I just got a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her love poems are coldly truthful, written from a position of complete and purely feminine power (that is, traditional feminine) of a kind that only the most beautiful and fascinating women can have (but with which many less beautiful and fascinating people can somehow identify).

From Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction:

“A few days before his death, Heidegger penned a motto for his collected edition: “Ways, not works”. He explained this motto in some notes for a preface:

The collected edition should indicate various ways: it is underway in the field of paths of the self-transforming asking of the many-sided question of Being … The point is to awaken the confrontation about the question concerning the topic of thinking … and not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless.”

I also found out from Polt’s book that Heidegger worked on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, which makes perfect sense, especially when you consider what Martin Buber had to say about Taoism.

I’ve made it through Division 1 of Being and Time. This is my first rereading of this book since 2006. It strange to return to this book because these ideas — especially the ethical themes — connect to memories from the time, almost like music or distinctive scents. Except with philosophy, what is recalled is a perspective — which is precisely what in memory is absent, supplanted by our present perspective, which re-orders past events into the perpetually arrogant “only now do I really understand” of the present mind. What rereading philosophy recalls is the meaning of a time along with its images and facts — and allows a self to return and to justify itself to the self it has become.

*

Philosophy has been called the queen of the sciences. It is also the queen of the arts.

A series of conversations with my wife and younger daughter forced me to rethink feeling and, consequently, extraversion.

A vision is essentially holistic.

If one has a mental image of some new entity or some new situation that fits neatly and non-disruptively into the world as it is today, that is an idea, not a vision.

However, if one conceives a vision, ideas for new entities and situations will result.

Further, the only way to really convey a vision is to indicate it through entities and situations.

So many people cannot tell the difference between a vision and a bunch of ideas.

In form, vision and ideas are identical. They differ merely in essence.

*

This confusion of vision and ideas is also why people cannot tell the difference between a religion and a set of beliefs.

Fundamentalism is religion-like ideas without redemptive vision. Fundamentalism is not the extreme of religion, but anti-religion.

*

Ideas are derived from vision.

Most ideas we have and hear about are derived from the vision of life most of us casually hold and mistake for reality itself.

What is meant by vision is actually new vision, which serves as a contrast to the old vision, and highlights the difference between reality itself (which is mysterious and pregnant with surprise) and what we have made of it through vision and connected ideas and realizations intended to fend off surprise.

*

If we have real conversations, sooner or later we will be surprised. And if we are surprised enough we might undergo a change of vision. If we undergo a change of vision, new ideas and new aesthetic expressions will naturally emerge.

If we keep ourselves perpetually busy with tasks and entertainments, and communicate mostly through wise-cracks, gossip, and electronic messages of 200 or fewer characters, we cannot disrupt one another, we will never undergo a change of vision, we will never have deeply new ideas rooted in new vision. We will have to painstakingly create new ideas and new situations for ourselves, one at a time. We will have to tinker our way to art. And we will not even know why none of it any longer sustains or inspires us, because we haven’t even gone far enough to know the existence of vision.

Conversation and art live together and die together.

Fundamentalism is a naive realist belief system which adhere to a moralism of adhering to 1) a truth which is reduced to a set of explicit truth assertions, characterized as one’s “beliefs” and 2) an ethic which is reduced to algorithmic practices, characterized as one’s “principles”.

To consider it a virtue to question or alter your beliefs and to always adhere to your ethical rules regardless of the consequences, and to call this virtue “faith” is to be a Fundamentalist.

*

We are mistaken when we take a fundamentalist form of a religion as its purest expression. On the contrary, the purity of any form of fundamentalism consists of straining out precisely the essence of religion and retaining only the formal aspects, which are valuable solely as practical supports for religious life.

Religion is rooted in the finite but is oriented toward in infinite. Fundamentalism is hostile to everything beyond its finite system, and in this respect it is anti-religion.

Real religions are intersubjective. Nothing disrupts the apparent finitude of reality than other person who sees reality another way, revealing both one specific otherwise and the principle than an otherwise is always possible despite all inconceivability. To assume on principle that this other way is factually or morally wrong is to insulate oneself against the essential infinite Subject of religion.

*

Every religion subjected to a Fundamentalist reduction ceases to be a form of that religion and becomes another denomination of Fundamentalism.

First we learn that other people exist and that they have feelings, too.

Then we learn that those other people can feel quite differently than we do, even about the same things.

Then we learn that these different feelings other people have are rooted in how they conceive, perceive and inhabit the world; when understood this way, these differing feelings are revealed as legitimate and deserving of our respect.

Then we discover that listening and learning from those with legitimate different feelings can alter our own ways of conceiving, perceiving and inhabiting the world — or to put it more simply, can change our own experience of life.

From this we learn that the world is always infinitely greater than what we have yet made of it.

And the gate to this infinitude is other people, accepted as teachers.

*

Disclaimer:

Let’s not allow sentimentality to lead us astray. Learning is more than letting someone else have their turn talking. Learning requires that we discover our own ignorance and develop a sincere appetite for learning.

Complicating this situation is the fact that the ones most eager to be teacher are often the very ones who are too proud to be taught, and who therefore have little material to teach. Or you get the opposite situation: the “good listener”. The kind of person most eager to let everyone be their teacher are acting a role, mostly for themselves. They cannot be absorbed in their lesson because they are too absorbed in the activity of good listening.

It requires the involvement of at least two authentic participants for teaching to transpire.

Politics can be base, and usually is base, but it does not follow that politics is essentially base.

It is very important to resist cynical tolerance of base politics.

The following two statements provide clues for finding a dignifying conception of politics:

“Action… corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.”
– Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition

“Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.”
– Bruno Latour – Irreductions

 

Goffman, from Presentation of Self [bulleted formatting added]:

In previous sections of this chapter some general characteristics of performance were suggested:

• activity oriented towards work-tasks tends to be converted into activity oriented towards communication;
• the front behind which the routine is presented is also likely to be suitable for other, somewhat different routines and so is likely not to fit completely any particular routine;
• sufficient self-control is exerted so as to maintain a working consensus;
• an idealized impression is offered by accentuating certain facts and concealing others;
• expressive coherence is maintained by the performer taking more care to guard against minor disharmonies than the stated purpose of the performance might lead the audience to think was warranted.

All of these general characteristics of performances can be seen as interaction constraints which play upon the individual and transform his activities into performances. Instead of merely doing his task and giving vent to his feelings, he will express the doing of his task and acceptably convey his feelings. In general, the representation of an activity, especially when this representation is socialized in accordance with interaction standards, will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore, in a certain sense, will inevitably be a misrepresentation of it. And since the individual will be required to rely on signs in order to construct a representation of his activity, the image he constructs, however faithful to the facts, will be subject to all the disruptions that impressions are subject to.

*

As I read this, it occurred to me that if Goffman had written this book today, he would have needed a chapter on the role of producing data as part of our everyday performances. (We even call it “performance data”.)

*

For administrators, the effort of capturing data is incredibly light. The burden falls on those who report to them (a.k.a. their “reports”).

The effort for administrators comes mainly with analysis, which can be deferred indefinitely, with no weakening of justification for the data-capture requirements. Administrators have no practical burdens to restrain their data-capture requirements, and so the requirements are largely unrestrained.

Administrators generally deny that activities and performances are separate things, and assume they are one and the same. It is understood that data measures what the reports should be doing anyway. Therefore, reports have no valid reason to resist measurement — otherwise they appear to have something to conceal, or they are just whiners or grumblers. So administrators encounter no real resistance in their quest to gather comprehensive data by which to evaluate the performance of their reports.

Finally, the object of scrutiny is objective data, which — unlike subjective impressions — cannot lie, and therefore cannot be blurred, squirmed around or contested.

The situation creates an intensified and extensified panopticon effect, where the guard has the power not only to look where he chooses, but also when, and with digitally augmented intelligence, to analyze with superhuman speed and thoroughness, and issue incontestable judgments.

Eventually, when administrators have the means to extract 100% performance from their reports, there is no time nor energy left for effective action. The system begins to fail. More data is gathered in an effort to identify the cause of failure, and to root out nonperformers…

*

If you want to control both means and ends, you have to really understand what is going on, and that means forgoing two of the greatest pleasures of authority: 1) being lied to and 2) despising philosophy.

There’s far too much discussion on how to measure, and far too little on what to measure and why.

Positioning means creating substantial, defensible, perceptible, significant, credible difference.

1. Being substantially different means your differentiation is actualized in offerings that differ from others on the market. The difference is real.
2. Being defensibly different means your differentiation is so difficult to imitate that your competitors will have to weaken their own positioning to copy your key offerings. The difference is enduring.
3. Being perceptibly different means that a customer considering your offerings and competing offerings will see differences. The difference is obvious.
4. Being significantly different means that people care enough about your difference that they will pay for that difference, either with money, effort, time or risk. The difference is important.
5. Being credibly different means that people have faith that your difference will make a difference in their own lives. The difference is believed.

Reason is the synthesis of pluralism and logic.

*

Science at its best is the synthesis of reason and intentionally formatted empiricism, but when it lapses into positivism it is merely the synthesis of logic and naively formatted empiricism.

*

Reason becomes second nature to someone who must constantly persuade.

For those who are isolated and need only convince themselves, or those who are in a position of power and need only command, or those unable to think creatively who crave a single coherent perspective — logic appears to be perfectly sufficient.

Intuition is selective seeing — an implicitly managed selective ignorance — which assigns relevance to some beings, irrelevance to others, and, even more importantly fails to perceive some beings at all, and just looks past or through them.

*

Freedom is living according to one’s intuitions.

*

Everyone is at some point required to think through whatever is deemed relevant by another’s intuition. Everyone must sacrifice some freedom in order to live socially — at least to the degree one lacks the power to impose one’s intuitions on the less powerful.

*

Intuitions are personal. They are preferred or hated according to how natural they feel to an individual’s mind. Or, as we say, how intuitive they feel.

An intellectual discipline that feels unintuitive might eventually come to feel intuitive, at least to some degree, but prior to its becoming intuitive, practicing that discipline requires an enormous sacrifice of energy. And it might be that such disciplines always operate in the red, and always require a sacrifice of energy. You can be sure that somewhere, someone who finds the discipline more intuitive is actually acquiring energy practicing it.

*

A person who finds natural the intuitions of the most powerful strata of society will find it easy to gain power.

First, when such a person adopts the intellectual and practical norms of the powerful, this is a cultivation of his nature. Conformity with the norms is empowering and pleasurable, even if it is involuntary. Others, however, experience the same norms as alien, its concepts and practices artificial, its imposition oppressive, and its effect is to make life more arduous, tedious and less spontaneous. In other words, the norms favor some temperaments and cripple others.

Second, people who share intuitions are natural allies. It is by our intuitions that we are friends or enemies.

*

Reason is the commitment to discover new ways of understanding that accommodate more and more intuitive natures. Reason is guided by the pluralistic faith that there are many possible ways to conceive and perceive — many possible lifeworlds — and each of these lifeworlds favor some intuitions and hinder others. The ideal we will never reach but must always pursue through constant transcendence of intellectual comfort for the sake of others, is the lifeword that is natural to all people.

When I read about philosophical, sociological and physical scientific attempts to root out metaphysical thought, this passage Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” comes to mind:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

In my wiki I just cross-indexed the passage above with Heraclitus: “The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.”

I read Leibniz’s Monadology this morning.

Leibniz is well-known for being one of the inventors of calculus. However, I was not aware that he also anticipated the fundamental ideas of fractal geometry, and precisely the ones that make fractal geometry beautiful.

In philosophy, logic is good craftsmanship.

It is possible for art without craftsmanship to be great, but art that is only craftsmanship can never be more than good.

*

Reason is always logical, but logic is not always reasonable.

*

I probably shouldn’t post stuff like this on facebook:

Some arguments are not meant to win the other over, but rather to wear her resistance down, to the point where she is ready to do or say anything to get relief from the harassment.

When the arguer finally gets his way, he credits his superior position or logic, when in truth he just used argumentation as a sophisticated form of whining.

If you find yourself getting more and more tired engaging in an argument with no escape apart from surrender, consider the possibility that you are not actually being reasoned with.