It’s hard to hear a question when your ears are stuffed with answers.
*
Stupidity is rarely honest enough to appear as confusion. More often it takes the form of the aptly-named “no-brainer”.
*
“How could anyone possibly disagree with me?” This question, asked rhetorically, is an ignorant confession of ignorance. Asked urgently, it is the dawn of possibility.
When I close my eyes, the blackness I see is not blindness.
When I close my eyes and see blindness, the distinction I have failed to perceive is blindness.
When I close my eyes and see only blackness, recalling that blackness and blindness were once the same to me, I can see blackness against contrasting blindness, sight against contrasting sightlessness, and something against contrasting nothingness.
*
It is the essence of blindness that it is not seen. That’s obvious.
What is less obvious is why people who “know” this fact habitually dismiss what doesn’t make immediate sense to them as nonsense, obfuscation, pointless sophistry or deception.
If you can’t discover blindness with the immediacy of sight, how can you become aware of it?
*
Knowledge of ignorance is practical knowledge.
Purely theoretical knowledge of ignorance is more ignorance.
The ignorant belief that ignorance is known as a fact (as opposed to a practical stance toward potential coming-to-know) is the root of that peculiarly turbulent intellectual stagnation we call “romanticism”.
*
To learn a new fact, all one needs is smarts. To gain an insight one also needs hunger, humility and the capacity to trust. These conditions rarely coincide with power. This is why Nietzsche says “power makes stupid.”
*
Invalidation of the testimony of alien perspectives (“the Other”) is the most potent tool we have to stabilize our ignorance. We find many forms of objective justification for never considering the objective claims of the alien other and to keep that other a speaking, behaving object within our own privileged subjectivity. Some of these justifications are cynical, some are credulous, some are rigorously skeptical, some are sloppily sentimental, some are practical, some are fantastic, some are psychological, some are epistemological, some are religious, some are scientific, some are collectivistic, some are individualistic. They come in many forms, but they all stuff our ears with the belief that we already know what we need to know.
*
Somehow, one way or another, we manage to make what we don’t want to hear impossible to say.
Too often, when we need to share something of the highest personal significance we are faced with a painful choice: either make it easy to be misunderstood or face the indignation, impatience, frustration or scorn of those who wish always to already know.
*
To relate to an other as a Thou-subject and not an It-object means to attempt to share subjectivity, which means to share objectivity.
*
If you do not understand what your friend says to you when your friend tells you something, this shows that your understanding of your friend is incomplete.
If you do not understand what your friend says to you when your friend tells you something crucially important, you have no right to believe that you understand your friend.
If you do not understand what your friend is saying to you when your friend tells you something crucially important, and you are unwilling to understand what your friend is telling you, this person is not really your friend. If you believe differently, you do not know what friendship is.
*
This is my exegesis on the pop-feminist accusation: “You treat me like an object.” This statement is misleading, though. It isn’t that anyone minds having their objective, bodily being acknowledged, admired or desired. It is that this is not enough. A human relationship requires that the subjective dimension of our being be acknowledged, admired and desired as well. But due to the ambiguity of the word “subject” we can’t very well say “You don’t treat me like a subject.”
If it didn’t sound ridiculous and pompous and if people were prepared to understand what that means, a better way to say this would be: “You do not relate to me as a Thou.” “Thou” includes the entirety of the other’s being — body and spirit.
Most cultures have ways of explicitly honoring the Thou: making the gassho, saying “namaste”, saying “shallom”.
The best way of honoring the Thou is to listen intently and respectfully. Re-spect, “back”-“look” … to regard the other as one who looks back and sees you as part of her world — hopefully a world in which she sees you as a Thou looking back at her. This is the ground for sharing subjectivity and objectivity and also the ground of ethics.
*
A blind man knows he is blind because he is told so and shown so.
When I think about the interplay between understanding and application as a hermeneutical-rhetorical circle its appearance and its behavior resembles the Lorenz Attractor.
Or — maybe this is just the plain old hermeneutic circle. Gadamer says of the division of interpretation and application:
Formerly it was considered obvious that the task of hermeneutics was to adapt the text’s meaning to the concrete situation to which the text is speaking. The interpreter of the divine will who can interpret the oracle’s language is the original model for this. But even today it is still the case that an interpreter’s task is not simply to repeat what one of the partners says in the discussion he is translating, but to express what is said in the way that seems most appropriate to him, considering the real situation of the dialogue, which only he knows, since he alone knows both languages being used in the discussion. Similarly, the history of hermeneutics teaches us that besides literary hermeneutics, there is also a theological and a legal hermeneutics, and together they make up the full concept of hermeneutics. As a result of the emergence of historical consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, philological hermeneutics and historical studies cut their ties with the other hermeneutical disciplines and established themselves as models of methodology for research in the human sciences. The fact that philological, legal, and theological hermeneutics originally belonged closely together depended on recognizing application as an integral element of all understanding. In both legal and theological hermeneutics there is an essential tension between the fixed text — the law or the gospel — on the one hand and, on the other, the sense arrived at by applying it at the concrete moment of interpretation, either in judgment or in preaching. A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect. This implies that the text, whether law or gospel, if it is to be understood properly — i.e., according to the claim it makes — must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way. Understanding here is always application.
*
Often, when I’m talking to people about the ideas that concern me, the other person will apologize to me for digressing, then proceed to ask me if what I am talking about could be applied to some concrete situation of concern in their life.
That is not a digression. That is the act of understanding. That is dialogue.
If the entire conversation took place in philosophical language and never left that way of speaking and reasoning, it would not be dialogue (dia– “across” + -logos “word, language, reason”), but homologue (homo- “same” + -logos “word, language, reason”), the sort of conversation that takes place among experts who share specialized language and methods.
Dialogue has far more generative potential than homologue.
*
User experience practitioners are constantly telling their clients to overcome organization-centricity. The usual argument is that you need to speak in language your customers can understand and care about. But there are even better reasons than that to know your customers (or more generally, your users or stakeholders): You might learn to see what you’re doing from a different, more productive, more compelling angle.
“We need to find ways to experiment not only with the product innovation itself, but with novel business models. We are now looking for innovations in the interstices between different disciplines – for example, between bio- and nano- technologies. Any new model of innovation must find ways to leverage the disparate knowledge assets of people who see the world quite differently and who use tools and methods foreign to those we’re familiar with. Such people are likely to work both in different disciplines and in different institutions.”
– John Seely Brown, Director Emeritis, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
For similar reasons pursuing understanding of marginal perspectives is valuable. Certainly it is a decent, compassionate thing to do. Sometimes it is prudent. But reckoning with marginal views is also philosophically rewarding. One comes to a deeper and richer understanding of self and world in dialogue with those radically unlike oneself.
I just found a plugin for WordPress that allows threaded discussions. Now, instead of a flat list of comments people can respond directly to other people’s comments.
I am having problems getting through this chapter of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”. This is one of those chapters where I’ve underlined and starred the margins of 85% of the text. Every paragraph presents a mind-blowing insight, which means I’m immediately compelled to apply that insight to a million problems outside of the book, which means I stop reading. (This is my personal test of a book’s awesomeness: Does the book fling me out of its pages into life?)
It’s always interesting to reread the same physical book, and to see how my own patterns of underling has shifted. This chapter was practically clean from the last reading, which I guess means I didn’t find it all that exciting. It is tangible proof of progress, or at least change.
The following passage may not make a lot of sense outside the context of the book, but I want to post it anyway.
*
That subsequent understanding is superior to the original production and hence can be described as superior understanding does not depend so much on the conscious realization that places the interpreter on the same level as the author (as Schleiermacher said) but instead denotes an insuperable difference between the interpreter and the author that is created by historical distance. Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. … . Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. Perhaps it is not correct to refer to this productive element in understanding as “better understanding.” For this phrase is, as we have shown, a principle of criticism taken from the Enlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. [Note: This is why in active listening, the understander must not repeat back or synonymically paraphrase back what one has heard, but must interpret and apply what one has heard and submit this interpretive application to the judgment of the understood, aka validate it.]
Such a conception of understanding breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics. Since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth. That this is what is meant by “understanding” was once self-evident (we need only recall Chladenius). But this dimension of the hermeneutical problem was discredited by historical consciousness and the psychological turn that Schleiermacher gave to hermeneutics, and could only be regained when the aporias of historicism came to light and led finally to the fundamentally new development to which Heidegger, in my view, gave the decisive impetus. For the hermeneutic productivity of temporal distance could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an “existential” and when he interpreted Dasein’s mode of being in terms of time.
Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events. Everyone is familiar with the curious impotence of our judgment where temporal distance has not given us sure criteria. Thus the judgment of contemporary works of art is desperately uncertain for the scholarly consciousness. Obviously we approach such creations with unverifiable prejudices, presuppositions that have too great an influence over us for us to know about them; these can give contemporary creations an extra resonance that does not correspond to their true content and significance. Only when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal.
In historical studies this experience has led to the idea that objective knowledge can be achieved only if there has been a certain historical distance. It is true that what a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances that gave rise to it. The positive conditions of historical understanding include the relative closure of a historical event, which allows us to view it as a whole, and its distance from contemporary opinions concerning its import. [Note: This reminds me of a Rilke quote I’ve posted a million times before, which I will post again below.] The implicit presupposition of historical method, then, is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context — in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest. Only then does it seem possible to exclude the subjective involvement of the observer. … It is true that certain hermeneutic requirements are automatically fulfilled when a historical context has come to be of only historical interest. Certain sources of error are automatically excluded. But it is questionable whether this is the end of the hermeneutical problem. Temporal distance obviously means something other than the extinction of our interest in the object. It lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension. And along with the negative side of the filtering process brought about by temporal distance there is also the positive side, namely the value it has for understanding. It not only lets local and limited prejudices die away, but allows those that bring about genuine understanding to emerge clearly as such.
Often temporal distance can solve question of critique in hermeneutics, namely how to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand. Hence the hermeneutically trained mind will also include historical consciousness. It will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own. Foregrounding a prejudice clearly requires suspending its validity for us. For as long as our mind is influenced by a prejudice, we do not consider it a judgment. How then can we foreground it? It is impossible to make ourselves aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, provoked. The encounter with a traditionary text can provide this provocation. For what leads to understanding must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity. Understanding begins, as we have already said above, when something addresses us. This is the first condition of hermeneutics. We now know what this requires, namely the fundamental suspension of our own prejudices. But all suspension of judgments and hence, a fortiori, of prejudices, has the logical structure of a question.
The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open. If a prejudice becomes questionable in view of what another person or a text says to us, this does not mean that it is simply set aside and the text or the other person accepted as valid in its place. Rather, historical objectivism shows its naivete in accepting this disregarding of ourselves as what actually happens. In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for him to have full play himself.
The naivete of so-called historicism consists in the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity. We must here appeal from a badly understood historical thinking to one that can better perform the task of understanding. Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research, and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. [Note: The past is a Thou!] A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as “history of effect.” Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.
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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”
Black Elk:
You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
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Gadamer:
We recall the hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole. This principle stems from ancient rhetoric, and modern hermeneutics has transferred it to the art of understanding. It is a circular relationship in both cases. The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole.
…
Nineteenth-century hermeneutic theory often discussed the circular structure of understanding, but always within the framework of a formal relation between part and whole — or its subjective reflex, the intuitive anticipation of the whole and its subsequent articulation in the parts. According to this theory, the circular movement of understanding runs backward and forward along the text, and ceases when the text is perfectly understood. This view of understanding came to its logical culmination in Schleiermacher’s theory of the divinatory act, by means of which one places oneself entirely within the writer’s mind and from there resolves all that is strange and alien about the text. In contrast to this approach, Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of foreunderstanding.
The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding but, on the contrary, is most fully realized. The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.
The circle, which is fundamental to all understanding, has a further hermeneutic implication which I call the “fore-conception of completeness.” But this, too, is obviously a formal condition of all understanding. It states that only what really constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible. So when we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken — i.e., the text is not intelligible — do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied. The rules of such textual criticism can be left aside, for the important thing to note is that applying them properly depends on understanding the content.
The fore-conception of completeness that guides all our understanding is, then, always determined by the specific content. Not only does the reader assume an immanent unity of meaning, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning that proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said. Just as the recipient of a letter understands the news that it contains and first sees things with the eyes of the person who wrote the letter — i.e., considers what he writes as true, and is not trying to understand the writer’s peculiar opinions as such — so also do we understand traditionary texts on the basis of expectations of meaning drawn from our own prior relation to the subject matter. And just as we believe the news reported by a correspondent because he was present or is better informed, so too are we fundamentally open to the possibility that the writer of a transmitted text is better informed than we are, with our prior opinion. It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to “understand” the text, psychologically or historically, as another’s opinion. The prejudice of completeness, then, implies not only this formal element — that a text should completely express its meaning — but also that what it says should be the complete truth.
Here again we see that understanding means, primarily, to understand the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and understand another’s meaning as such. Hence the most basic of all hermeneutic preconditions remains one’s own fore-understanding, which comes from being concerned with the same subject. This is what determines what can be realized as unified meaning and thus determines how the foreconception of completeness is applied.
Thus the meaning of “belonging” — i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity — is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices. Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a bond to the subject matter that comes into language through the traditionary text and has, or acquires, a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks. On the other hand, hermeneutical consciousness is aware that its bond to this subject matter does not consist in some self-evident, unquestioned unanimity, as is the case with the unbroken stream of tradition. Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness; but this polarity is not to be regarded psychologically, with Schleiermacher, as the range that covers the mystery of individuality, but truly hermeneutically — i.e., in regard to what has been said: the language in which the text addresses us, the story that it tells us. Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.
*
Try this out: What if the formerly-much-jabbered-about (* see note) “Post-Modern Condition” is essentially the widespread breakdown of any “fore-conception of completeness” possessed at any level by our society. Because of our passive stance toward meaning (that it is to be discovered, not made, as if these two constitute some kind of absolute dichotomy!) since there’s no truth to be discovered, we resign ourselves to utter intellectual and practical fragmentation.
My view: the point of understanding is not to form an adequate picture of the “truth out there.” The purpose of understanding — of synesis, that twofold together — is to, by way of coming to (authentic) agreement on what is “out there” we create meaningful social solidarity: culture.
We seek truth for the sake of truth, in the same way we have sex to have sex. Babies are the side-effect of our intentions and the hidden telos.
Truth is social, and for precisely that reason, we must take truth seriously, which means to be rigorously non-reductive. By that I mean we cannot continue to identify truth with “objectivity”. It’s killing us.
*
For your listening enjoyment: “Circles” by the Who and by Camper Van Beethoven.
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* Note: If we’ve stopped talking about postmodern fragmentation and disorientation it’s for the same reason we’ve stopped talking about modernist themes of alienation, nihilism, loss of faith — we no longer have any sense that a non-alienated, non-nihilistic, faithful might be possible, let alone preferable. We’ve never experienced having to contrast with not-having, so not-having is indistinguishable from reality itself.
As a user experience practitioner, it is interesting to me that the hermeneutical circle (the movement between whole and part that characterizes the process of understanding) originated in ancient rhetoric. The privilege of my profession is that we get to stand on both sides of meaning, as understanders (in the mode of researchers) and as creators of things to be understood (in the mode of designers), and best of all, we get to iteratively connect the two modes. (I’m picturing the infinity symbol: we research understandings, we design things to be understood, we research understandings of our designs, we redesign… etc. )
It seems everything we do in user experience wants to be iterative. (* See note.) I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is because we are in the understanding business, and iterativity is the form of understanding.
*
An idea to try on: user experience strategy/design as a species of rhetoric. Pan-sensory, interactive rhetoric. (I’ve been enjoying the perversity of using words revaluated by Gadamer to express benevolent thoughts as villainously as possible. This one falls short of the last example of the pattern, characterizing brand as “prejudice design”. )
*
In his wonderful book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis Richard J. Bernstein made a very interesting criticism of Gadamer: that Gadamer did a good job of outlining a theory of hermeneutics, but in regard to practice he left us hanging.
My view is that experience design can be a practical extension of Gadamer’s thought, and in fact is following a semi-conscious trajectory toward this point. It’s always exciting to find new ways to integrate my philosophical mornings and my professional days.
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(* Note: Conversely, much of the friction we experience in the world of business seems to center around the flattening of circularities. Business likes predictability, so it likes nice straight lines. Non-linearity is innately unpredictable.)
A nice zinger from Gadamer’s Truth and Method:
…the criteria of the modern Enlightenment still determine the self-understanding of historicism. They do so not directly, but through a curious refraction caused by romanticism. This can be seen with particular clarity in the fundamental schema of the philosophy of history that romanticism shares with the Enlightenment and that precisely through the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment became an unshakable premise: the schema of the conquest of mythos by logos. What gives this schema its validity is the presupposition of the progressive retreat of magic in the world. It is supposed to represent progress in the history of the mind, and precisely because romanticism disparages this development, it takes over the schema itself as a self-evident truth. It shares the presupposition of the Enlightenment and only reverses its values, seeking to establish the validity of what is old simply on the fact that it is old: the “gothic” Middle Ages, the Christian European community of states, the permanent structure of society, but also the simplicity of peasant life and closeness to nature.
In contrast to the Enlightenment’s faith in perfection, which thinks in terms of complete freedom from “superstition” and the prejudices of the past, we now find that olden times — the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analyzed away by consciousness, in a “society close to nature,” the world of Christian chivalry — all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth. Reversing the Enlightenment’s presupposition results in the paradoxical tendency toward restoration — i.e., the tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old, the conscious return to the unconscious, culminating in the recognition of the superior wisdom of the primeval age of myth. But the romantic reversal of the Enlightenment’s criteria of value actually perpetuates the abstract contrast between myth and reason. All criticism of the Enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the Enlightenment. Belief in the perfectibility of reason suddenly changes into the perfection of the “mythical” consciousness and finds itself reflected in a paradisiacal primal state before the “fall” of thought.
In fact the presupposition of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought is just as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfect enlightenment or of absolute knowledge. Primeval wisdom is only the counterimage of “primeval stupidity.” All mythical consciousness is still knowledge, and if it knows about divine powers, then it has progressed beyond mere trembling before power (if this is to be regarded as the primeval state), but also beyond a collective life contained in magic rituals (as we find in the early Orient). It knows about itself, and in this knowledge it is no longer simply outside itself.
There is the related point that even the contrast between genuine mythical thinking and pseudomythical poetic thinking is a romantic illusion based on a prejudice of the Enlightenment: namely that the poetic act no longer shares the binding quality of myth because it is a creation of the free imagination. It is the old quarrel between the poets and the philosophers in the modern garb appropriate to the age of belief in science. It is now said, not that poets tell lies, but that they are incapable of saying anything true; they have only an aesthetic effect and, through their imaginative creations, they merely seek to stimulate the imagination and vitality of their hearers or readers.
Another case of romantic refraction is probably to be found in the concept of an “organic society,” [Note: uh oh — this one hits close to the bone] which Ladendorf says was introduced by H. Leo. In Karl Marx it appears as a kind of relic of natural law that limits the validity of his socio-economic theory of the class struggle. Does the idea go back to Rousseau’s description of society before the division of labor and the introduction of property?
I filed this under the Romanticism theme in my wiki.
I’m contemplating creating a thought-structure library. It could actually take the form of a practical philosophy pattern language.
I can see it dividing into several strata, corresponding to the theoretical (the objective, atomistic, systematizable realm of knowledge, around which most of us draw the line delimiting truth), the practical (the purely intuitive or instinctive sphere of inarticulate know-how, which is rarely as firmly linked to the theoretical as most of us think * , or rather is linked to it very weirdly ** ) and the meaningful (the “subjective”, holistic, gestalt realm of meaningful totalities in which our moral/aesthetic values and our symbol-systems are rooted.
A lot of it will be diagrams, especially in the stratum of the meaningful. It is going to look very cool. (I’m going to have to find my old visual tantrum, the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide”, which I created in response to an epidemic of depicting every triadic relationship as facets of a cube. The cube has semantic value which should not be ignored for the sake of finding a less boring way to depict a generic aggregate-of-three. Use three apples or something to depict that, ok? A cube represents either three dimensions (which also means something specific: co-presence of attributes) or three aspects of something (that is, you can view an identical entity multiple ways). Really, you don’t need an image to depict an aggregate. We all understand aggregates. The difficulty is in depicting anything other than an aggregate. But I digress into the same tantrum that induced the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide” in the first place…
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* Thus the need for field research. If people actually had a clear theoretical understanding of what they do we could just conduct interviews and user research would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Fact is, the gulf between theory and practice, which is so widely recognized in application of theory (expressed in sarcastic remarks to the tune of “that sounds great in theory”) is just as bad running the opposite direction. We rarely reflect on our actions theoretically unless something goes wrong, and theory is asked to assist.
** What we are trying to accomplish has a lot to do with how we schematize our world. Fact is, the theoretical is founded on the practical more than the reverse. And the practical is largely founded on the meaningful. If we saw no value in science, there would be no science. This is a gross simplification, offered in the spirit of provocation.
Negativity does not mean focusing on what is unpleasant. Negativity means focusing on absence rather than presence.
Many people advise one another to not be negative. This is negativity in regard to negativity: wishing the absence of the negative. Negating negativity does not produce positivity.
But why prefer the positive to the negative? Why try to eliminate negativity? Negativity is not necessarily bad. Negativity has positive value in that it makes room for positivity by signaling problems with what is established.
*
That all-too-common prohibition against pointing out problems unless one already has a solution is a nasty trick — a self-preservation strategy for the incumbent version of the truth. To cooperate means there can be no collaborative effort toward diagnosing and confronting problems. It is a sentimentally disguised divide-and-conquer move. The power of dialogue is denied to dissent and granted to preservation.
*
Those who know only negative responses to “negative emotions” — confusion, anxiety, disorientation — are hermeneutically crippled. One must learn the positive meaning of the negative. The most important thing for a knower to know is that he does not yet know.
The negative emotions are the sense organs of interpretation.
*
Who cares if you have all the answers if you’ve failed to see the questions?Seeing the question is the hard part. Answers are cheap.
*
A well-formed question practically answers itself. A question is a perspectival field. Along the lines of the question an answer is sought.
*
Many malformed answers result from the failure to ask the question thoroughly enough: one coddles bad ideas that need to be asked into oblivion.
*
The term no-brainer is ironically apt.
The world doesn’t get simpler the smarter you are.
What happened to him
on the desert plate
of glaring white,
under steep, soft blue,
when heaven sagged,
seeping purple-brown heat;
clouds and ocean
wound around his face,
and the horizon convulsed
and constricted in welts,
and gathered and bound
his groundless feet,
and he slid from the world
unseeing, unseen,
heavy and blind,
a dark, silver drop?
“The Transfiguration”
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The Shepherds’ hovels shone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said,’To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those tangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.
But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled–
Glad to be so–and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.
– Edwin Muir
I just bought professional optical character recognition (OCR) software so I can index and connect everything I read in my wiki even more efficiently.
The difference between innocence and guilt is a matter of urgency. How much time is there to judge?
In crises – on the battlefield, in a catastrophe, or even under the pressure of a tight deadline – judgment is dispensed quickly and cursorily. (“Analysis paralysis! We don’t have time to philosophize!”) In peace judgment is slower and deeper.
*
Three men were condemned in court, each for a statement he had made which had been taken out of context and used as evidence against him.
The first man would have been absolved by the sentence preceding and the sentence following his statement. The second man would have been released had the full transcript of his speech been made available with a brief explanation of his situation. The third man also would have been exonerated had the courts heard and understood his full speech, knew his biography and had learned to see his situation as he saw it – but this would have taken months or years of close and honest study. In other words, the third man really was guilty.
*
Some people prefer urgency precisely because urgency leaves no time to think. One must leap straight to the conclusion, ostensibly in order to “act decisively”. In some cases, though, the need for immediate action is a semi-conscious ruse. The possibility that the situation could be different from how it appears at first glance arouses instinctive anxiety in the “man of action”. This anxiety is discharged in attacking dissent and lunging into reaction. From there doubts are dispelled by the distractions of events.
However, urgency is real, the need to act is real, and guilt is real. The question is: Real in what sense? This kind of question deservedly arouses the most cynical skepticism. “God is real… but in what sense?” “What is… is?”
*
The declining world-view loves an emergency; but the dying world-view is dependent on emergencies and expends its last strength creating them.
Some wars are only the death-spasms of a world-view.
The Democrats in nominating Obama transcended the familiar and put its faith in the radical Other.
“Radical Other”: This means Obama is unknowable on principle to the average Democrat. He is fascinating precisely because (for most for now ) it is qualitatively impossible to imagine how the world looks from his eyes. It is obvious from his words and bearing that his vision is a good vision. Obama’s infamous vagueness seems to me to be refusal to pre-determine the outcome of a conversation that has not yet taken place; his hope is faith that the fusion of horizons arising from dialogue between antithetical perspectives can result in a deeper, more comprehensive, more inclusive, more nourishing national vision.
If the Democrats had nominated Hillary it would have continued an old narcissistic pattern that sunk the party again and again. “Give me the epitome of what I can comprehend: myself. That is, give me a competent administrator.” Skillful administrators are necessary and good, but even the most excellent administrators tend to ground themselves in a vision. The national vision is precisely what has been in question. With the nomination of Obama this pattern was broken: the Democrats finally adored beyond themselves and elected a true leader.
Meanwhile look what happened in the lower-order right, the Republican mob. Since Neoconservatism – (a movement with Troskyist roots, which “turned conservative” only in the 60s as a reaction against Stalinism) – gained full control of the party the Republicans have been hard at work employing the demagogic tricks of the left, namely disingenuously condescending to and flattering the masses, pretending to be “of the people”. The Cheney upper-Right Republicans taught the lower-Right to adore only its own self-image and to hate everything that does not conform to it. Essentially, they’ve taught those with the most crippled judgment to exalt its own style of “no-brainer”, self-evident, common sense, and to reject as the “wise man’s foolishness” whatever can’t be processed and packaged into a sound-bite…
Particity: participatory being in relation to a whole who transcends it.
This statement, I think, refers to particity: “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.”
I am interested in recognizing evidence of the particity that saturates the being of a self, and the interpretive tricks used to explain it away or cover it over in order to preserve our individualistic conceits. Imagine each of us as participants in a conscious being trying to come to terms with itself through our ordinary (no unusual or supernatural conceptions added) human interactions. Why not? A mind can be of two minds on a matter and remain a mind.
*
I understand Logos to be the being that arises from beings participating in dialogue who through their participation become a unity that exceeds each but includes both.
*
A series of statements from Heraclitus, who lived 500 years before the birth of Jesus Christ:
Although this Logos is eternally valid, yet men are unable to understand it — not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it — at least if they are judged in the light of such words and deeds as I am here setting forth.
My own method is to distinguish each thing according to its nature, and to specify how it behaves; other men, on the contrary, are as neglectful of what they do when awake as they are when asleep.
–
We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.
–
Although intimately connected with the Logos, men keep setting themselves against it.
–
Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.
*
Now read this as if you’ve never heard it before:
In the beginning was Logos, and Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.
–
…For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
*
Brian Jonestown Massacre: “Everyone Says”
Magnetic Fields: “Book of Love” and “The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure”
Common things can be taken or left casually. Uncommon things require weighing. The absolutely unique dictates its terms, and the world accommodates.