*

To name something is to answer the question: “What is it?”

That question is set by us.

It is answered through good-faith collaboration between the asking and that which is named.

But the question can be re-asked and re-answered again and again: “What is it?”

. . . .

“It is an object.”

“It is what is here, now.”

“It is an organism.”

“It is something useful.”

“It is something dangerous.”

“It is phenomena.”

“He is a friend.”

“He is someone looking at me.”

“He is someone asking ‘What is it?'”

“He is someone looking at me and asking ‘What is it?'”

“He is someone looking at me and asking ‘Who is he?'”

“He is someone looking at something and asking me ‘What is it?'”

. . . .

To agree on what something is means we have first agreed on how we ask “What is it?”

We aren’t in the habit of questioning such simple and obvious questions.

*

Asking creates space for an answer.

A deep personality knows how to ask in many different ways.

An expansive personality is willing to ask in many different ways with others.

When we have no space for an answer, when we lack the capacity to ask the answer’s question, the answer is irrelevant or nonsensical. Or we attach the answer to another question, sometimes with partial success.

*

Sometimes when we refute an answer, what we are refuting is the question.

Sometimes the refutation of a question deprives the other of space. We constrict the other’s world.

Sometimes the refutation of a question deprives the other of shelter. We take away the source of ready answers that protect the other from the vacuum of questions which extends infinitely in every direction from every truth.

*

An answered question is like a bright spot.

An unanswered question is like a dark shadow.

An unasked question is a blind spot, which is neither dark nor light, but is simply nonexistent.

The worst kind of mistake escapes detection by disguising its non-rightness with non-wrongness: it is the correct answer to the wrong question.

Nobody mistakes confusion for understanding.

It is easy to recognize confusion. Confusion is unclear, incoherent, disorienting, unsettling — the very opposite of understanding.

But how do we distinguish misunderstanding from understanding? After all the essence of a misunderstanding is that it appears to be an understanding.

So how do we detect a misunderstanding? What is the tell-tale sign?

That’s the problem: there isn’t one.

*

As long as we believe that misunderstanding announces itself as confusion — or that misunderstanding happens when we try to interpret “reality” and make a mistake — if we think interpretation happens after we perceive reality — we will fail to do the one thing necessary for uncovering misunderstanding. To uncovering misunderstanding we must seriously consider the very real possibility that what we fully and clearly understand might be wrong.

Most of us are oriented toward trying to see how we are right. The key to becoming more and more right, though, is trying to see how we are wrong, and then correcting that wrongness. We will never exhaust our wrongness, but this is how rightness is approached.

*

It is not about right vs wrong. It is about right vs even more right.

It is about a one right vs wrong and another right vs wrong in open dialogue discovering a new and overwhelming shared rightness.

“A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

*

When we do not know how to orient ourselves to a situation we feel apprehensive. We are aware that a problem exists, but we do not know how to orient ourselves to the problem, and the problem lacks definite form.

Posing a question orients us to a problematic situation and gives us an approach for finding an answer. Formulating the question gives the problem an explicit form so we can communicate the problem to others and share it.

A formulated question works like a compass or a sextant, and helps people find common ground and orientation — a shared point-of-view from which problem can be viewed and seen in the same perspective, which is the point of departure for approaching the problem.

Once the question has been posed and formulated, a point-of-view and perspective on the problem has been established, then an individual or community can get to work comprehending the element of a situation, and relate them together as elements of a solution to a problem.

*

A problem that has not yet been resolved into a question is a perplexity. A perplexity can be recognized by the inability to ask meaningful questions, or to account for what the problem is. They also have a distinctive feel: they are unsettling and they tend to arouse anxiety. They are unpleasant. Consequently, people want to resolve perplexities as quickly as possible.

The trouble is, How do we resolve a perplexity?

Many (most?) people see problems, questions and perplexities as essentially the same: they’re the absence of an answer.

Consequently, they try to resolve them all by the same method: Find an answer.

(Think of how many times you’ve heard: “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions.” This sentiment looks positive and action-oriented, and sometimes it is well-founded, especially when used to combat pessimism, cynicism and unproductive fault-finding. However, when it discourages the raising of productive questions, it can ultimately work against decisive and wholehearted action.)

But a perplexity is far more problematic than a question, and it calls for a different response.

A perplexity is rarely settled by answers. It’s resolved by clear questions.

An unasked but answered perplexity remains unsettled and unsettling. Plans founded on such answers are often fraught with controversy, because they’re addressing different problems. Incompatible points-of-view on what should be done are discussed primarily at the level of the concrete decisions around plans or outcomes. The only way to come to agreements is compromising on aspects of the answer. The resolutions tend to have more to do with politics than with the problem itself.

As strange as it sounds, real agreement is founded not on shared answers, but on shared questions.

*

Suzanne Langer says this about questions:

The “technique,” or treatment, of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given. If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” we will be accused of trying to be cryptic, smart, or “unsympathetic.” For in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question. The questioner feels called upon to repeat his problem. “Then how did the world become as it is?” If now we answer: “It has not ‘become’ at all,” he will be really disturbed. This “answer” clearly repudiates the very framework of his thinking, the orientation of his mind, the basic assumptions he has always entertained as common-sense notions about things in general. Everything has become what it is; everything has a cause; every change must be to some end; the world is a thing, and must have been made by some agency, out of some original stuff, for some reason. These are natural ways of thinking. Such implicit “ways” are not avowed by the average man, but simply followed. He is not conscious of assuming any basic principles. They are what a German would call his “Weltanschauung,” his attitude of mind, rather than specific articles of faith. They constitute his outlook; they are deeper than facts he may note or propositions he may moot.

But, though they are not stated, they find expression in the forms of his questions. A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

In philosophy this disposition of problems is the most important thing that a school, a movement, or an age contributes. This is the “genius” of a great philosophy; in its light, systems arise and rule and die. Therefore a philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. Its answers establish an edifice of facts; but its questions make the frame in which its picture of facts is plotted. They make more than the frame; they give the angle of perspective, the palette, the style in which the picture is drawn — everything except the subject. In our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield.

*

Gadamer says something similar:

It is clear that the structure of the question is implicit in all experience. We cannot have experiences without asking questions. Recognizing that an object is different, and not as we first thought, obviously presupposes the question whether it was this or that. From a logical point of view, the openness essential to experience is precisely the openness of being either this or that. It has the structure of a question. …

… The openness of a question is not boundless. It is limited by the horizon of the question. A question that lacks this horizon is, so to speak, floating. It becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy is concretized in a specific “this or that.” In other words, the question has to be posed. Posing a question implies openness but also limitation. It implies the explicit establishing of presuppositions, in terms of which can be seen what still remains open.

To apprehend (“toward taking hold of”) is to intuit that something in one’s experience is significant, but one cannot yet conceive (“together take”) what is signified, and one is unable to orient (“find east”) oneself to the meaning of this situation (“placement” within a context).

To comprehend (“together taking hold of”) is to resolve an apprehended significance into a concept of a thing. The mind reaches out toward something significant and “takes hold of it” in a way that allows it to be “taken together” as a concept, with an objective form.

But some types of significance are not essentially objective. They do not point to conceptual objects, but rather to situations in which we are embedded as participants (“part takers”). In these situations, if we try to create objective significance (which is what minds find easiest and nearly always try to do) we end up with distorted, “magical” conceptions — things which lack the normal attributes of things.

These kinds of significance are not comprehensible, but that does not mean they are unintelligible. It only means we must find other modes of knowing — relate ourselves to this significance differently.

The two primary modes of knowing a situation are 1) disposition & orientation (knowing how one is situated within the situation), and 2) response (knowing how one’s action will change one’s situation).

When one is relating oneself to a situation, one is trying to understand the nature of his participation in the situation, and how to participate in the situation.

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In an objective conception, the knower stands beside what is to be known in a side-by-side peer relationship. The knower is distanced from the object (“thrown in front”) of knowledge.

In a subjective conception the knower stands inside what is to be known. The knowledge encompasses the entire situation: the knower and the known together, as well as the knowledge itself which affects the knower’s participation in the situation. This kind of knowledge does not dispense with the objective factors of the knowledge, but seeks to grasp them and relate them to what underlies them and gives them their significance. It wishes to grasp what can be grasped, but also to understand (find that upon which the objective facts stand) the subjective truth (that which has been “thrown under” the situation and makes it intelligible.

(Contrary to popular belief, subjectivism does not have to be non-objective or romantic and anti-objective. The most profound subjectivism is super-objective. Also, subjectivism also does not have to be idealist, at least not metaphysically idealist. In my opinion, subjectivism means that objectivity is a product of subjects, and is best understood as such — through the method of phenomenology. A physics that moves outside the bounds of phenomenology has trespassed into metaphysics.)

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Think about perspective. One has a point-of-view from which a situation is seen. Some things appear larger and some smaller, according to where they fall in relation to the viewer. They, themselves don’t change size, yet from the point-of-view of the viewer they do, and those sizes change together as a whole based on where the viewer is situated relative to each. One can map the situation from above, but the map is meaningless to that perspective until it is translated into perspectival terms.

Here is what is really interesting about a perspective: It cannot be ascertained and is in fact meaningless without reference to both viewer and objects.

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To comprehend an apple — an object one can grasp in one’s hand and consume at will — is one kind of knowledge; to understand oneself as a participant in the life of a garden is a very different type of knowledge which contains elements of comprehension within it, but is not reducible to objectivity.

Objectivity, on the other hand is reducible to subjectivity.

But this does not mean that the entities known through objectivity are subjective. We have phenomena, and we have conceptualizations, and we have a sense that phenomena is more than appearance — it is entities existing beyond phenomena showing themselves to us (phainein ‘to show’) — that something transcends mere appearance.  That’s all we have.

But phenomena are always surprising us. We are shown things we do not expect, and these surprises force us to reconceptualize objects, again and again. And sometimes we are surprised so profoundly that we have to conceptualize the world as a whole — our whole situation — transfiguring its meaning.

Surprise is (to use William James’ ugly but apt term) the “cash value” of transcendence: we can never assume our experience has shown us all there is of things. We certainly cannot sanely assume we are inventing what we are shown. Things surprise us, and other people — if we are open to learning from them — are the most surprising feature of reality.

When justifications given and received in a particular field have little relation to the actual accomplishment of the goals and the realization of the purpose of the field — or worse, the goals have not been related to any purpose at all, so that the goals are just free-floating standards that gradually degrade into ends-in-themselves —  that field is out of joint, and needs to be rethought.

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I think a major problem inherent to the modern mindset is to become anxious in the face of things for which we do not already have ready-made names, conceptual apparatus, and easy means of measurement. Rather than say, “I do not know yet how to think about this, much less speak about it clearly, much less measure it.” we instead cynically dismiss it as bullshit, or hopelessly, permanently unclear — or something subjective that belongs strictly in the private sphere. Or we scrape whatever incidental features are measurable off the surface of what we wish to understand, and treat these measurable features as the essence of what is being measured.