Working in my wiki this morning, I found myself tagging this passage from Martin Buber with the theme “tragedy“:

If a man were only guilty toward himself, in order to satisfy the demanding summons that meets him at the height of conscience, he would only need to take this one road from the gate of self-illumination, that of persevering. But a man is always guilty toward other beings as well, toward the world, toward the being that exists over against him. From self-illumination he must, in order to do justice to the summons, take not one road but two roads, of which the second is that of reconciliation. By reconciliation is understood here that action from the height of conscience that corresponds on the plane of the law to the customary act of reparation. In the realm of existential guilt one cannot, of course, ‘make reparation’ in the strict sense — as if the guilt with its consequences could thereby be recalled, as it were. Reconciliation means here, first of all, that I approach the man toward whom I am guilty in the light of my self-illumination (in so far as I can still reach him on earth) acknowledge to his face my existential guilt and help him, in so far as possible, to overcome the consequences of my guilty action. But such a deed can be valid here only as reconciliation if it is done not out of a premeditated resolution, but in the unarbitrary working of the existence I have achieved. And this can happen, naturally, only out of the core of a transformed relationship to the world, a new service to the world with the renewed forces of the renewed man.

This is not the place to speak of the events in the sphere of faith that correspond to the events in the sphere of the high conscience that we have just discussed. For the sincere man of faith, the two spheres are so referred to each other in the practice of his life, and most especially when he has gone through existential guilt, that he cannot entrust himself exclusively to either of them. Both, the human faith not less than the human conscience, can err and err again. And knowing about this their erring, both — conscience not less than faith — must place themselves in the hands of grace. It is not for me to speak in general terms of the inner reality of him who refuses to believe in a transcendent being with whom he can communicate. I have only this to report: that I have met many men in the course of my life who have told me how, acting from the high conscience as men who had become guilty, they experienced themselves as seized by a higher power. These men grew into an existential state to which the name of rebirth is due.

Here is a tragic synthesis that cancels both Pharisaic/fundamentalist dogmatism and antinomianism.

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As an experiment, I’ve tried reading three quotes from Nietzsche as if they agree with Buber’s view on guilt (setting aside the question of whether Nietzsche’s quotes on Jesus even agree with one another), to see what insights arise:

1.) From Birth of Tragedy:

It is an unimpeachable tradition that in its earliest form Greek tragedy records only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that he was the only actor. But it may be claimed with equal justice that, up to Euripides, Dionysus remains the sole dramatic protagonist and that all the famous characters of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are only masks of that original hero. The fact that a god hides behind all these masks accounts for the much-admired “ideal” character of those celebrated figures. … If we wished to use Plato’s terminology we might speak of the tragic characters of the Greek stage somewhat as follows: the one true Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of characters, in the mask of warrior hero, and enmeshed in the web of individual will. The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering individual. That he can appear at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionysian condition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries.

2) From Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

[Jesus] died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching, had he reached my age. Noble enough was he to recant. But he was not yet mature. Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy. But in the man there is more of the child than in the youth, and less melancholy: he knows better how to die and to live. Free to die and free in death, able to say a holy No when the time for Yes has passed; thus he knows how to die and to live.

3) From The Antichrist:

Until [the crucifixion] this warlike, this No-saying, No-doing trait had been lacking in [Jesus’s] image; even more, he had been its opposite. Evidently the small community did not understand the main point, the exemplary character of this kind of death, the freedom, the superiority over any feeling of ressentiment: — a token of how little they understood him altogether! After all, Jesus could not intend anything with his death except to give publicly the strongest exhibition, the proof of his doctrine … But his disciples were far from forgiving this death — which would have been evangelic in the highest sense; or even from offering themselves for a like death in gentle and lovely repose of the heart … Precisely the most unevangelical feeling, revenge, came to the fore again.

The name of the final chapter of Leviathan and the Air-Pump is “The Polity of Science: Conclusions”. My own understanding of polity has been most influenced by On Justification. I would say both of these works are part of the developing Actor-Network canon — that is, they’re both mentioned in Reassembling the Social, which I’ve taken to be pretty much the Bible of ANT. So I am a little surprised that there appears nobody has yet performed a Boltanski-style analysis of the “Scientific World”. And since this is (with certain ontological adjustments) my own world, it seems that this might be a valuable thing to do. I’m putting this on my list of things I’d like to like to do. Maybe I’ll even make myself do it, or at least do it for the social science polity. Or the UCD polity…

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My interest in On Justification is this: it is clear that at the root of authentic brand is the lifeworld family of concepts (culture, form of life, language game, polity, worldview, perspective, vision, etc.). Authenticity of brand is a function of its faith to the logic of its worldview and the traditions of its lifeworld. I’ve spent a decent amount of effort looking for frameworks that might help define/describe/locate/orient a lifeworld for the purposes of branding. I’d like to see a kind of branding that synthesizes Michael Porter’s activity system approach to strategy, actor-network theory’s approach to people research, and a Nietzschean concrete pluralist ethic/ethos. I want a genodynamic brand strategy to replace the phenodynamic superficiality of conventional brand identity.

Where a person chooses to work, and how that person relates with others in the workplace shows that person’s deepest political preferences (as opposed to superficial party loyalties).

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The pragmatic meaning of “respect” litmus test: Some people believe respect means to treat all people as equals (or at least political equals), while others think it means to acknowledge organizational rank (which means accepting inequality), while yet others have personal criteria for earning respect through displays of this or that virtue (industriousness, honesty, intelligence, ingenuity).

It is easy to see how perceptions of “disrespect” can occur across conflicting definition of respect… One person attempts to treat another person as an equal, and this is perceived by the other as insubordinate presumption of an inferior…

Workplace clashes of this kind is the true site of ideological difference (between what Boltanski and Thévenot called “polities“). The appeals that are heard or not heard, the decisions that are praised or condemned, the preferences that are honored or ignored in the daily world of work is the very political substance of a person’s life. “Office politics” is not a metaphor — it is where politics touch down, are lived out as the reality of choice or compulsion.

Compared to the reality of work politics, national politics as reported by Fox News or MSNBC is abstraction. Newscasting might as well be sportscasting. Parties are rival teams playing in distant coliseums. We may have bets placed on one team or another, but mostly it’s just symbol play.

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Every company is a polis. Beneath the surface of missions and core value (and other such internal-communicationy bullshit), every business has a set of values or rival sets of values, which have been operationalized as work practices, and which are regulated through local political norms. These operationalized values determine the character of the businesses offerings and its self-presentation in the market.

I’d rather do ordinary things with extraordinary people than extraordinary things with ordinary people.

An outline of my meager understanding of the history of science:

1. Informal natural observation; unsystematic explanation
2. Informal natural observation; systematic metaphysical explanation
3. Formal natural observation; systematic metaphysical explanation
4. Formal natural observation; systematic metaphysical/mathematical explanation
5. Artificial experiment; systematic metaphysical/mathematical(?) explanation
6. Artificial experiment; systematic phenomenological/mathematical(?) explanation

I’m thinking of reading Koyre’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe in order to get a basic, probably outdated, plot-line to work with.

Why do I care? I want to paint business as being stuck back at step 4, and make a case for progressing to step 6. And yes, I’m whigging.

The excessive specificity of scholarly monographs can seem ridiculous from the outside, but the most explosive insights are located between the banal minutiae and irrelevant anomalies of human life.

splitting the atom : physics :: splitting hairs : humanities

I’ve never believed that Nietzsche’s will to power was meant to be something that belongs solely to individuals, nor that it takes the form of domination. Groups of people have a will to power, as much as the individuals who constitute groups, as do the psychic subdivisions within an individual psyche. And this will to power can manifest and resolve itself in myriad ways, sometimes through coercion, but often through alliance.

Nietzsche was a reductionist — reducing all human and even natural actions to the universal animating force of the will to power — but this force was understood to undergo rich transformations and sublimations in its journey from inorganic to organic to social life, and it is crucial to note both that Nietzsche did stratify and rank these transformations, noted their changes in character as they elevated in rank.

In its infancy a models helps us conceptualize complexity, and helps us orient ourselves within a problem that would otherwise be experienced as bewildering chaos.

Later as the model matures it help us manage complexity, and helps us keep large numbers of details organized so we can capture, present and recall them.

Research that develops models where no adequate models exist has relies more on philosophical thought. Research that uses and populates existing models relies more on observational skills.

Natural science : technology :: social science : design

Human nature is artificiality.

Humankind has co-evolved with the civilizations we have built and inhabited. Under the pressures of these artificial habitats (which include not only what we live in, but live with and use), we have biologically evolved and become capable of rebuilding our civilizations in new ways — within which, and with which, we further biologically evolve.

Human beings as we are now have never existed apart from civilization, and would be incomplete alone and in the wilderness. The belief that we’d be better off without civilization is artifice, but artifice discordant with our true artificial natures.

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Humankind and civilization are the twin children produced by humankind and civilization, who will parent the next twins. We belong to an interminable double-helix chain of bio-artifice incest stretching behind us and before us. We blind ourselves with Origin stories of perfection lost and regained.

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Don’t even try to make arguments based on what is and is not natural. In human existence, nothing is natural. The best we have is second-nature: some things seem or feel natural, and other things can come to seem or feel natural, and these second-natures vary from individual to individual. If you take this fact (the pluralistic fact) seriously enough to make attempts to learn the specifics of varying experiences of naturalness, which differs from psychic economy to psychic economy, you’ll approach truth instead of shrinking from it.

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Conservatives who hate the idea of evolution should take extreme care to avoid understanding the concept of co-evolution. Evolution is training wheels for the shock of its logical progression to co-evolution.

We’d better protect the sanctimony of our individual marriage customs, because collectively we are a polygamous, incestuous, bestial, technophilic monsters, marrying and mating with animals, household appliances and anything that moves (or fails to move fast enough to escape our embrace) for dozens of millennia.

We’ve done all sorts of crazy things to ourselves as a species, and who’s to judge what ought to or ought not to have happened? Actually, we will, and in the process we will do yet more crazy things to ourselves.

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My new definition of design: humans artificing and doing crazy things to ourselves.

I could be accused of Romanticism in one respect: I place enormous emphasis on psychic economy. In a society, morale is a matter of life and death.

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The way a person how a person lives, inhabits and conceptualizes life makes that person want to live, grow, flourish and expand, or it makes a person indifferent to what happens.

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Life is lived most skillfully when we value it, and we value life most when we live it skillfully. If we wish to survive, we must work to flourish. If we do not flourish, we will not care if we outlive ourselves, and we will place our hopes in death. If we do not flourish we will feel no more than affection for our children and grandchildren, loving them only with our “hearts”, but not with our minds and bodies.

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Generation X, the “apathetic generation”, understands the vital importance of the psychic economy. We were commanded to care, but never shown why to care nor how to care, so we simply abstained from all gestures of caring. Only as adults, partly through becoming parents, did we begin to understand the problem of caring: of value.

This is why we are reinventing brand, modeling it on the only institutions we were able to value in our youth: in bands.

There’s something consummating about entering the Cyborg Manifesto into my wiki, my own dear spirit-prosthetic, who helps me recall myself when I’ve forgotten who I am trying to be/come.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble quoted some passages from Elizabeth V. Spelman’s essay “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” that captured my interest enough that I found a copy and read it this morning. Here’s one of the finest zingers in the piece:

In this essay she mentions another unpublished piece I’d like to read, ‘Metaphysics and Misogyny’. The connection between religious faith, traditional metaphysical conceptions, preference for hierarchical power structures, aversion to matter and the senses, xenophobia, readiness to use violence and subjugation of women are becoming clearer to me.

The pragmatic formula for a role: “You are __________ , therefore you should __________ .” The question to ask is whether a role with an acceptable “therefore” exists and is accessible to the one who will be expected to fulfill it.

Soft systems are systems that include as part of the system human participants whose various interpretations and responses help regulate the workings of the system.

Hard systems are systems that do not include an interpretive human element and are assumed to be regulated entirely algorithmically.

Hard systems are engineered.

Soft systems are designed.

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The signature error of the 20th Century was to mistake soft systems problems for hard systems problems, and to attempt to engineer solutions where design was needed.

This bit from the introduction to Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is very exciting to me:

Chapter seven interprets the traditional distinction between the search for “objective knowledge” and other, less privileged, areas of human activity as merely the distinction between “normal discourse” and “abnormal discourse.” Normal discourse (a generalization of Kuhn’s notion of “normal science”) is any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria. I argue that the attempt (which has defined traditional philosophy) to explicate “rationality” and “objectivity” in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourse of the day, and that, since the Greeks, philosophy’s self-image has been dominated by this attempt.

“Abnormal discourse.” I like that term. Consider: anoma + logos.

There is more to reality than is speakable, and there is more to possibility than is predictable.

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Without the concrete-reality-between, each mind is solitary confinement.

Without experiment, reality lies on a linguistic Procrustean bed.

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