Category Archives: Philosophy

Of course, but maybe

Ethics, Politics

“I’m against violence…” “I do not condone murder…” “Killing is unacceptable…”

…But maybe…

“…he started a much-needed public conversation.” “…he expressed an anger we all share.” “…he has put sociopath executives on notice.”

In other words, he did a bad thing, but maybe he also did some good.

How much good?

So much good that maybe we won’t regret the murder? So much good that maybe the murder was justified? So much good that maybe the murderer was, in fact, a hero?

And how bad was the murder, really?

Is it really so bad to murder an alleged murderer? How many death did this man cause? Is the world a worse place with one less sociopathic zillionaire?

I met a group of friends for dinner last night. The question of Brian Thompson’s murder came up.

I listened to everyone washed their hands with “of course…” before bloodying them with “but maybe…”

I protested the but-maybes. I insisted that we decouple the condemnation of murder from the obvious need for healthcare reform.

It was assumed that my protest was a protest against murder, and, being both tired and outnumbered, I lacked the clarity at that moment to respond.

Driving home I realized that my problem is not with murder or with violence.

If Brian Thompson had been charged, tried and found guilty of 40,000 deaths and sent to the electric chair, I would not have the reaction I’m having. I’d be saying something like “of course we should never celebrate an execution, but maybe….” And the same will go for whatever punishment Brian Thompson’s murderer receives.

My problem is that one man — an elite among elites, posturing as a victimized marginal figure — extralegally appointed himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. And my even bigger problem is that a great many fellow-elites, who share his outlook, vaguely approve of his vigilanteism, because he is dispensing justice as they see it.

The outlook goes like this: “This system is hopelessly corrupt. The powerful are beyond the reach of justice. Maybe we are past the point of getting justice any other way.”…

…”So maybe… it would be a good thing if CEOs feared for their lives when they do ?harmful things to the public.”

A few points:

1) This is literally advocating terrorism. Terrorism is use fear as a political instrument.

2) What the public perceives as harmful is very easily manipulated through propaganda. The public has believed a great many incorrect things, even in the recent past.

3) Half of this country — albeit a less elite and privileged half — holds completely different theories of corruption. They believe that woke radicals dominate our institutions, including education, media, finance and technology, and that the system is hopelessly rigged to give woke radicals more and more power to do horrible things like persecuting white people, destroying religion and public decency and transing all the kids, and so on. The conspiracy theorist fringe of the right believes even wilder stuff. There’s this universal principle of morality known as the Golden Rule. How do we feel about them sitting around a table saying “Of course, thou shalt not kill, but maybe…”

The problem as I see it is that we have all become so goddamn sure that we are so goddamn smart and well-informed and well-intentioned and self-aware that while of course I believe in liberal democracy, maybe… just maybe, the country would be better off if people like me had dictatorial power.

That is my problem.

Our liberal-democratic institutions are designed to make indulgence in our false omniscience impossible. When they work correctly, they force us to take one another seriously as persons. We must win public support for our preferred leaders and their policies through persuasion. We must win customers by offering them better value. We must make our case before a jury of our peers.

These experiences sometimes show us the limits of our omniscience. We come away less omniscient, but much wiser.

That wisdom advises reforming our institutions when they stop working correctly. It advises against giving up on institutions and going radical, illiberal and antidemocratic. This is especially true when we convince ourselves that only antidemocratic illiberal action can save “our” liberal democracy.

I had a friend who was a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. I found his worldview horrifying. The horror had less to do with the falseness of the beliefs than it did the pragmatic consequences of those beliefs: if he truly believed what he professed, he was obligated to respond violently.

My QAnon theorist had no evil intentions. He had no selfish ambitions. He just wanted to protect us from others with evil intentions.

When leftists talk about conservatives, are they really that much different? They have fancier resumes, more reputable authorities underwriting their convictions and more respectable coercive tools backing their wills, but the logic is the same. Conservatives don’t really mean what they say. They are trying to trick you. If you listen to their arguments and find some of them persuasive, you are a sucker. They are motivated solely by greed, but we are motivated only by the public good. Which is why we must fight the greedy, lying people with ruthlessness. We must fight them with every economic and social tool at our disposal. Maybe violence, if it comes down to it.

We learn more about a person by listening to what they have to say about their enemies than from what they say about themselves.

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Actant systems

ANT, Design, Etymology

Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.

One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!

Dark glass

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

Twenty years ago when I was first reading Nietzsche, fully on fire and burning to pure ash, I became convinced that Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian of some weird variety. The belief lacked evidentiary foundation. Not only could it not be proved, but proving it seemed somehow wrong.

The belief was rooted in hermeneutic experience: having sacrificed my old truth at the altar of interrogation, a new kind of truth could emerge. That truth made the clearest and most vital sense of the Gospels. Please notice — it was not only a new truth, a new “belief system”, a new set of opinions on what was and wasn’t true, good or existent. It was a new kind of truth and entirely different way to approach truth. This new kind of truth was not a set of facts to look at and to accept or reject. Rather, this was a truth to be looked through, which revealed a new world of givens — and that new given world was infinitely preferable to the old one.

Nietzsche’s comments on Christianity, on Christians, Jews, Jesus, Saul/Paul and his use of polyvalently charged appellations — like “the founder of Christianity” — make his attitude toward the Judeo-Christian tradition highly… multistable. Depending on the tone of our reading and the care we take in considering everything Nietzsche might have meant in each of his statements, we could take his utterances as a whole to be radically atheistic or passionately (but covertly) evangelical. Or something else entirely.

When we look through a dark glass what we see is a matter of focus.

We can focus into the dark glass and see what images the glass reflects, which includes the image of our own selves as objects, and all the objects that lie behind and around ourselves. Our human-all-too-human eyes are magnetically drawn toward our self-image. “There’s me!”

Or we can focus through the glass to see what images the glass transmits — the objects on the other side of the glass.

If we never reflect on focus and just take the image we see at face value, we naturally assume we have seen what there is to see in the glass. We look into it and never look through it, or we look through it and never look into it, and, consequently never understand the full reality of the dark glass, which is, whether we look into it or through it, always involved — unseen — in the act of seeing.

Book Idea: Designing Hat

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ideas, Politics, Works

I have an idea for a book I will never write. I may just steal Borges’s beautiful move: writing a short story that is a review of a nonexistent book, outlining its key ideas. Or maybe I’ll add a new meta-level of laziness and just outline the Borgesian short story I will never write.

This never-to-be-written short story will be a fictional review of the never-to-be-written book Designing Hat, which is, of course, an allusion to DeBono’s actually-written pop-biz classic Six Thinking Hats. In this book DeBono advises strategic hat changes to address various situations. My book, however recommends putting on your one designing hat and never taking it off whenever approaching any problem involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything.

This single move, I’ll argue, can clear up all kinds of hellish nonsense we all detest. It won’t solve everything — no method can — but it can dramatically improve our chances of making real progress. In the process, it can reduce everyday hostility and nihilism while increasing solidarity and goodwill.

In the grand tradition of inflating the importance of design, I will insist that design thinking is effective far beyond its usual applications. Since almost everything we do is a variation on “problems involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything”, the advice is more or less to superglue your designing hat onto your head.

Political problems, from the pettiest household squabbles to international crises, should be addressed as design problems. Even if we are not hands-on participants in shaping domestic or foreign policy, our conversations about these issues will improve if we approach them in a designerly manner. And meetings, too… Ninety-five percent of meetings could be vastly improved if approached as design collaborations.

The review will offer a succinct summary of each chapter, showing how adopting designerly attitudes and practices makes everything better:

  • Segment people in reference to a clear purpose
  • Go to the reality you want to change and observe it for yourself
  • Ask people to teach you about their lives
  • Fall in love with problems, not solutions (I think Marty Cagan coined this?)
  • Win alignment; never resort to coercion
  • Do not argue if you can prototype and test
  • Do not debate; compare options
  • Make smart tradeoffs

There are definitely more chapters, and I’ll keep adding them as they occur to me. Please comment if you have ideas for chapters.

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

Design, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).

Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.

I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.

The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!

I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.

I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.

(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull the plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize and psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say. I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas, and they will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)

The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.

I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effect both religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.

Philosophical antecedents

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Franz Rosenzweig’s description of the peculiarities of philosophical reading reads familiar and true:

The reader has a particularly high regard for the first pages of philosophical books. He believes they are the basis for all that follows. Consequently he also thinks that in order to have refuted the whole, it’s enough to refute these pages. Hence the immense interest in Kant’s teaching of space and time, in the form in which he developed it at the beginning of the Critique. Hence the comical attempts to “refute” Hegel by refuting the first triad of his Logic, and Spinoza by refuting his definitions. And hence the helplessness of the general reader in the face of philosophical books. He thinks they must be “especially logical,” and understands by this the dependence of every succeeding sentence on every preceding one; so that when the famous one stone is pulled out, as a consequence “the whole collapses.” In truth, this is nowhere less the case than in philosophical books. Here a sentence does not follow from the preceding one, but more likely from the one following. Whoever has not understood a sentence or a paragraph is little helped if, in the conscientious belief that he must not leave anything behind that is not understood, he reads it perchance again and again or even starts over again. Philosophical books deny themselves such a methodical ancien régime-strategy, which thinks it may not leave behind any fortification without having conquered it. They want to be conquered napoleonically, in a bold attack on the enemy’s central force, upon the conquest of which the small outlying fortifications will fall automatically. Thus, whoever does not understand something can most assuredly expect enlightenment if he courageously goes on reading. The reason why this rule is difficult for the beginner, and, as the cases cited above show, also for many a nonbeginner to accept, lies in the fact that thinking and writing are not the same. In thinking, one stroke really strikes a thousand connections. In writing, these thousand must be artfully and cleanly arranged on the string of thousands of lines. As Schopenhauer said, his entire book wants to impart only a single thought which, however, he could not impart more briefly than in the entire book Thus, if a philosophical book is worth reading at all, it is certainly so only when one either does not understand its beginning or at the very least misunderstands it. For otherwise the thought that it imparts is scarcely worth re-considering, since one evidently already has it, if one knows right at the beginning of its exposition “where it is leading up to.” All this is valid only for books; only they can be written and read without any consideration for the passing of time. Speaking and hearing follow other laws. Of course, only real speaking and hearing, not the kind that derogates itself a “lecture” and during which the hearer must forget that he has a mouth and becomes at best a writing hand. But, at any rate, for books it is so.

Just where that decisive battle of understanding is fought, where the whole can be seen at a glance, cannot be said in advance; in all probability already before the last page, but hardly before the middle of the book; and surely not by two readers at precisely the same point. At least when they are readers who read on their own and not readers who, because of their learning, already know before the first word what is written in a book, and because of their ignorance do not know it even after the last one. In respect to older books, the last-mentioned readers’ virtues are most often found in two sorts of people, professors and students; in respect to newer ones they tend to be found in one and the same person.

Exnihilist Manifesto

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.

I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.

What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.

It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.

But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.

In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.

The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.

We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.

Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.

If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.

If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.

If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.

If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.

If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.

If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.

If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.

If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.

Nothingness is dreadful.

It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.

Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.

If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.

It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.

How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?

The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.

Imagined murmurations

Philosophy

Imagine a murmuration of starlings alighting upon a tree. As they land, they converge on the tree, saturate its branches and shape themselves to the tree itself. This would be an intuitive murmuration.

Imagine this flock of starlings collectively recalling the tree within their flock. They sing to one another of their positions, relative to one another. They try to reproduce those same spatial relations in mid-air deep in the sky. And for a moment they collect themselves — re-collect themselves — into the form of that tree. This would be a remembered murmuration.

Imagine this flock of starlings collectively recalling all the various trees they’ve alighted upon. There is a way this alighting goes, despite the differences between one unique tree and another. It is different to land in trees than to land on rocks or roofs. A discipline is distributed throughout their flock, a discipline that knows landing in trees. This would be a practical murmuration.

Could this flock make use of its practical tree-alighting murmuration to collect themselves to form novel trees in the sky? This would be an imaginative murmuration.

Is there a limit to this imaginative murmurating? When is a formation no longer a tree, but a rock-form or roof form? When is the flock practicing, in its mid-air performance, alighting on a roof or rock, rather than alighting on a tree. This would be an essential murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings disciplined for simplicity, flying in geometric formation, according to strict rules of relation. This would be logical murmuration.

Imagine flocks of starlings flying out its simple logical murmurations in ever more elaborate permutations. It would form and reform itself according to its simple rules, ramifying limitlessly. This would be mathematical murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who aspired to recreate essential tree forms, essential rocks forms, essential roof forms, using only logical and mathematical murmurations. This would be scientific murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who attempted to use only its scientific murmurations for alighting in trees. Maybe it would fudge its landings to accommodate the essential noise of real trees. But iterative attempts to land with increasing precision reduce this noise to near silence. This would be technical murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who never once alighted on anything. The flock learned to reproduce the technical murmurations of other flocks. It knows of tree, rocks and roofs by collecting itself into the technical murmurations for which it has been carefully trained. It doesn’t know what it is to alight on a tree, but it can collect itself into a technical murmuration “about” a tree. This would be alienated murmuration.

Our souls are murmurations of intuitive I-points. Each intuitive I-point knows a bit of the world around it. Each I-points knows some of its fellow intuitive I-points. In Kabbalah, they are known as divine sparks.

Our faiths are the murmuration movements we can perform — defined against those movements we cannot. Some faiths can alight on trees. Some cannot. Some faiths can imagine novel trees, and discern trees from rocks. Some cannot. Some can fly in technical formation. Some can only fly in technical formation. Our faith limits what we can intuit, conceive, recollect or imagine. I call these formation capacities enceptions.

A soul can be blown apart by strong winds.

Gut liberalism

Philosophy, Politics

It has been obvious to me for a while that Generation X was the last generation to be inculcated with liberal values. And by “inculcated, I do not mean only that we were taught to affirm the truth and correctness of a set of explicit liberal principles. We were trained to perform mental and social liberal acts. Perhaps it would be better to say that we were initiated into a liberal praxis. We are the last to understand liberalism from within.

What do I mean by praxis? Praxis is a reinforcing feedback relationship between theory and practice. Theory guides practice. Practice informs theory. The theory-guided practice informs theory. The practice-informed theory guides practice. Behind this loop, a set of intuitions develops, which move and shape perceptions, conceptions and responses. This intuitive grounding gives practice a reflective lucidity and theory applicability and effectiveness, and both a spontaneous naturalness. Praxis creates a tacit common sense among thinking and doing (and sometimes feeling). In other words, through praxis we develop a faith.

Until a faith develops behind praxis, the theories are only known about. And the actions are executed via memorized mental instructions. The practice is theoretically explained by reciting memorized concepts. The words and actions are stiff and unnatural.

After a faith develops behind praxis the words and actions are animated by something spontaneous and masterful, and they have a grace and naturalness. A person with faith-grounded praxis clearly “knows what they’re doing.” Their hands and bodies act with intelligence. And their minds are deferential. The mind knows it plays a leadership role, but must share credit with the whole being.

The point I am trying to make is that a great many young people I attempt to discuss politics with have been initiated into an illiberal praxis backed by an illiberal faith. They believe what they have been taught to believe about liberalism, from the understanding of an illiberal faith that rules out solidarity and understanding among unique persons, and accepts only shared interests among members of identities. They have been taught criticisms against liberalism and have accepted them uncritically, and are therefore closed to liberalism as a praxis, because it has been rejected as a theory. And against all evidence, they have been taught to interpret their own internalized nihilism, despair and dissatisfaction as caused by liberalism (and capitalism!), when, in fact, this unhappiness is a symptom of their own illiberal faith.

This seems true across the left-right spectrum. Young right-wing post-liberal youth are as smugly contemptuous of liberalism as the “left”-wing progressivists. They each see themselves as confronting an ideological other from the most diametrically-opposing position possible — as utterly opposite as Bolsheviks and Nazis.

From the perspective of this political Flatland, they cannot conceive how they are opposed from outside by something their omniscience cannot conceive, submerged in oblivion, a nothing from nowhere.

The sun is setting on our liberal-democracy. This is not because our institutions have eroded, or because one bad side is ruining everything. It is because we are running out of citizens who know how to participate in liberal-democracy. Liberalism must be inculcated in the young through education, but instead of educating our children, we stashed our children in childcare facilities where they were pacified for convenient management, while their parents dedicated themselves to what matters most in life: their career paths to retirement. The tradition has been broken, and now it is decaying, and the more people celebrate this fact, the faster we rot.

Changes of faith

Philosophy

In metanoia, what really happens? So much of it transpires beyond anything we can communicate. It isn’t ineffable. We can say all kinds of things about it. The problem is with being heard and understood. We are faced with an unhappy choice: We can say what makes perfect sense to our own ears, and face the perplexity, angst and hostility of those unprepared to comprehend our incomprehensible words, or we can translate our truth to familiar terms and be radically misunderstood.

Designers face this reality with their uninitiated clients and collaborators. We can “speak the language of business” and make do with approximate and often inadequate understandings of our work and what is required to do it effectively, or we can try to teach them designerly ways of understanding so they can collaborate with us effectively, or at least support the work, or at least not make our work impossible.

In reality, coming to that understanding requires a gentle transition from the familiar to a new unfamiliar praxis. The transition is only partly mental. Much of the understanding is acquired through doing. It is intuited in the How-doing hands and in the Why-feeling heart long before the What-knowing head catches up and can chatter explicitly about the What, How and Why of the work. To get that What-How-Why to coalesce and stabilize is to have a faith. The faith is not in the content of the understanding, nor is it in the willful believing of that content. Faith is what acts behind the understanding, that makes the explicit content of belief understood and self-evidently true. But to people who think exclusively in terms of systems of explicit content this just seems like mystical vapidity, a thereless there.

This understanding of design is not just a metaphor for religion. It is a species, or maybe a region, of religious understanding. There is a designerly metanoia a person will undergo, which will effect in them a designerly faith, which will animate their being and make it possible to think, feel and act as a designer in any situation where design is needed.

But returning to the question: in metanoia, what really happens? Do we awaken slumbering mental or spiritual faculties that allow us to receive previously undetected givens? Do we reorganize or recrystallize our souls to accommodate (or accommodate ourselves to) new intuitions and conceptions? How does it happen that a person and the world are reenworlded together in an event which changes nothing and everything together in one epiphanic rush? Does this question even need resolution? Or can we let it go with the simple fact that something of our ownmost own, nearer even than the content of our most intimate belief changes, and the consequences ripple outward to and beyond the furthest edges of the universe, before the advent of time and after it.

The Chinese coins hung from my reading lamp dangling over my right shoulder, are each the size of everything. It is only the metal part of the coin that is spatially constrained. The outer edge of the metal disk radiates an infinitely extensive circle along a two-dimensional plane, symbolizing in two dimensions an infinitely extensive sphere in a three-dimensional volume. This is the environmental part of the coin. But punched in the center of the metal is an empty square. This finite square-shaped bit of space is separated from the infinite environment of the coin, but it is also continuous with it, despite its apparent separation, and this is especially apparent when we see this coin from outside its plane, in three-dimensional space. Spatially-speaking, the metal is also continuous with the interior and environmental space, and the only difference is some of the space is occupied with the metal of the coin, and the rest is occupied by space and materials understood to belong to the coin’s environment. The entire world is saturated with myriad overlapping Chinese coin environments. These coins are quite overwhelming when we intuit their actual being.

When someone is faithless to another person, this just means they have allowed themselves to reenworld to us in unfamiliar form, as strangers. And some strangeness is so estranged it does not even want reconciliation, but increased estrangement. For reasons of its own, the new faith wants to divorce itself and alienate itself from the formerly uniting faith. We call it “breaking faith” for reasons few people recall.

Three neglected distinctions

Philosophy, Politics

I want to call attention to three crucial distinctions that I seldom see made, but which are disastrous if conflated.

  1. Evil versus immorality. Evil is acting with sadistic intent to harm or annihilate. Immorality does not intend suffering, harm or annihilation, but it tolerates or supports what does harm, and sometimes even tolerates or supports evil. When evil and immorality are conflated, moral judgment loses a primary point of orientation, and well-meaning people can be manipulated to tolerate or even support causes whose only goal is sadism, harm and annihilation. The passionate revulsion humans naturally feel toward evil is channeled into whatever examples of immorality capture their attention (whether injustice, indifference, disrespect or tribal animosity).
  2. Authoritarian versus totalitarian. Authoritarians attempt to tyrannically control what individuals do (and do not do). Totalitarians attempt to tyrannically control not only what individuals do, but also how they think and feel. Totalitarianism is not authoritarianism taken to an extreme; totalitarianism has the aim of displacing intuited reality with its own constructed truth, and it has its own path of development. When totalitarianism and authoritarianism are conflated, the visible brutality of authoritarians can be used to divert attention from cultural propagation of totalitarian ideologies through propaganda and indoctrination.
  3. Moral explanation versus justification. Moral explanation is descriptive, and causally accounts for the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. Moral justification is normative and morally assesses the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. When these are conflated a sympathetic description of how a person or group became evil can be passed off as a justification of evil.

Ungrounded is not abstract

Philosophy

I believe what is making so many people feel alienated from the world, from other people and from themselves is too much playing with remote notions and far too little intuition of what is present.

If the world feels like a simulation to you, maybe you inhabit a simulation. If you feel like a ghost, maybe you are not doing what is required to be.

Lacking intuitive grounding, the ideas the alienated thinker plays with are not even abstract. After all, an abstraction is abstracted from something real and concrete. An ungrounded idea might share the simplicity and insubstantiality of an abstraction, but it can’t even claim to represent anything other than itself.

Too much ungrounded thought-play and a thinker will almost automatically succumb to that perennial radical cop-out that today narcissistically claims to be a courageous assertion: reality itself is constructed.

People wonder why art today is so uninspiring: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.” Nietzsche saw what is coming, the last time it came.

Intuition abuse

Philosophy

Some people cannot believe something exists only if they are unable to think it.

Others think the more something is encountered as the existent it is, the less it can be thought, and the more one must rely on direct intuition, such as perceptions or tacit know-how and tacit feel-why.

This is a Kantian — not Jungian — use of the word intuition. By this use, intuition is a direct, non-linguistic, non-logical, non-representational relationship with some real, present entity or being we are presently encountering.

I am strongly in the second camp. Intuition gives us what is present. What we actually encounter in reality will always be partially incomprehensible and inconceivable, but, through skillful use of intuition supplemented by thought can become more comprehensible and conceivable.

Our thoughtful intuitive dealings with realities of various kinds is the best data (literally “givens”) for representations of reality. Thoughtful intuition provides us a repertoire of representations faithful to the real entities and actual beings we attempt to represent in language and thought. It also develops our capacity for interpreting and responding to present realities.

Intuitive grounding makes thought reasonable, and not merely ideologically logical — or capriciously illogical.

If we approach present realities representation-first, scanning for representations to recognize and logically manipulate, we lose our ability to improve our representations. Our ideology limits our ontological repertoire and we experience only what we were already “ready to see” or “ready to hear”. This data gets fed into our cognitive processes, which are also often limited to an ideological toolset. Ideologically-determined nounset interact by an ideologically-determined verbset.

But approaching representations intuition-first is also disastrous. Capricious illogic and intuitive manipulation of mental representations acquired willy-nilly from wherever does not produce a reliable sense of reality, nor any sense of the kinds of supernatural realities new age mystical types think they know. Intellectually laziness, indisciplined and unscrupulousness only reinforces and intensifies whatever unchosen prejudices and attitudes that passively infected our minds.

To rely on one’s intuition in matters of representation or language or logic to try to understand a distant reality is to misuse intuition and to short circuit intuition and turn it toward mental objects, instead of outward toward beings and entities transcending our mind. Intuiting mental objects is not a proxy for intuiting the realities these mental objects claim to represent.

A strong aversion to learning and informing your mental objects in order to make them more faithful representations — to rely instead on intuiting mental objects already inside your head — this is an alienation from reality akin to solipsism.

Moral benchmarking

Ethics, Philosophy

Before I dig all the way down into Bernstein’s Radical Evil, I want to benchmark my current views on what is evil, vs immoral, vs unethical.

Evil means active desire to annihilate and inflict suffering on other people.

Immoral means supporting evil, while stopping short of being evil oneself. One accepts, affirms and strengthens the conditions of evil and beliefs of evil-doers, while lacking evil desires.

According to this view, most progressivists are immoral. Only some among them — the ones who support Hamas, chant their slogans and mean it, or the ones who enjoy harming, abusing, terrorizing and humiliating living manifestations of identities they hate — are actively evil to any real degree.

But most progressivists I talk with believe the same things evil progressivists believe, and differ primarily in lacking an appetite to take part in the sadism and destruction. Part of progressivist immorality consists in a stubborn incuriosity to look into who they support and the practical implications of their beliefs. This allows them to water down their immorality with amoral ignorance, and to dissociate themselves from what they passively support, while also enjoying a sense of tribal belonging and security.

Ethics is fidelity to the behavioral rules of an ethos, which includes linguistic behaviors. It is entirely possible to be highly ethical within an amoral ethos. To be truly moral, one must actively choose a moral ethos. But most people are not morally responsible, and do not make such choices. They are merely ethical, and fail to make moral choices of any kind.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, and in the compulsivly identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is attributable to this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.