Category Archives: Philosophy

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Philosophy

“Pictures or it didn’t happen.”

In business: “Numbers or it didn’t happen.” Only what is quantifiable is real.

For wordworlders: “Explicit language or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be said clearly and argued is real.

For scientism: “Repeatable demonstration or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be technologically reproduced is real.

But even deeper, and common to all: objectivity or it isn’t real. This is the deeper objectivism. Radical objectivism confuses “objective reality” with absolute reality, and treats the two as synonymous.

An opposing view says that any finite, definable entity is only an actualized possibility of reality which is simultaneously both object and subject, and neither. Neither: apeiron.

Articulation of preconceptual awareness

Judaism, Philosophy

If I did not already own a lovely hardback copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God In Search of Man, I’d be desperate to find a copy for my sacred library:

It is the assertion that God is real, independent of our preconceptual awareness, that presents the major difficulty. Subjective awareness is not always an index of truth. What is subjectively true is not necessarily trans-subjectively real. All we have is the awareness of allusions to His concern, intimations of His presence. To speak of His reality is to transcend awareness, to surpass the limits of thinking. It is like springing clear of the ground. Are we intellectually justified in inferring from our awareness a reality that lies beyond it? Are we entitled to rise from the realm of this world to a realm that is beyond this world?

We are often guilty of misunderstanding the nature of an assertion such as “God is.” Such an assertion would constitute a leap if the assertion constituted an addition to our ineffable awareness of God. The truth, however, is that to say “God is” means less than what our immediate awareness contains. The statement “God is” is an understatement.

Thus, the certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realm of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transition from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of His existence.

What we attempt to do in the act of reflection is to raise that preconceptual awareness to the level of understanding.

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Biography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

New and improved vulgarity!

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Trefoil

I reject two very common, often unexamined, and highly consequential psychological assumptions.

Vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious mind consists largely of objective beliefs of which we are unaware, that exist beneath the surface of awareness, because unconscious psychic processes push them under. I think repressed objective beliefs do exist, but that most of “the unconscious” consists of activities of the intuition which are essentially unknowable as objects, in the same way seeing is essentially invisible to sight. The rational mind, however, inhabits a world of comprehension, and to rationality, whatever evades comprehension cannot have the status of existence. It must belong to the phantasmic inner world of sentiment — a nonexistent subjective pseudo-object.

Vulgar assumption 2: Intuition is essentially an unconscious rational process. Two consequences of this belief are equally wrong: 2a) that anything we think or do can become intuitive through practice. 2b) that anything we intuit can through analysis will reveal an implicit rationality.

In both of these assumptions I see evidence of a rationality that claims to speak on behalf of the self, but instead speaks only for itself in purely rational terms. In some cases, rationality tyrannizes over the whole self and attempts control all its behaviors. In most cases, though, rationality is made the powerless figurehead of the self, and is allowed to say whatever it wants, but has no significant influence over real feelings or behaviors. In both cases, the intellect is alienated from self.

I would like to replace these two vulgar assumptions with two different vulgar assumptions. And by “vulgar” I mean they can be unthinkingly adopted by ordinary people and become ideas so mainstream nobody even thinks to question them. As I’ve said before, the sign of a well-designed philosophy is (like all good design) invisibility. And invisible philosophy is naive realism, or, to say it in a prettier way, a faith.

A practical philosophy designer’s ultimate goal is new forms of naive realism that, when adopted, allow people to live better lives together.

When a philosophy is designed well, people easily understand what is said (it is usable), they spontaneously see applications (useful) and they feel value in the new understanding (desirable). But that is just the first encounter, when the philosophy is still an object of understanding. The true test of the philosophy’s design is after it is adopted, and the philosophy becomes the subject of understanding — that is, it is used to understand subject matter beyond itself. Now the philosophy is understood from, and it functions less like an object we experience at than an interface through which we experience other objects of understanding. And like all designed things we can change modes of attention, and experience it as a beautiful object, or a beautifying subject.

Almost every beautiful thing I see, I see clearly because of a very beautiful pair of glasses I wear, which were crafted in Germany by trained jewelers. But sometimes I remove my glasses and look at them and marvel at their form. And I love my bicycle for similar reasons. I climb into my bike (if you’ve ever ridden a Rivendell, you’ll know why I say “into” instead of “on to”) and I am now merged into this bicycle and into the landscape I ride through. But often I climb off and look at this bicycle from a distance and am overwhelmed by its appearance. Same with all my favorite objects. And of all the beautiful objects, the best are books. They have innumerable layers of subject-object gorgeousness. The book is a physical and typographic object. But it is a “crystal goblet” for its content. But its content is also a crystal goblet for various realms of reality. Despite practicing design for decades prior to reading Beatrice Ward, I could never understand it or practice it the same way again after learning to see it through her eyes. Same with Liz Sanders and Christopher Alexander. The reading was wonderful. The permanent change to myself and the world as I inhabit it (my enworldment) as a designer was immeasurably better.

I am sitting in a middle of a room lined with the most beautiful books, dozens of which have subjectively reshaped me. I am the immortality of myriad beautiful souls.

What was I talking about? Oh – vulgar assumptions. My goal in life is to improve our vulgar assumptions. A philosophy that is not adopted and vulgarized is falling short of its purpose.

My improved vulgar assumptions go like this.

Improved vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious is unconscious only to our rational mind. Subjectivity is not a realm that exists side by side with objectivity. On the contrary, objectivity is a subset of subjectivity — that small corner of subjectivity that can be defined, comprehended and explicitly spoken about. The rest can only be known about indirectly, and can never be known any other way. So, for example, if our unconscious keeps producing racist notions it isn’t because we have racist beliefs that we keep repressing; it is because we have racist subjectivity that perpetually generates racist observations and racist thoughts. Trying to manipulate the content of such a subjectivity will just make the racist more divided against herself, more emotionally hysterical and more desperate for drastic remedies for her dividedness. The resolution of the problem is through asking different questions, not from inventing different answers to old ones and bullying ourselves and others into pretending to believe what we say.

Improved vulgar assumption 2: Rationality is one kind of intuitive process, one that is mostly composed of explicit objects and operations. But many intuitions and other intuitive processes exist that are not reducible to rational terms. And this means 2a) that we should not assume intuitive design only makes use of established habits, or that any design will become intuitive once it is practiced and made habitual. And it means 2b) that we should not assume implicit rationality in any intuition or intuitive response. The why behind an intuition might not have any explicit “because”, and this only makes it more real and important.

One last thing. Even beyond the usefulness, usability and desirability of a designed philosophy, there is something even more important. Does it answer to reality beyond itself? This is the truth many younger designers are trying to bring to the design discipline. Our responsibility as designers extends beyond the needs of immediate receivers, deliverers and supporters of services and products. Our designs impact the entire world, and we are answerable for all impacts to anyone, not only to those we consider. Most designers I meet are materialists, who think only in terms of ecology, economy or psychology, but this is only the parts of transcendent reality a materialist rationality can comprehend. There is more out there (and in here) that we must answer to, and this determines whether our designs bear halos of light or void.

Chord: Intellectual Conscience

Chord, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Someday I will collect the passages that reshaped my soul. This one, by you-know-you, would certainly be among them:

The intellectual conscience. — I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress — as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors {“discordant concord of things”} and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

Another:

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.

But then there is this:

The need for little deviant acts. — Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: — many tolerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ — this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognised custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognised as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

Confession: this rabbit hole excursion was inspired by an article by Mary Harrington, “Truth Seeking Is Not a Pathology”. A couple of standout quotes:

Does anyone here remember James Damore? He was fired from Google in 2017 for circulating a memo arguing, with all possible reference to the scientific evidence, that not all sex differences in employment choice are down to discrimination. He was pilloried and punished in essence for telling the truth. Now, just recently I read a Free Press interview with Damore, who lives in Europe now. It was a sympathetic piece; in the course of it the writer suggested Damore may have an autism spectrum disorder.

First: a necessary disclaimer. Lots of people find it helpful to have a label and diagnosis for those ways they feel different. What follows is in no way intended to dispute or invalidate that experience. But it’s also widely accepted that there’s a cultural component to what reads as “normal” or “different” in people’s psychological makeup. So what if another way of looking at at least some individuals who get lumped in with these supposed “disorders” is less as “disordered” than as outlier personalities, more oriented toward truth than social consensus?

Another:

The two World Wars were the climactic frenzy of Europe’s industrial civilisation – and the second of the wars was ended by truth-seekers, who split the atom just to see if it could be done. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

This is, at its core, the engineer mindset. Engineers want to know: is it technically sweet? And: does it work? The “why” or “what to do about it” as Oppenheimer puts it, is for many a secondary consideration to whether it’s technically sweet, and whether it works.

In the case of the bomb, it did work. The consequences were apocalyptic for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the cultural ripple effects are still with us.

….

What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. And this is how, in the 1960s, we arrived at the twin engines of the transhumanist revolution: computing and biotech. But as a consequence, it was also the point at which the engineering mindset turned on itself.

And:

The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

…

Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus. Over time, then, the aggregate effect of policies like this is to increase the number of consensus-seekers, which is to say those adapted to managerialism, and to decrease the number of truth-seekers.

Manifesto as genre

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Polycentrism

I find the manifesto an attractive genre.

Most persuasive writing takes disagreement or indecision as its point of departure. Not the manifesto. A manifesto assumes agreement or at least sympathy and persuades toward full embrace and action.

A good manifesto activates an egregore.

One other winning characteristic of the manifesto is its brevity, which makes it eminently letterpressable and chapbookable. I have at least two manifestos I could write:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto — Reality is morally meaningful and you know it. And reality is pregnant with surprise.
  • Polycentrist Manifesto — The world we inhabit is one of myriad experiential and agential subjective centers. We should not be naively ego-centric, nor naively other-centric. We should polycenter ourselves. Empathy, the Golden Rule, law and principles are indispensable to polycentered life.

Closer and further

Philosophy, Religion

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

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

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

Design, Holarchy, Murmurations, Philosophy

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

Enworldment, Philosophy
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. A personal subject and an academic subject is a subject in precisely the same sense.

Unpleasant left-liberal musings

Ethics, Politics

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

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Extended Self

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

History, Philosophy

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.”

*

The convection current of history.

Four pluralisms

Philosophy

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

Enworldment, Murmurations, Philosophy

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

Ethics, History, Judaism

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

Biography, Ethics, Politics

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?

Design, Philosophy

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.)