4 Indian blind men and 7 Chinese brothers: my superstitious numerological instincts kick into overdrive…

The world makes more sense once you realize that for the vast majority of people a question is nothing more than the painful absence of an answer: A question is a hole in the side of the intellect to be plugged with an answer — any answer — before more chaos can flood in.

*

Wherever the seal of reality holds, no question exists. When the seal breaks, any answer-like material of the right size and shape nearest at hand will be jammed into the question to plug it up.

*

It might be that we focus our “faith” (in the popular sense of “willfully believing”) on the scars of poorly plugged questions. Apologetics is the art of patching over the plugs and making them less visible.

*

Skeptics run about under the waterline with drills, boring holes here and there to show themselves and everyone else that reality is just an artificial wall.

*

Excessive patching, boring, re-patching results in a vessel that can only float in gentle weather.

The majority of people only experience a generative idea through the concrete ideas it generates. The generative idea is too abstract and insubstantial to perceive as real and actual; the mind can’t wrap itself around it, like it can a generated idea. However in every generated idea the generative idea to which it belongs resonates and makes a person respond emotionally.

*

Innovation gurus make loads of money promising executives and managers that anyone can innovate. They may be right, but if they are, they always neglect to mention that anyone who does wish to learn to innovate deeply will have to undergo an intellectual metamorphosis most will be unwilling to accept.

That metamorphosis involves learning to orient oneself to generative ideas as well as the more familiar generated thought we celebrate as objective fact. It involves rethinking what subjectivity essentially is, and recognizing that objectivity does not, for a finite human mind, contain it.

“What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it. And just as for the dramatist words and verse are but the stammering of an alien tongue, needed to tell what he has seen and lived, what he could utter directly only through music or gesture, just so every profound philosophic intuition expressed through dialectic and through scientific reflection is the only means for the philosopher to communicate what he has seen.”

A generative idea is worth much more than a generated idea.

*

Generative ideas are perceived only indirectly in the ideas they generate — if the generative idea is perceived at all. Most people only see and celebrate only the final output, and the “doing” that produced it. The rest is “just thinking”.

It’s as if, observing a birth, they honor only the birth canal, and forget the womb, let alone the egg.

And forget the seed — the code — (that abstract element that breeds with distant possibilities, and actualizes diversity and prevents in-breeding, genetic defects and degeneration).

*

Heraclitus: “Asses prefer straw to gold.”

Some mythical thoughts on the number myriad…

Continue reading Myriad →

Reason is pluralistic logic.

A passage from Ingold’s Being Alive linked into a 20-year-old chain of thought this morning.

While walking side by side, pedestrians can remain aware of and coordinate each other’s gait and pace through peripheral vision, which is especially sensitive to movement, even though they may not ‘see’ one another directly (on the role of peripheral vision in the detection of movement, see Downey 2007). In a recent study of pedestrian behaviour on the streets of the city of Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland, Lee and Ingold (2006) found that side-by-side walking was generally experienced as a particularly companionable form of activity. Even while conversing, as they often did, companions would rarely make direct eye contact, at most inclining their heads only slightly towards one another. Direct face-to-face interaction, by contrast, was considered far less sociable. Crucially, in walking together, companions share virtually the same visual field, whereas in face-to-face interaction each can see what is behind the other’s back, opening up the possibility for deceit and subterfuge. When they sit and face one another, rather than moving along together, conversers appear to be engaged in a contest in which views are batted back and forth rather than shared.

*

First, Rilke. This passage has oscillated between inspiring and bothering me since a friend gave it to me typewritten on a slip of paper at a critical moment in the autumn of 1989. If he hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t be married now, and my two daughters would not exist. Though my assessment of its truth changes constantly, my assessment of its value as a meditation never changes. Here it is:

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.

The essential question is: “merge how?” And also: in what respects and to what degree is the other’s subjectivity an object to us?

I think the answer to these questions actually changes over times, rhythmically and cyclically, and this is what causes my opinion of the passage to oscillate.

Here is where my oscillation has brought me today: 1. To the degree a person wants to merge into one with the other without remainder, that person’s love has not transcended the drive to possess and subsume (or the passive complement, to be possessed and subsumed) and to annihilate otherness (which is to say it is mere lust). 2. And to the degree a co-subjective merging has not occurred, love is still only a possibility.  3. Further, that possibility exists only if there is both lust and resistance-to-lust powerful enough to force dialectic and consequent transcendence. If lust and resistance-to-lust is missing, and co-subjectivity has stagnated, yet the couple still wants to persist in couple-hood, what you get is a not-at-all-wonderful side-by-side arrangement: a modern marriage. It might be assigned official marriage status, but even if it is blessed by the Pope, the Dalai Lama and every other marriage-blessing authority on Earth, practically and actually, it will never be no more than civil union, or an uncivil one.

*

The second passage is C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, a short essay I’ve attacked, refuted, ridiculed, and defeated in my own mind dozens of times, only to have it return a few months or years later, all fresh and compelling — and irritating.

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

One thing about this analogy has always seemed very strange to me. Lewis looks at the beam of light (or rather the reflection of dust in the beam) from the side, and he also steps into the beam and looks straight up into the source of light — but he never steps into the beam and looks along its beam toward the illuminated objects. To my perhaps too-literal eye, this seems to ignore biological design. The eye clearly is not meant to stare into the sun, but to look at what the sun illuminates.

*

There’s more to seeing than looking-at and looking-along. There’s also looking-along-toward and looking-along-with. Lewis entertains only looking right into the glare face-to-face like Rilke’s infatuated gazing lovers.

It seems both Rilke and Lewis could learn something from Ingold’s strolling Scottish companions.

And even with this expansion, we are still inside the little world of optics. There’s far more to life and truth than seeing, metaphorically speaking.

A surprising fact makes you realize your answer was wrong.

An insight makes you realize your question was wrong.

To call an unexpected fact (or worse, an expected fact) an insight is the kind of crude leveling-down that deprives subtler thinkers of distinctions.

An insight is only an insight if it effects a perspectival shift in how one sees a situation.

Of course, now I have to explain that a perspective is not merely an opinion. To call a mere disagreement of opinion a different perspective, is yet another leveling-down of language. A perspective is how one approaches a question — what relevance is seen in what features of a problem — and this is what gives rise to opinions.

One’s perspective is directly related to vision, another term that suffers from leveling-down. A vision is not figments of an executives imagination (whether this figment is an ambition or a goal or an offering of some kind). A vision is that way of seeing that makes fresh imaginative images possible.

And vision drives strategy — which is not merely a plan of action for meeting a goal…

And so on.

*

There’s a pattern in all these levelings-down. They’re the product of minds that conceive the world as an aggregate of objects which one acts upon — and cannot conceive the world as an environing and participatory whole. It’s precisely the distortion fundamentalist religion inflicts on the host religions it infects.

*

Reading Ingold’s Being Alive, I’m excited to see that Ingold made the same observation as I did about transitive and intransitive verbs and what they imply about one’s conceptions of reality.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of verbal reductionism, but I’m considering changing it to transitive reductionism.

“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” — Wittgenstein

“The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.” — Nietzsche

The desire to see the world from above and contain it in outline is attracted to maps.

The desire to orient oneself within the world and engage it in detail is attracted to compasses.

*

When a compass is interpreted as a comprehensive map, religion is inverted into fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is a form of ideology that converts religious symbols of orientation into objective images.

Fundamentalism is the idolatrous form of the religions it claims to epitomize.

*

Fundamentalism is so literal that it does not realize that an image does not have to be a literal image. It is completely possible to make an intellectual image of “God” in one’s mind.

Coherence in the what: System.
Coherence in the how: Fluency.
Coherence in the why: Grace.

*

Complete coherence is as unobtrusively present as reality itself, because it is reality itself.

Incomplete coherence is perceived as a breaking up or darkening.

Complete coherence is blindness void even of darkness.

The emergence of coherence is ex nihilo appearance.

*

Coherence is only perceived as coherence it is when it is changing: when coherence is caught between states of imperceptibility: on one hand being not-there-enough, and on the other, being all-too-there.

*

Coherence tries to preserve itself, at the expense of other coherences.

“Abraham”

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir

*

“Abram” – Jose Gonzales

Barthes: “It would be good to imagine a new linguistic science that would no longer study the origin of words, or etymology, or even their diffusion, or lexicology, but the progress of their solidification, their densification throughout historical discourse; this science would doubtless be subversive, manifesting much more than the historical origin of truth: its rhetorical, languaging nature.”

Did anyone ever develop this science? I want to study it and apply it.

This morning I added this quote of explanation to my wiki’s home page.

The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. His ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses. To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve “the intention of such investigations,” namely, “to plumb the depths of language and thought … by drilling rather than excavating” so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection.

I also connected this:

All socio-ideological analyses agree on the deceptive nature of literature (which deprives them of a certain pertinence): the work is finally always written by a socially disappointed or powerless group, beyond the battle because of its historical, economic, political situation; literature is the expression of this disappointment. These analyses forget (which is only normal, since they are hermeneutics based on the exclusive search for the signified) the formidable underside of writing: bliss: bliss which can erupt, across the centuries, out of certain texts that were nonetheless written to the glory of the dreariest, of the most sinister philosophy.

with this:

From time to time there comes to them — what it will certainly be hardest to concede to them but must be conceded to them nonetheless — a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended. — Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above and beneath it can again clearly be heard.

And I connected this:

Reading a text cited by Stendhal… I find Proust in one minute detail. … Elsewhere, but in the same way, in Flaubert, it is the blossoming apple trees of Normandy which I read according to Proust. I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. I recognize that Proust’s work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony — as Mme de Sevigne’s letters were for the narrator’s grandmother, tales of chivalry for Don Quixote, etc.; this does not mean that I am in any way a Proust “specialist”: Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an “authority,” simply a circular memory.

with this:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem, ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is the every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant.

As I index Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text in my wiki, I’m picking up some really useful words. I’m going to add them to this post as I find them, and wherever possible I’ll link them up to wikipedia:

• Atopy/atopic: Atopy (Greek atopia – placelessness, unclassifiable, of high originality; Socrates has often been called “átopos”) describes the ineffability of things or emotions that are seldom experienced, that are outstanding and that are original in the strict sense. The term depicts a certain quality (of experience) that can be observed within oneself or within others. Application: some of the most important qualities of a design are atopic (have je ne sais quois). The same is true of the qualities of situations and informants in design research (you just have to be there to really get what it’s like). Finally, the most compelling aspect of brands are atopic, and exist despite formal brand identity guidelines and the brand cops who enforce them. But, because business is so objective, explicit and verbal, and because the majority of interactions in the business world are mediated entirely by explicit language and numbers, especially across hierarchical strata in an organization, the atopic realities that make the difference between “eh” and “awesome” are lost, strained out or dismissed).
• Sociolect: In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language (a dialect) associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc. Application: one of the major obstacles to inter-disciplinary collaboration is difference in sociolects, which at best introduce a learning curve, and at worst constitute professional shibboleths. Also, an organization’s sociolect sometimes differs from that of its customers — which, again, at best interferes with understanding, but at worse marks company and customer as belonging to two different worlds of meaning, which alienates.
• I wish I had a third. A two-item list is really lame. This line is here solely to create the illusion that there are three items in this two-item list.

I was on the verge of writing Barthes off forever, then I hit a couple of good parts.

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.

Then, later:

On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye which an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) describes: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

Apparently Arab scholars, when speaking of the text, use this admirable expression: the certain body. What body? We have several of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science sees or discusses: this is the text of grammarians, critics, commentators, philologists (the pheno-text). But we also have a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from the first body: it is another contour, another nomination; thus with the text: it is no more than the open list of the fires of language (those living fires, intermittent lights, wandering features strewn in the text like seeds and which for us advantageously replace the “semina aeternitatis,” the “zopyra,” the common notions, the fundamental assumptions of ancient philosophy). Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need. The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

I think this one is final:

I’ve got a whole mini-slide show that goes with it, which I plan to develop into a presentation on verbal (or factual or objective or explicit?) reductionism.