Category Archives: Philosophy
Closer and further
Charles Sanders Peirce:
We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …
A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
Nietzsche:
The two principles of the new life. —
First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.
Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.
Latour:
Religion does not even try… to reach anything beyond, but to represent the presence of that which is called in a certain technical and ritual idiom the “Word incarnate” — that is to say again that it is here, alive, and not dead over there far away. It does not try to designate something, but to speak from a new state that it generates by its ways of talking, its manner of speech. Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blase, bored.
Conversely, science has nothing to do with the visible, the direct, the immediate, the tangible, the lived world of common sense, of sturdy “matters of fact.” Quite the opposite, as I have shown many times, it builds extraordinarily long, complicated, mediated, indirect, sophisticated paths so as to reach the worlds… that are invisible because they are too small, too far, too powerful, too big, too odd, too surprising, too counterintuitive, through concatenations of layered instruments, calculations, models.
Misusing esoteric symbols
I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.
Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.
When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.
But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.
To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.
All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.
Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.
Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.
The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”
In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.
And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.
Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.
Toward a Theory of General Multistability
This article builds on two previous articles, “The Click” and “The Philosophical Click”. It also builds on my murmuration articles — my “murmurata”.
Any click is the rapid change of stability in an order, from one stable state to another. It is almost as if stability under stress builds up static energy that discharges itself in an instant of recrystallized stability.
There are many kinds of multistable orders, each with its own kind of click.
The gestaltists observed perceptual multistabilities. The phenomenologists and hermeneutic philosophers (I believe) observed conceptual multistabilities, which form not only our understandings but our spontaneous interpretations of whatever we encounter. The postphenomenologists focused on equipment-mediated multistabilities. Depth psychologists observed psychological multistabilities, and called them complexes. I do not know if ethnomethodologists speak of multistabilities, but they should. (Socially, we act within the rules of an ethos to make sense to others and to understand the actions of others — and we navigate the hazards of multistability to attempt to avoid misunderstanding or being misunderstood. We can take (perceive, conceive) any given action “the wrong way”, a way other than intended.) Then there is the world of cybernetics and systems theory. Adaptive systems have responsive multistabilization abilities. They are, what Koestler called holons, whole-parts existing and subsisting within a holarchy.
All these multistabilities are crucially important to designers. Designers work with (and often against) multistabilities. We try to stabilize systems of participation, where a person spontaneously takes the system as given (as intended) and responds in a way that supports that system. The response is often — and ideally — not explicitly thought about. Often people barely notice their interpretations and responses. They respond with natural instinct or second-natural habit.
Our various options for participating in social systems can be viewed as practical multistability. We can work support systems as they exist currently by cooperating and contributing to their stability. Or we can undermine systems by destabilizing them, perhaps in order to dissolve them and reconstitute them in a new stable order.
Radical pluralists cultivate awareness of all the kinds and possibilities of multistability. Whatever seems to us a given truth is always a function of what we can take (-ceive), and what we can take — further constrained by what we will take — is a matter of the myriad stabilities surrounding us and within us.
On the subject of subjects
- Never forget the etymology of the word “data”. Data is that which is given. And what can be given is limited by what we can — and will — receive.
- When a person says “objectively true” when what they really mean is “absolutely true”, this is data for those with ears to hear what it means.
- A personal subject and an academic subject is a subject in precisely the same sense.
Unpleasant left-liberal musings
Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?
The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.
No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.
That is how things actually go down.
Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.
This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.
If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.
Rambling on about self-formation
When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.
The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.
Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.
We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)
Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.
I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)
These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.
Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.
Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.
- Extra-extra-flaky note: For me, super-personal consciousness (also known as egregores) are not a matter of speculation, but is, in fact, a given feature of reality, as manifestly real as gravity.
And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.
This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.
I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.
The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?
Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.
Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.
Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.
The convection current of history, redux
When we say “I don’t understand,” that can be a confession: “I am, so far, still unable to understand.” Or it can be an assertion “I don’t understand because it is nonsense.”
If we are powerful, we get to decide which way to say it. Are we feeling charitable today? Let’s dialogue and be good listeners. Or is the master feeling impatient and disinclined to suffer fools? We call it like we see it. We scoff at it. Or we angrily send it away. It is entirely our choice. We cannot even imagine a world where it is not we, but someone else, who decides what gets heard or dismissed.
And we have forgotten what it is like to be on the other side of this dynamic.
If we are weak and vulnerable, the decision is far less discretionary. Our leaders might be stupid and boorish or even crazy — but if we don’t get inside their heads and figure out how they see the world, we will be unable to make persuasive appeals to them, or anticipate their next action. And we cannot appear presumptuous, which means to believe our judgment is equal to that of theirs. We must act out their truth to their satisfaction, or suffer consequences. And we cannot rely on public support for our truth. We must learn to make sense of the world to ourselves. The powerful can take shelter in consensus. Everyone knows.
In this way, the weak get smarter, more insightful, more resourceful, and grow stronger, and the strong get more and more complacent and stupid and grow vulnerable.
–x–
–o–
I can’t understand how anyone could think that.”
“I can’t understand how this nonsense is so persuasive to so many people.”
“I don’t understand how I lost power.”
“I don’t get to decide everything, anymore? I must do the persuading?”
“Perhaps there is something I was averse to understanding, and refused to notice and consider.”
“Oh! I understand now.”
“Here is what we must do to change this situation.”
*
Four pluralisms
I’ve encountered at least four pluralisms in the past week.
The first is an old-school postmodern pluralism. In this kind of pluralism each person has their own truth, and they don’t have to reconcile it with anyone else’s. They might not even be able to.
The second pluralism is a typological one. In this kind of pluralism there is a schema of types, each with its own valid way of understanding the world. But behind this pluralism is an implicit monism. A typological pluralist will be quite comfortable with a plurality of truths within their system, but they are often averse to viewing their own typology as a product of one of a plurality of truths. The typology itself is privileged as somehow transcending the pluralistic order. It functions almost like a metaphysical foundation for the typology. Personality typologies like Jungian / Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are psychological examples of this form of pluralism, and progressivist identitarianism is a political example.
The third pluralism is one that seeks to situate itself as an equal in a plurality of views. It aspires to view the world as constituted of I-points, each with its own truth, all of which are the center of an otherwise centerless reality. It differs from the first pluralism in that it wishes to understand other truths besides its own. It differs from the second pluralism in that it is aware that its own way of understanding other truths (for example, in a typology) is a feature of its own truth that does not transcend itself, but rather is intrinsic to it. Consequently, a belief that one’s typology has a metaphysical reality that transcends one’s own truth and self is a covert self-privileging. A well-meaning pluralist can renounce one’s identity all day, but if one does this while exalting one’s identity schema and theory, this is only a trick for exalting one’s own truth over that of others. The third pluralism sees this clearly, where the second pluralist remains trapped in unconscious meta-absolutism.
The fourth pluralist builds on the third pluralism and tries to learn from other perspectives in order to create a less naive version of what the second pluralism has, namely, a way to conceptualize pluralistic difference. The fourth pluralist attempts to maintain awareness that however persuasive their schematic conceptualization might be to them, it remains their truth, and that this truth can and should continue evolve with learning. But it tries to accommodate more and more difference, which includes more and more divergent accounts of difference. This fourth kind of pluralist, for example won’t argue over which personality typology is more true, but instead tries to understand what each typology includes and excludes, and what this pattern of inclusions and exclusions allows it to do. It doesn’t deny the relative reality of social or political identities, but it looks at what this way of viewing social and political situations reveals and conceals. And it does all these things tentatively.
Content-container distinction
A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”
It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:
Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.
But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.
The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.
Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.
If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.
One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.
Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.
Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.
What is a container? An object which contains content? Yes. A wineskin, for example, is a container for wine. But a container may also be a subject — one who contains.
A container is a subject who does the containing of some form of objective content.
J’accuse
I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.
I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.
Allow me to explain.
The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.
The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.
They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.
Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.
But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.
And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.
No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.
So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?
Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.
And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.
And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.
And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.
During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.
And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.
Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.
And this is why Israel must exist.
And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.
So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.
Mutuality, again
I will say this again, because it is relevant to at least three imploding relationships I am currently witnessing:
When a relationship lacks mutuality, it cannot be repaired in any normal mutual way, nor can it be destroyed by mutual consent.
Trying to reach an agreement with someone with an inert understanding, who lacks motivation to seek the validity of alternative understandings is futile — and the pursuit of mutuality where mutuality is impossible is a participation in the brokenness.
Someone who refuses to listen to what you have to say, will listen even less to what you have to say about their refusal to listen.
It doesn’t matter why they won’t listen. They might believe they already know. They might believe they have a right to not hear you. They might think you are so deluded or stupid that their understanding must replace yours. They might think you are consciously or unconsciously motivated by wicked motivations, called bias or demons based on whether they prefer to express the same concept in secular or religious jargon. They might think they will be harmed by listening. They might use emotion or moral outbursts to make communication impossible. But in all likelihood they’ll just find ways to perpetually delay conversing. They’re very, very busy. An urgent matter requires their attention,right now,at this decisive moment.
Whether they cannot listen or simply will not does not matter. Listening will never happen.
I’ve learned to stop trying.
I learned it with individuals. Now they are no longer my friends.
I am learning to do it with collectivities. Ideologies whose members to refuse to hear dissenting views lose their rights to reason.
I can’t find an old post, so I’ll rewrite it:
A: There is a problem with our friendship.
B: I disagree.
A: And that is the problem.
And while I am repeating myself:
Ethics are the rules of participation in an ethos.
Mutuality is for the mutual.
Peace requires mutual commitment to peace.
That so few people understand this is profoundly telling.
Praxis? — or apology?
Instinctively I’ve always designed a particular way. I have always looked for a clear and simple inspiration to animate my design work and to invest whatever artifact I design with life. My philosophy only articulates my intuitive practice. My philosophy is probably useful only for others who already work in an intuitive way similar to how I work and who need concepts, reasons and language to explain and justify it. My philosophy won’t enable anyone to design any differently than they normally design.
(I realized I’ve lapsed into believing that my philosophy guides or shapes my practice. It doesn’t. Philosophy is primarily my defense against interference.)
Fromsights
We call them “insights”, but we should call them fromsights.
Totality : Infinity ::
Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.
Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.
Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.
Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.
Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.
Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.
Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.
Etiquette is not morality
I just replied to Matthew Yglesias’s substack article, “Defund the Language Police”:
The last decade has confused etiquette with morality.
This does not mean that etiquette is unimportant, but it does mean that it is neither all-important nor absolute.
Know thyselves
“Know thyself,” Apollo commands.
Okay. But how? And which “thyself”? — for there is more than one. Two roads diverge before us: the path of self-consciousness and the path of self-awareness
Most take the path of self-consciousness, which tries to know the self objectively. One’s self is taken as an object of knowledge. We call it “reflecting on ourselves”. We look into the mirror, and we are absorbed in the image we see there. We identify with it.
But we can also take the path of self-awareness, and take ourselves as subject, the subjectivity to whom objective data is given, including our objective third-person self.
But self-awareness includes an insight that we are given only what we know how to take, and that changing our way of taking can change our givens.
We can experiment with our taking (our receptivity) and see how observing from various angles or focusing on various aspects changes our objectivity. Or we can experiment with our conceptivity by asking different questions about what seems objectively true to us. Or we can experiment with our selfhood by participating in new realities, physical and/or otherwise.
What we take “self” to mean makes all the difference in who we are, and who we may become.
Etymological cheat sheet:
- Conceive = together-take
- Perceive = thoroughly-take
- Receive = back-take
- Data = given
Untried ideas
The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.
The problem of idle thought has nothing at all to do with virtues of industriousness or vices of laziness. The problem with idle thought is that such thoughts are not only untried and likely untrue, but that a great many of them are untriable and cannot even be said to be truth or false, because they are nonsense. They create what Richard Rorty called “theoretical hallucinations”.
This invites a comparison with drugs. We can use drugs for therapeutic purposes. We can also use them ritualistically. And we can use them experimentally. But all too easily what begins with therapeutic, ritual or experimental use lapses into mere recreational use, and from there to recreational abuse and addiction.
People who have zero occasion to put thoughts they consume or think up to practical trial — except to sell or resell them to other, equally idle thought consumers — can become a lot like recreational drug abusers, who maybe deal on the side to fund their all-consuming hobby. The drugs or ideas are for nothing but themselves. A life organized around procurement, consumption and traffic of such intoxicants begins to serve nothing but perpetual intoxication.
Rereading Richard Rorty, I’m realizing I am in a similar situation as when I read Christian scripture. The ideas are amazing and meant to be employed in practice.
But many of the most fervent fans of both of these luminaries just like feeling intoxicated by the ideas. They use them recreationally, but never put them to work in the real world. They’ll memorize words and quote them chapter and verse, but the ideas are their play toys, not their life equipment.
Back in 2016, the smarter regions of the proggosphere lost their collective minds over the uncanny prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. They neatly carved this quote out of its context.
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. …members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
What is rarely included was even more insightful prescient explanations of how a thoroughly decadent, idle and alienated cultural left would cause this to happen.
If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party — namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals — Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me.
The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere — to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.
Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated — and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.
The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements.
And then Rorty continues on.
These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”
In its Foucauldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot “… confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.” Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.
The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued… that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman’s civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.
Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists-the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the daylit cheerfulness ofWhitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete-for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.
If you buy into this dark, fundamentalist deformation of progressive politics (which I call “progressivism”, similar to “Islamism” and “Christianism” as names for fundamentalist deformations of the religions they pervert) it probably makes perfect sense to you that the occult forces of racism must be coercively exorcised from every institution via “antiracism training”. Doing so might not even seem to be a political act, but a purely ethical one.
One Rortyist (a Rortian can be fundamentalist, too!) appealed to history. His claim was that because the historical fact of racism is indisputable, that the need to respond to this fact is, by extension, also indisputable. So, because the effects of history continue on to the present (which is entirely plausible), all the disparities progressivists observe and compulsively measure can be attributed to the effects of this history (less plausible), that this effect is concentrated primarily in the institutions where the disparities are seen (institutional racism, which is the furthest thing from indisputable), that progressivists have an effective remedy for this problem (in the form of “antiracist” harassment of employees, which is flat implausible) and that therefore employers have a moral right to use their power to subject employees to cultural political harassment. All this is contrary to liberalism and to Rorty’s ideals, in much the same way that political Christianism is directly contrary to Jesus’s teachings and example.
But back to the original point I was making: “The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.”
What I am saying here is an old thought I’ve been hammering again and again.
John Dewey called his brand of Pragmatism “instrumentalism”. According to instrumentalism, we should understand ideas not primarily as representations of reality, but as tools for responding to reality. A idea that helps us respond effectively in a wide variety of practical challenges can be called true. One that malfunctions can be called false.
I’ve called my praxis, “design instrumentalism“. I think we should evaluate our ideas exactly as designers evaluate their outputs: by Liz Sander’s brilliant framework of useful, usable and desirable. An idea that gives us a feeling of clarity and reinforces our sense of moral rightness, but which cannot be applied to practical problems lacks usefulness, and in all likelihood, usability beyond clear talk.
Such appealing but impractical theories are at best, art.
Art is only useful when we take it for what it is — something we experience but do not take literally.
Art that is taken literally and confused with reality is delusional or even psychotic.
The anti-bias bias
It is a certain kind of person who is preoccupied with cognitive bias.
It is a kind of person who seems to have a taste for explicit, formal procedures. It is a kind of person who seems to operate via verbal self-instruction. It is a kind of person who always asks for very detailed clarifications on how things ought to be done, and needs every contingency to be planned out. It is the kind of person who shows up to a new job expecting documentation on how everything ought to be done. This kind of person’s eyes light up when “cognitive bias” is mentioned. (Or “motivated reasoning” or “implicit bias” or “institutional racism”, etc. They are all variations on false consciousness claims. They are always pointed outward at objects of critique, and never back at the ideological subject making them.)
To such people, safeguards against bias are no burden, or maybe even a support. It seems that if formalized anti-bias practices were not available, they would seek some other formalized practice. The question for them is whether the explicit practice we adopt and use has anti-bias features or not.
But some people have a very different relationship to practice. They rely more on intuition, and only occasionally verbally work some problem or another out. Much of what they know is tacit know-how, and muck of their understanding comes to be known only response to concrete situations. If, before engaging a problem, you ask them what they plan to do, they struggle to verbalize it, because, unlike the self-instructors, they don’t code their actions in words before executing them. If you ask them after the fact why they did one action rather than another, they will have to ask themselves the same question.
Yet, these intuitive practitioners are often highly effective at their craft and in solving problems, especially novel problems. Further, they are often pioneers in their fields, and in fact were behind the codification of the very practices executed by the self-instructors.
An intuitive practitioner, after successfully solving a problem, reflects on what they were doing, and tries to explicate principles that intuitively guided them. They move back and forth between practical intuitive interaction with their materials and theoretical formulations of the practice. They tack back and forth between explication of implicit purpose in their own practice, and seeing how well those explications work in guiding practice. Gradually, praxis develops.
But the best practitioners still act intuitively in the moment. If asked why they do what they do, they’ll provide an explanation that conforms closely to their intuitive responses, but this account should not be confused with the explanations given by the verbal self-instructors, which is exposing the code they run when executing an action.
But verbal self-instructor do have one huge advantage over intuitive practitioners. If intuitive practitioners are loaded with self-instructing code and told to execute that code, they lose all grace. They become awkward robots, even more artificial than the self-instructors.
In a world where all people are required to verbalize everything, where intuition and tacit know-how are denied the status of knowing, where one is only regarded as an expert when they can list their source-code on demand, where people are given instructions to execute and templates to format their output, the verbal self-instructors reign supreme.
This is, I believe, why verbal self-instructor’s instinctively love the requirement to neutralize bias. It is why they love bureaucratic rigor. It is why they want everything proceduralized. They can adopt these anti-bias and standardized practices without any impediment, but it encumbers intuitive and reflective practitioners and destroys their ability to — let’s just say it outright — to compete against them.
It tilts the playing field against intuitive and reflective practitioners, so the self-instructors can flourish and dominate.
In the past, I’ve complained about anti-bias meta-bias — the bias in what we regard as biased, versus the biases we neglect to notice at all, versus the biases we regard as virtuous, that is our ethical convictions. But there is also a deeper and worse bias prevalent among the verbal and intuitively-challenged — a procedural, rather than substantive bias — to see intuitive judgment, action and unsupervised perception as inherently more vulnerable to bias than formally codified policies and processes. So the starkest prejudices at all, both substantive and procedural, are coded into institutions, to counter what appear to be biases to the highly-biased minds who implement, support and champion them.
Reformist revolution?
In the last week something inspiring has come into clear view for me.
It all started when Susan complained to me that she has a dozen urgent projects to do, which all interconnect and play a part in a single overwhelming goal she wants to reach. All the projects need to unfold simultaneously. I suggested she think in terms suggested by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country:
…Dissent, and the group of writers around it, felt able to dispense with membership in a movement. They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of campaigns. By “campaign, ” I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called “the passion of the infinite.” They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called “feeling thought.”
Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves. Campaigns for such goals as the unionization of migrant farm workers, or the overthrow (by votes or by force) of a corrupt government, or socialized medicine, or legal recognition of gay marriage can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements levy contributions from each of these areas of culture. They are needed to provide a larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s “new being in Christ” or Mao’s “new socialist man.” Movement politics, the sort which held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics which Howe came to know all too well in the Thirties, and was doubtful about when it was reinvented in the Sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born.
As I re-read this passage, it brought to mind a beautiful essay from Bruno Latour, called “A Cautious Prometheus”. It begins by describing five characteristics of design, and draws parallels between the evolution of design and Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) re-understanding of scientific truth.
…what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far-fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense.
The five characteristics of design he listed can be summarized as:
- Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than a foundational acts of creation.
- Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft, and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
- Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism, and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
- Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
- Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.
You should read the essay yourself, but I am summarizing these five characteristics of design to provide context for this inspiring passage:
Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.
At the risk of undermining Rorty’s advocacy of campaigns (aka social design projects), I’d like to suggest that energetic embrace of designerly reform could be revolutionary.
If a critical mass of people got it in their heads that progress is not measured by proximity to perfection, but rather by how many improvements we can make to the world around us, and took up the tools of design we could improve the world considerably, find meaning in doing so, and because design seeks alignment and collaboration, do so more democratically and inclusively. This way of working generates alignment and solidarity, something sorely lacking today. …and something even more lacking: inspiration.