Category Archives: Ethics

Sanity and vision

October 31, 2009Ethics, Etymology, Politics, Synesis, Taoismanomalogue

The world is overrun with visionaries and sane people.

What is lacking is:

vision which respects sanity, and
sanity which recognizes vision.

Too often, sanity poses as vision, exotically paraphrasing the same old content in the language and gestures of vision. Why? Because the sane know what the truth is, but they find the truth bland and wish to spice it up a little.

Too often, vision is ignorantly parasitic. It lives off the conditions provided by sanity while denouncing the sanity that provides it. Why? Because the visionary knows the truth about truth, and cannot go back to the stunted “truth” of the sane.

But neither the truth nor the truth about truth is true enough to support community.

We need sanity, not because it is more objectively true than vision, but because it is stable, more communicable and therefore more readily sharable.

We need vision, because things are true as far as they go but they are never true enough for long.

Human beings need each other — commonalities and differences, alike.

We hate this. Otherness confronts us with the fact of finitude. Individuals longs to be infinite.

Re-spect: re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’
“How does this world we share look through your eyes?”

Re-cognize: re– ‘again’ + cognoscere ‘learn.’
“Can you show me a new way to see this world we share?”

Re-duce: re– ‘back, again’ + ducere ‘bring, lead.’
“The world exists as I comprehend it.”

Com-prehend: com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’
“I am objective.”

Ob-ject: ob– ‘in the way of’ + jacere ‘to throw.’
“The world is reducible to material, to the being of the object.”

Under-stand
“Do you understand that under every object stands an experience, and upon this does an object exists as an object?”

Is experience essentially individual?

Synesis means we stand together and see the world as together.
The subject who sees — we — is active. We see together.
The object of sight — the world — is passive. The world is seen as together.

Synesis recognizes that the solid togetherness of the world is only apparent.
We can see this solid togetherness differently if are open to being shown.

Synesis respects the truth that we human beings need solidity.
The solidity of the world is scaffolding for the solidarity of people.

Synesis is solidity through solidarity and solidarity through solidity.

Both the solidity and the solidarily of synesis long for infinity and pursue it.
This means sometimes solidarity and solidity must be renounced, for the sake of synesis.
Synesis is essentially self-sacrificing and self-affirming.

On this liquid ground of experience we stand together in understanding or we sink under the surface as dissolving individuals.

Vision opens sanity. Sanity stabilizes vision.

openstablespiral

Selections from BG&E

October 23, 2009Ethics, Philosophyanomalogue

Preface. Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. The dogmatists’ philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia…

…

6. Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoires; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he –) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) as a mere instrument. But anyone who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and kobolds –), will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time — and that every single one of them would like only too well to represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is domineering {herrschsuchtig}: and as such it attempts to philosophize. — To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different — “better,” if you like –, there you may really find something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real “interests” of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else, in his family, say, or in making money, or in politics; indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the “promising” young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist: — it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is — that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.

…

205. The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a rough game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game …..

…

230. Perhaps what I have said here of a “fundamental will of the spirit” may not be immediately comprehensible: allow me to explain. —

That commanding something which the people calls “spirit” wants to be master within itself and around itself and to feel itself master: out of multiplicity it has the will to simplicity, a will which binds together and tames, which is imperious and domineering. In this its needs and capacities are the same as those which physiologists posit for everything that lives, grows and multiplies. The power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign to it is revealed in a strong inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the complex, to overlook or repel what is wholly contradictory: just as it arbitrarily emphasizes, extracts and falsifies to suit itself certain traits and lines in what is foreign to it, in every piece of “external world.” Its intention in all this is the incorporation of new “experiences,” the arrangement of new things within old divisions — growth, that is to say; more precisely, the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.

This same will is served by an apparently antithetical drive of the spirit, a sudden decision for ignorance, for arbitrary shutting-out, a closing of the windows, an inner denial of this or that thing, a refusal to let it approach, a kind of defensive posture against much that can be known, a contentment with the dark, with the closed horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: all this being necessary according to the degree of its power to appropriate, its “digestive power,” to speak in a metaphor — and indeed “the spirit” is more like a stomach than anything else.

It is here that there also belongs the occasional will of the spirit to let itself be deceived, perhaps with a mischievous notion that such and such is not the case, that it is only being allowed to pass for the case, a joy in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exultant enjoyment of the capricious narrowness and secrecy of a nook-and-corner, of the all too close, of the foreground, of the exaggerated, diminished, displaced, beautified, an enjoyment of the capriciousness of all these expressions of power.

Finally there also belongs here that not altogether innocent readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them, that continual pressing and pushing of a creative, formative, changeable force: in this the spirit enjoys the multiplicity and cunning of its masks, it enjoys too the sense of being safe that this brings — for it is precisely through its protean arts that it is best concealed and protected.

This will to appearance, to simplification, to the mask, to the cloak, in short to the superficial — for every surface is a cloak — is counteracted by that sublime inclination in the man of knowledge which takes a profound, many-sided and thorough view of things and will take such a view: as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste which every brave thinker will recognize in himself, provided he has hardened and sharpened for long enough his own view of himself, as he should have, and is accustomed to stern discipline and stern language. He will say “there is something cruel in the inclination of my spirit” — let the amiable and virtuous try to talk him out of that.

In fact, it would be nicer if, instead of with cruelty, we were perhaps credited with an “extravagant honesty” — we free, very free spirits — and perhaps that will actually one day be our posthumous fame? In the meantime — for it will be a long time before that happens — we ourselves are likely to be least inclined to dress up in moralistic verbal tinsel and valences of this sort: all our labor hitherto has spoiled us for this taste and its buoyant luxuriousness. They are beautiful, glittering, jingling, festive words: honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for the sake of knowledge, heroism of the truthful — there is something about them that makes one’s pride swell. But we hermits and marmots long ago became convinced that this worthy verbal pomp too belongs among the ancient false finery, lumber and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, and that under such flattering colors and varnish too the terrible basic text homo natura must again be discerned.

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura {natural man}. To confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him “you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!” — that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task — who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently: “why knowledge at all?” — Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves the same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer ….

231. Learning changes us; it does what all nourishment does which also does not merely “preserve” — as physiologists know. But at the bottom of us, really “deep down,” there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable “this is I”; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn but only finish learning — only discover ultimately how this is “settled in him.” At times we find certain solutions of problems that inspire strong faith in us; some call them henceforth their “convictions.” Later — we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problem we are — rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fatum, to what is unteachable very “deep down.” — Having just paid myself such a deal of pretty compliments I may perhaps be more readily permitted to utter a few truths about “woman as such”: assuming it is now understood from the outset to how great an extent these are only — my truths. —

Step 5 of 8

October 4, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

When you live your life wrongly, you lose the capacity to value.

When you lose the capacity to value, you cannot imagine something worth working toward.

When you have nothing to work toward, you live your life wrongly.

Melioristic meditation

October 4, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

To attack all forms of collective self-determination — any kind of visioning an ideal, intentionally pursuing that ideal, and evaluating means in terms of whether they advance or harm the pursuit of the ideal…

… to brand every kind of collective intentional coordination of efforts as soulless “social engineering”…

… to hope that compromise solutions on innumerable questions of means, each considered in isolation from the others, will somehow result in something acceptable to all relevant citizens (that is, those with the awareness, the will and the means to take action)…

This is America’s state religion, held most fervently of all by our Christian element: An aggregate of self-interested parts, operating under simple rules, will somehow miraculously, effortlessly, inevitably and automatically serve the best interests of the whole.

Ours is an atomistic-mechanistic faith assembled by the blueprint image of the Deistic god of the Enlightenment.

Our self-interests are parts of an enormous intricate moral machine that drives the engine of public welfare. This system was designed for unconcern. Our impulses can — and should — push with unconstrained force against the unconstrained forces of our citizen-opponents. Each takes care of himself, and the system looks after the whole.

The system was designed to replace moral responsibility. Moral responsibility was never humankind’s strong suit. It’s too squishy, too evadable. Following laws to the letter, with no concern for their purpose or consequences — we’re much, much better at that. Push by the rules, and whoever is crushed in your pushing is either a holy sacrifice to competition or an economic infidel (insufficiently motivated to participate in our economy).

Here is a question: Do we hold the American moral atomistic-mechanical faith because we’ve seen it work out? Have we judged this tree by its fruit?

Is it possible that our adherence to this faith is just inertia? A fear of the Otherwise? Do we suspect that an improvement for the whole, might not be an improvement for me?

Or do we hold this faith because we are crushed by the sheer size and complexity of the world, and we’re dogged by pessimism that we can improve anything?

I have to wonder if the Founding Fathers imagined the psychological consequences of their lowered expectations. Did they ever imagine that a populace propped up by an artificial public morality might eventually lose all moral muscle-tone?

Not only do we pious Americans see no conflict between serving the good and serving wealth — we know for a fact that we serve the good most perfectly by refusing to get caught up in ideals and instead concentrating on serving wealth. Who says there’s a conflict? With the exception of a few isolated wingnuts, nobody.

We fixate on isolated issues because we instinctively know that discussing ends will be catastrophic.

Why? Because we disagree so deeply? Because if we sketched out our ideals to one another that they would be so mutually unacceptable that violence would be inevitable? But, if we can just manage to coerce the other into trying things our own way, they’d see how right we are?

Or, have we neglected altogether the question of how we would like our lives to be?

Or, have we merely defined our ideal negatively? I’d like my life as it is, but without the loneliness, the soul-crushing boredom, the insane stress, the ugliness?

Or, do we just have no idea what a public discussion of ends could be? What forum? What themes? How is it moderated? It cannot be imagined in any detail at all.

How many of us believe we have any right to form our lives?

How many of us believe we can play by the rules and end up with lives we really love?

What’s a little strange is that many of us are pretty sure that this system doesn’t actually serve the whole, and when we play, it theoretically serves us — we can pay for our homes, our food and our entertainments — but our lives are not lives we would have chosen. Ah, here’s a moral responsibility every American is required to accept: We are responsible for feeling grateful. We are at least required to tack some gratitude to the end of whatever complaints we express. “Oh, well, it could be worse.” “At least I’ve got a job.” “At least I don’t live in Africa or Iraq.”

Sometimes we console ourselves with our little virtues. We may not love life, and we may not really concern ourselves with the whole — but at least we are good. We adopt little causes and practices here and there that we believe will somehow benefit the whole — the Earth, if you lean left, or America if you lean right.

At least we’re good. That we have.

When you live your life wrongly, you lose the capacity to value.

When you lose the capacity to value, you cannot imagine something worth working toward.

When you have nothing to work toward, you live your life wrongly.

Against fundamentalism

August 29, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

Fundamentalists found their lives on false faith, undergirded by a mistaken conception of what faith is.

Can you believe in the validity of what an author says to you, apart from the apparent intelligible truth, intelligible falsity or unintelligibility of what you hear? This is what faith is. Faith is an active optimism that what one hears can, with effort, be understood as true.

What faith isn’t is automatically taking what one initially understands to be true, whether it makes sense or not.

And false faith is taking that initial understanding to be the one and only truth.

Every fundamentalism is xenophobic political ideology expressed in religious language.

The point of the fundamentalism is not the religion but the justification for a xenophobic attitude: an invalidation of others.

The invalidation of others is the invalidation of other conceptions of truth beyond the ideologue’s political-religious ideology.

And invalidation of truth beyond one’s own ideology is invalidation of what transcends oneself. And what transcends oneself…

Milton expressed it best:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

Home

August 21, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

To have a place in the world — to have a home — is to reach agreement with others on one’s own use. For some, this means being assigned roles they can play well, for others it means having their purpose welcomed.

Alienation occurs when roles are assigned without regard for the assignee. A person who doubts his suitability to the role becomes grimly afraid. The one who knows the unsuitability of the role for him becomes contemptuous.

A person can become so acclimated to alienation that he sees all need for social acknowledgment, all acceptance of role-assignment, as essentially contemptible.

Modernity gave way to postmodernity when western culture forgot its longing for home. The longing for home was forgotten when the expectation of having a home was abandoned. Who even talks about alienation anymore, much less regrets alienation?

“The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.” – Black Elk

Using people

August 20, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

A thinks he knows B’s best use. B thinks he knows his own best use.

Who is more presumptuous? Can we really answer A or B at this point?

One of the two wishes to come to an agreement. One of the two feels entitled to make the call unilaterally.

Now can we answer?

Understanding understandings

August 15, 2009Ethics, Hermeneuticsanomalogue

For someone to wish to really understand what you are saying and to work at pursuing that understanding — this is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It is pleasurable even when the understanding remains incomplete. The desire, and desire’s sole proof — action — is the source of pleasure.

To pursue understanding requires sacrifices of different kinds. First, and most obviously, understanding takes real effort, and the effort required increases with the strangeness of the concepts in question.

This sacrifice of effort leads directly to another more interesting sacrifice, one which is harder to explain: the more a person has understood and overcome strangeness in others, the stranger he himself becomes. So, the better he becomes at understanding other people’s crucial truths, the harder it becomes to understand what he means when he attempts to share his own most crucial truths.

Many people will find many uses for him, but his real use is locked away in his own strange understanding.

There are many ways to love a “subject”. One can love a subject as a topic — as something about which someone is factually knowledgeable. Or a person can love a subject as a discipline — as an area one knows practically. To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms “one knows one’s way about” and loves manifesting it in effective action.

Finally, one can love his subject as a subject. The lover of a subject pursues his subject with his own subjectivity. He will shed bulk — even his treasured objective knowledge and his practical know-how — in order to slim down and lighten up enough to penetrate narrow passages and get ever closer to the unattainable point of his pursuit.

(One can love as an academic, a practitioner or a philosopher (philo “love”- sopher “wisdom”).

It is unreasonable for someone who has understood too much to expect anyone to undertake understanding what he has understood.

Gadamer: three levels of conceiving the Thou

August 11, 2009Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideasanomalogue

Here it is, all laid out:

Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language — i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.

It is clear that the experience of the Thou must be special because the Thou is not an object but is in relationship with us. For this reason the elements we have emphasized in the structure of experience will undergo a change. Since here the object of experience is a person, this kind of experience is a moral phenomenon — as is the knowledge acquired through experience, the understanding of the other person. Let us therefore consider the change that occurs in the structure of experience when it is experience of the Thou and when it is hermeneutical experience.

[FIRST STAGE: Thou as a behaving object; understanding as ability to predict behavior and a means to influence/control it. This view is overwhelmingly the norm in business. The problem of the Thou is centered around “eliciting desired behaviors” from customers and employees that benefit the business.]

There is a kind of experience of the Thou that tries to discover typical behavior in one’s fellowmen and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience. We call this a knowledge of human nature. We understand the other person in the same way that we understand any other typical event in our experiential field — i.e., he is predictable. His behavior is as much a means to our end as any other means. From the moral point of view this orientation toward the Thou is purely self-regarding and contradicts the moral definition of man. As we know, in interpreting the categorical imperative Kant said, inter alia, that the other should never be used as a means but always as an end in himself. [NOTE: This is the heart of morality, in my opinion.]

If we relate this form of the I-Thou relation — the kind of understanding of the Thou that constitutes knowledge of human nature — to the hermeneutical problem, the equivalent is naive faith in method and in the objectivity that can be attained through it. [NOTE: There does seem to be an uncanny correlation between fixation on method and an apparent prediction-and-control view of understanding others.] Someone who understands tradition in this way makes it an object — i.e., he confronts it in a free and uninvolved way — and by methodically excluding everything subjective, he discovers what it contains. We saw that he thereby detaches himself from the continuing effect of the tradition in which he himself has his historical reality. It is the method of the social sciences, following the methodological ideas of the eighteenth century and their programatic formulation by Hume, ideas that are a cliched version of scientific method. But this covers only part of the actual procedure of the human sciences, and even that is schematically reduced, since it recognizes only what is typical and regular in behavior. It flattens out the nature of hermeneutical experience in precisely the same way as we have seen in the teleological interpretation of the concept of induction since Aristotle.

[SECOND STAGE: Thou as a separate, “seen against the sky” subjectivity; understanding as psychological explanation. One believes one understands another if he is able to sketch out an accurate and nuanced persona of that person. It has been very, very difficult to extricate myself from this vision of the Thou.]

A second way in which the Thou is experienced and understood is that the Thou is acknowledged as a person, but despite this acknowledgment the understanding of the Thou is still a form of self-relatedness. Such self-regard derives from the dialectical appearance that the dialectic of the I-Thou relation brings with it. This relation is not immediate but reflective. To every claim there is a counterclaim. This is why it is possible for each of the partners in the relationship reflectively to outdo the other. One claims to know the other’s claim from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself. In this way the Thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person. Because it is a mutual relationship, it helps to constitute the reality of the I-Thou relationship itself. The inner historicity of all the relations in the lives of men consists in the fact that there is a constant struggle for mutual recognition. This can have very varied degrees of tension, to the point of the complete domination of one person by the other. But even the most extreme forms of mastery and slavery are a genuine dialectical relationship of the kind that Hegel has elaborated.

The experience of the Thou attained here is more adequate than what we have called the knowledge of human nature, which merely seeks to calculate how the other person will behave. It is an illusion to see another person as a tool that can be absolutely known and used. Even a slave still has a will to power that turns against his master, as Nietzsche rightly said. But the dialectic of reciprocity that governs all I-Thou relationships is inevitably hidden from the consciousness of the individual. The servant who tyrannizes his master by serving him does not believe that he is serving his own aims by doing so. In fact, his own self-consciousness consists precisely in withdrawing from the dialectic of this reciprocity, in reflecting himself out of his relation to the other and so becoming unreachable by him. By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. In these reflective forms the dialectic of the I-Thou relation becomes more clearly defined. [NOTE: This is why I have soured considerably on personality typology. I’ve seen it used to explain away the relevance of other people’s claims: “this claim is only intelligible and applicable to certain temperaments.”]

In the hermeneutical sphere the parallel to this experience of the Thou is what we generally call historical consciousness. Historical consciousness knows about the otherness of the other, about the past in its otherness, just as the understanding of the Thou knows the Thou as a person. In the otherness of the past it seeks not the instantiation of a general law but something historically unique. By claiming to transcend its own conditionedness completely in knowing the other, it is involved in a false dialectical appearance, since it is actually seeking to master the past, as it were. This need not be accompanied by the speculative claim of a philosophy of world history; as an ideal of perfect enlightenment, it sheds light on the process of experience in the historical sciences, as we find, for example, in Dilthey. In my analysis of hermeneutical consciousness I have shown that the dialectical illusion which historical consciousness creates, and which corresponds to the dialectical illusion of experience perfected and replaced by knowledge, is the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment. A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo [“force from behind”]. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light.

[NOTE: This next point is enormously important] It is like the relation between I and Thou. A person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond. A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition in exactly the same way. In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.

[NOTE: This is why one cannot learn about philosophy (or religion) from survey texts or survey courses. A student immerses himself in the philosophy and tries to see and apply its validity or its meaning is lost. It is not a matter of thoroughness, either. One can know an infinite number of facts about a philosophy or religion or the biographical facts of the people who founded them, without having the slightest essential knowledge of that philosophy or religion. Further, because of one’s erudition on the topic, one may be closed to knowing it any differently.]

[THIRD STAGE: Thou as a partner in a mutual relationship to which I and Thou belong; understanding as synesis, shared vision. Through dialogue, the other is “experienced” and known by way of a change of holistic understanding of the the world, mediated by the content of the dialogue.]

Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou — i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this does not mean that one person “understands” the other. [NOTE: the false intimacy of psychologism.] Similarly, “to hear and obey someone” does not mean simply that we do blindly what the other desires. We call such a person slavish. Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.

This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naive mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it. The hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma. As we can now say more exactly in terms of the concept of experience, this readiness is what distinguishes historically effected consciousness.

We cannot regard the other as an object, nor can we regard the other as an alien subject with a separate but explicable experience of the world.

The other is someone who, through dialogue, might showing you something deeply unexpected and world-transfiguring. The other is one with whom the world can be shared in synesis.

Thou dialectic

August 10, 2009Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideasanomalogue

Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be merely or even primarily understood as an object.

To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

However, to attempt to understand another person without the help of objectivity is also to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

The scientific attitude and the romantic attitude misunderstand what understanding another person is.

The objectifying scientific attitude and the radically subjective attitude that characterizes romanticism together constitute an antithesis which has been steadily attacked and weakened over the last century and which (I am convinced) is breathing its last putrid breaths. (Nothing wrong with dramatizing things, ok?)

The two attitudes fail to see how an unconscious agreement (a shared determinate ignorance, a cognitive process that is unaware of its own operation) has drawn them into to an intractable conscious disagreement.

It is impossible to find agreement within the terms to which the two sides are unconsciously bound, and they are blind to the possibility of an alternative.

The only possible positions either side can conceive fall on a linear continuum of impure compromises between two pure and antithetical principles. Whatever is not the thesis or its antithesis is understood to be an equivocating ambithesis.

When someone trapped in this kind of ignorance wishes to be principled, he is “uncompromisingly” either-or, wholeheartedly throwing his support behind either the thesis or the antithesis. When he wants to appear politic, circumspect and socially wise it starts talking about “shades of gray”. (After all, you’re either an unrealistic purist or someone who understands the necessity of compromise and occasionally taking it up the tooter.)

At all times, however, all conceptions brainlessly obey the limiting terms of the underlying unconscious agreement, both in the schema of the theory and in practice.

The process of illuminating such forms of shared determinate ignorance, and in the process discovering new possibilities of resolving the issue that fall entirely outside the terms of the old disagreement is called dialectic. One discovers a point of view that opposes the old opposition and unites them in their common limitation, and opens up previously inconceivable options, often also outside the point of contention.

Here is how I’ve been drawing the structure of dialectic. White is the thesis, black is the antithesis and the red is the dialectic overcoming of the dichotomy, which is a new thesis:

dialectic

Two problems I’ve had with this diagram. 1) Once the old dichotomy fades from relevance a new one forms as a new antithesis forms against the new thesis, and the process repeats. This diagram accurately represents the delusion of the finality of the overcoming (to which some people believe Hegel succumbed), but the whole purpose of dialectic is to overcome this delusion, so the representation must be regarded not as a feature, but a bug. There is no indication that the process will continue, and this indication is essential. 2) Thesis and antithesis are not equal. A fundamentalist and an atheist argue over the existence of a ludicrously misconceived “God”… both are ignorant of other possible conceptions, but it is far more respectable to disagree with a fundamentalist than to be one. The atheist is philosophically superior to the fundamentalist, but both are philosophically inferior to someone who knows other possibilities of knowing God. And of the two, the atheist is closer to that realization than the fundamentalist who mistakes himself for religious and is therefore more closed to lines of questioning that can overcome his ignorance. (AND! — by the way, the limitation of both is that they have failed to grasp the being of Thou, which closes them off not only to the being of God, but also to the being of other people, which brings us back to my original point.) So, the thesis, though not true enough, does at least bear some resemblance to the larger truth, where the antithesis is simply a negative indication: this resemblance is not enough.

For these reasons, from now on, at least until I know better, I am going to draw the structure of the dialectic differently, on the golden section, and also I’m going to draw the antithesis as gold because I like how that looks:

But what is the determinate ignorance shared by scientism and romanticism? Neither recognizes the role of tradition in selfhood. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s something to think about:

The only way to know an Other as Other — as Thou — is to enter into dialogue and consequently come to see the world differently.

Dialogue -> Metanoia -> Synesis -> Tradition -> Community

Blind to darkness

May 14, 2009Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Taoismanomalogue

A question can be seen as a kind of intellectual darkness waiting to be illuminated by an answer.

Philosophy is not about illuminating darkness. It is about turning one’s head and making visible new regions where darkness and light can exist to one who asks and answers. It is about discovering new questions one has never thought to ask. And when the answers change the character of one’s spontaneous (pre-interpreted) lived existence — when the changes are authentically subjective, meaning the change is experienced as a transfiguration of the world (as opposed to a modification of one’s psychological attributes or one’s opinions about this or that fact, however fundamental that fact is) — philosophy crosses over its line into religion.

Where the sciences answer darkness with light, religion answers with vision questions philosophy raises from blindness.

As long as a science or philosophy does all its own asking and answering it remains sterile. Fertility requires otherness.

The best seem to speak only to their own kind. Nobody else understands them.

What is the cause of this, and what is the effect? Nobody understands because nobody wishes to understand. But, maybe the wish to understand has never been awakened simply because they haven’t been asked to understand. For sure, the wish to understand doesn’t want to wake up — but who ever thanks someone for waking them when they’re trying to sleep?

Calling someone a scientist’s scientist or an artist’s artist or a musician’s musician — this is usually considered a complement. I hope someday soon it will be considered a devastating criticism.

Are there any poets left who are not poet’s poets?

Collective solipsism is not much better than individual solipsism.

There are even forms of collective solipsism that encourage individual solipsism.

Years ago I knew someone who insisted that there is no essential difference between the understanding of a technical manual and understanding a poem. This failure to distinguish between different orders of understanding makes knowing what a self is impossible. It reduces subjectivity to psychological terms — that is, it forces subjectivity into objective thought-forms. This failure always has a peculiarly moral character — it seems to originate in need rather than incapacity. Perhaps it originates in the fear of a need.

Sight knows only what is visible. Experience knows only what has been experienced.

Negation does not produce the negative. If negation is possible, the negative is already gone. Philosophy has already occured and cannot be undone. Innocence is irretrievably lost.

Protection

May 12, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

In any genuine relationship, here’s no net gain in protectedness against the world. Certainly something positive is gained, but nothing negative is lost. Heraclitus said, “Nature likes to hide.” The retention of the negative (the desired shedding of the undesirable) in what seems to promise the shedding of the negative conceals an inconceivable gain. A sacrament is sacred for this seduction to the inconceivable, that is, to practical transcendence. (See note.)

A newlywed can become disillusioned in the discovery of suffering of the spouses pain. Pain is now shared. Overcoming the pain if it is to be overcome is a shared effort. One’s responsibility has expanded to that which cannot be directly controlled, only influenced, while consequences of the influenced are felt directly. It is as if the feeling nerves extend while the controlling nerves stay where they were.

NOTE: Capital-T Transcendence is a magically pregnant “everything else” (a positive reflection of negativity) which gradually develops positive concrete meaning in lowercase-t practical transcendence. In this development, capital-T transcendence loses none of its magic, its pregnancy, nor its negativity. It is reality who changes. Knowledge about objects resolves into knowing relationships, and knowledge is liberated from the tyranny of the requirement to posess and master. This negative freedom-from, however, is secondary to — and exists for the sake of — a positive freedom-to: the freedom to relate.

One’s former beliefs about capital-T Transcendence were never wrong, but they can always be more right, and this increase in rightness is pragmatic.

It is hard to know if the purpose of the Transcendent is to call us to transcend, or whether all transcending is done for the sake of the Transcendent. It isn’t even clear if this is a question that needs asking. Really: Can we love God with all our heart, soul and mind without loving our neighbors as ourselves, or love our neighbors as ourselves without loving God with all our heart, soul and mind? Such things are not discrete, not object-form facts, not possessable, masterable knowledge. They’re expressible as dogma — they indicate truth — but dogma is not essential truth. Dogma is still object: true but not true enough.

Rebuberizing

May 11, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

My situation requires some Judaic fortification. Until things change I’m dropping Hegel and taking up Buber.

A crucial passage from Buber’s “Dialogue” (in Between Man and Man):

Above and below are bound to one another. The word of him who wishes to speak with men without speaking with God is not fulfilled; but the word of him who wishes to speak with God without speaking with men goes astray.

There is a tale that a man inspired by God once went out from the creaturely realms into the vast waste. There he wandered till he came to the gates of the mystery. He knocked. From within came the cry: “What do you want here?” He said, “I have proclaimed your praise in the ears of mortals, but they were deaf to me. So I come to you that you yourself may hear me and reply.” “Turn back, ” came the cry from within. “Here is no ear for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals.”

True address from God directs man into the place of lived speech, where the voices of the creatures grope past one another, and in their very missing of one another succeed in reaching the eternal partner.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 22:34

Perfection

May 10, 2009Ethics, Etymology, Philosophyanomalogue

Yesterday I wrote this:

Love is the active desire to share a world, to see with. Love pursues the accomplishment of perfect sharing despite futility.

Some will point out the futility and on that basis to give up the pursuit, but this happens when love is lacking.

–

Would someone who loves chocolate refuse to eat a portion of chocolate she knows she cannot finish? The chocolate is intrinsically good. Eating it is not a means to having eaten it.

Where something is a means and not an end in itself it is not intrinsically valued. Love is intrinsic valuing.

–

In its imperfection, love is not absent, only its outer edges. Its imperfection is incompleteness, something remains to be done. But this is only a way of saying that it is inexhaustible.

Today I read this passage by Martin Buber:

Religion as risk, which is ready to give itself up, is the nourishing stream of the arteries; as system, possessing, assured and assuring, religion which believes in religion is the veins’ blood, which ceases to circulate. And if there is nothing that can so hide the face of our fellow-man as morality can, religion can hide from us as nothing else can the face of God. Principle there, dogma here, I appreciate the “objective” compactness of dogma, but behind both there lies in wait the — profane or holy — war against the situation’s power of dialogue, there lies in wait the “once-for-all” which resists the unforeseeable moment. Dogma, even when its claim of origin remains uncontested, has become the most exalted form of invulnerability against revelation. Revelation will tolerate no perfect tense, but man with the arts of his craze for security props it up to perfectedness.

Perfect – ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French perfet, from Latin perfectus ‘completed,’ from the verb perficere, from per– ‘through, completely’ + facere ‘do.’

Lamp moths

April 10, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

We’re always stealing choices. We make choices that are not ours to make. Someone makes a decision that someone else ought to be making and is called “presumptuous” or “aggressive”. Or someones decide to do something or to become something contrary to her own nature and consequently despairs.

When we refuse to steal a choice we say, “I have no choice.”

At the same time we’re always giving away choices that do belong to us – that belong to us alone and can only belong to us. What do we say then? “I have no choice.”

In the former case the statement is true; in the latter it is false.

A true statement always has a complementary false abuse. Aping truth is essential to falsehood.

A person who rejects as categorically false any concept that has been shown to be used falsely is naive or/and a charlatan – or/and ironic.

The fact that falsehood apes truth explains why the worst immorality is done under the guise of morality. This does not refute morality, but 1) makes morality deeply questionable, and 2) affirms morality.

Where there is truth there is power, and where there is power there are charlatans. Even a tiny bit of truth and power attracts charlatans.

Moths settle on a lamp and encrust it until the lamp is dark and its light is sealed inside.

(Maybe a helpful soul with a lamp could cast some light on the moth-eclipsed lamp so people could see what happened. If the moths were still alive, maybe they would abandon the old lamp for the new one in brightening flurry?)

Tales of Glorious Unrepentence

March 19, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

1) Boost your belligerence by watching this video portrait of a prisoner who tried to escape on a rope ladder made of dental floss.

2) An audio portrait in a similar spirit, Brooklyn Archipelago.

(This American Life is a national treasure.)

3) Years ago I read some mountain biker’s story about a time when he tried to hop his bike through the crotch of a tree and did not make it, and destroyed his bike, busted his face and broke his collar bone. He concluded his story with something along the lines of, “I have learned nothing from this, and will continue to bomb through the woods at breakneck speed risking my life attempting insane feats.”

4) A final offering: my favorite story from early childhood, Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief”. Between a way-too-early exposure to that story, and an equally way-too-early exposure to Beatles Revolver (mamas, don’t let your toddlers groove to “Tomorrow Never Knows”) all hopes for a normal adulthood were killed in the cradle.

Meliorism

March 9, 2009Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatismanomalogue

Meliorism – the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin melior ‘better’ + -ism .

A selection of passages I’ve indexed in my wiki under “meliorism“:

Thus speak and stammer: “This is my good, this I love, thus does it please me entirely, thus alone do I want the good.

I do not want it as divine law, not as a human law or a human need; it will not be a guide-post for me to over-earths and paradises.

It is an earthly virtue which I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all any common wisdom.

But that bird built its nest with me: therefore, I love and cherish it — now it sits with me on its golden eggs.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

*

A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in… he is at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet at one with himself and his surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work… The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

– Christopher Alexander

*

There are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world’s salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism… [which] treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

– William James

*

We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one – like any idea that concerns what should be.

– John Dewey

I’m preparing a pragmatist attack on metaphysically-grounded conceptions of morality. To make a pragmatist attack means to suspend for a moment the question of truth or falseness, and consider only the practical implications of a belief. How does a belief affect the believer’s actions? A few preliminary points:

When a person believes in a morality endorsed by something beyond humankind, whether God or nature, he is less likely to take personal responsibility for it. Passivity is passed off as faith: reality will take care of itself. (Someone who believes in natural rights appears to honor rights by attributing them to nature, but is he as likely to defend them as someone who values his rights but considers them vulnerable?)
When a person believes in a morality that is not a matter of agreement between people, but rather something that comes down from an authority higher than humankind he is less likely to take seriously the obligation to persuade other people of its truth. He is far more likely to impose it on others who are equally convinced they know the truth but are mistaken.
When a person believes in a morality that exists to serve a cause higher than humankind, he is less likely to consider the human consequences of his morality – neither to himself nor to others who follow his morality voluntarily or involuntarily.
When a person believes in a morality that is beyond human reason, his critical defenses are dismantled. If empirical observation and reason can’t tell him he is being manipulated and exploited, what can? Further, if reason is suspended, how does a person know what has overruled reason and whether it is itself valid? What is being trusted, and why? How does a person even know it is a virtue, and not a vice?
If a person believes morality is necessarily metaphysically grounded, if he comes to discover that metaphysics is radically mysterious and not solid and static like land but liquid like the shimmering surface of a sea he might sink into the depths of skepticism and antinomianism and never think to reach out for a human hand or listen for a human word. He will reject morality itself as false, rather than his human – his all-too-human – view of morality.

Notice the tendency here: metaphysically grounded moralities tend toward extremes of passivity and aggression.

Obviously, these points do not address the question of whether there isn’t in fact a metaphysically-grounded moral truth, despite the practical consequences. That is a separate question.

This is also not an argument against metaphysics, per se. My attack is strictly limited the use of metaphysics as a positive grounding.

Techne, phronesis, design and innovation

February 23, 2009Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesisanomalogue

A passage from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, illuminates a problem I have encountered innumerable times working as a user experience consultant: the need for predictability in innately unpredictable situations.

Before I quote the passage, I should provide some background, which involves the role of process in the practice of design, and how the need for predictability and preconceptions about process play into it.

What clients want is an established, proven process which can be applied to their business problems in order to lead them step-by-predictable-step to a predictable outcome. The ideal is maximum predictability throughout the process.

Predictability, though, can apply to many different aspects of a process. For instance, predictability can be applied to the specific form a solution will take, or it can apply to the general effectiveness of a solution to solve defined business problems. It can apply to the specific functions a solution must perform or it can aim at achieving more general goals (and leave open the question of what specific functions are needed to accomplish those goals). It can apply to varying granularities of time, ranging from the time it will take to complete the whole process, to the time it will take to complete each particular step within the process, all the way down to the number of minutes it will take to complete each sub-task in a project plan.

The question of which particular things must be predicted is very important because predictability comes at a cost. Every point of predictability necessitates a trade-off of some kind.

For instance, predictability in regard to the form a solution will take limits innovation: it means the form is pre-defined. The kind of solution available to this kind of pre-definition is most often an assemblage of “best practices”, which is a euphemism for “imitation”. An assemblage of existing elements is easily pre-visualized and implemented methodically and predictably with easily predicted results: a competently executed best-practices frankenstein will perform well enough to earn an employee a shiny new resume bullet and maybe a year’s job security. When a client comes in white-knuckling a feature-aggregate “vision”, nine times out of ten what looks like fixation on an idea is in truth only a side-effect of severe risk aversion.

Genuine innovation requires a different and slightly more harrowing approach. It requires a higher tolerance for open-endedness. Innovation entails, by definition, the discovery of something significantly new: a possibility nobody has yet envisioned and considered. Until it is discovered, the innovation cannot be shown to or described to anyone. (Innovation: ORIGIN Latin innovat– ‘renewed, altered,’ from the verb innovare, from in– ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’, from novus ‘new’).

Innovation does not necessitate radical unpredictability, though, and it also does not entail an undisciplined or purely intuitive approach. The locus of the unpredictability is in particular points within the process where discovery and the need to innovate are concentrated. At the micro-level, a solid innovation process is still mostly constituted of predictable activities, but wherever open-endedness is needed, the demand for predictability is relaxed or suspended. At the macro-level, at the overall success of the solution a solid, user-informed innovation process is predictably effective in its results, even if it is unpredictable in matters of form.

Most companies fail to innovate, not because they lack ingenious, inventive, creative people capable of innovation, and not because innovation is unavoidably risky, but rather because the thoughtless demand for predictability at all points precludes innovation.

A big contributing part of this problem is that for many people, practice means predictability. It means pursuing closed-ended goals, and evaluating ideas with pre-defined criteria. The notion of an open-ended process, where evaluation involves human deliberation and multiple satisfactory outcomes are possible seems antithetical to “best practice”.

Here is where Bernstein becomes useful. It turns out that the Greeks were aware of this distinction, and had names for the types of reasoning involved in each process. According to Bernstein, one of the most fundamental and damaging philosophical blindnesses of our time is the identification of techne (of technical know-how) with method. We tend to impose our conception of techne on understanding and practice in general, and in the process we lose something very important and central to humanity, a type of reasoning Aristotle called “phronesis”, generally translated as prudence or “practical wisdom”.

The chapter from which this passage is taken is excellent from beginning to end, but here is the most directly relevant part:

…Phronesis is a form of reasoning and knowledge that involves a distinctive mediation between the universal and the particular. This mediation is not accomplished by any appeal to technical rules or Method (in the Cartesian sense) or by the subsumption of a pregiven determinate universal to a particular case. The “intellectual virtue” of phronesis is a form of reasoning, yielding a type of ethical know-how in which what is universal and what is particular are codetermined. Furthermore, phronesis involves a “peculiar interlacing of being and knowledge… Understanding, for Gadamer, is a form of phronesis.

We can comprehend what this means by noting the contrasts that Gadamer emphasizes when he examines the distinctions that Aristotle makes between phronesis and the other “intellectual virtues,” especially episteme and techne. Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is knowledge of what is universal, of what exists invariably, and takes the form of scientific demonstration. The subject matter, the form, the telos, and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differ from phronesis, the form of reasoning appropriate to praxis, which deals with what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

For Gadamer, however, the contrast between episteme and phronesis is not as important for hermeneutics as the distinctions between techne (technical know-how) and phronesis (ethical know-how). Gadamer stresses three contrasts.

1. Techne, or a technique,

is learned and can be forgotten; we can “lose” a skill. But ethical “reason” can neither be learned nor forgotten…. Man always finds himself in an “acting situation” and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation.

2. There is a different conceptual relation between means and ends in techne than in phronesis. The end of ethical know-how, unlike that of a technique, is not a “particular thing” or product but rather the “complete ethical rectitude of a lifetime.” Even more important, while technical activity does not require that the means that allow it to arrive at an end be weighed anew on each occasion, this is precisely what is required in ethical know-how. In ethical know-how there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation.

3. Phronesis, unlike techne, requires an understanding of other human beings. This is indicated when Aristotle considers the variants of phronesis, especially synesis (understanding).

It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment…. The question here, then, is not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge…. The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

For Gadamer, this variation of phronesis provides the clue for grasping the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics.

…

…for Gadamer the “chief task” of philosophic hermeneutics is to “correct the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness” and “to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology based on science.” It is the scientism of our age and the false idolatry of the expert that pose the threat to practical and political reason. The task of philosophy today is to elicit in us the type of questioning that can become a counterforce against the contemporary deformation of praxis. It is in this sense that “hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.”

To put it in Bernstein’s and Gadamer’s language: a solid, innovative design methodology requires an intelligently coordinated blend of techne and phronesis, guided by phronesis, itself. It is an immenently reasonable process – meaning that the participants in the process make rational appeals to one another in order to come to decisions – but what is being arrived at is not predetermined, and the decision-making process itself is not determinate. Many good outcomes are acknowledged as possible. The innovators are not looking for a single right solution, but rather a solution that is among the best possibilities.

Incidentally, innovation is not needed always and everywhere (any more than predictability is). Unrestrained innovation is not a desirable goal, as fun as it may sound.

Feeling panoptic

February 8, 2009Ethics, Philosophyanomalogue

One of my favorite philosophical feelings is looking out on the world and seeing every relevant problem roughly settled. Unknowns and dangers remain, but everything is in its place, doing what it must do and ought to do.

I think this is the feeling happy old men have when they walk around on land they own and love.

It may be the ideal mood of introverted sensation (of the Jungian personality typology).

I’m calling this mood and this sense of things panopsis. (ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek panoptos ‘seen by all,’ from panoptes ‘all-seeing’ + –ic .) The optical root of the word is key.

The kind visualizations I do, when successful, induces panopsis in regard to a problem and how to go about thinking about it.

Panopsis might be a gentle form of ideology, or it might be the worst kind of ideology in larval form. It might be fundamental to sanity, or it might be something more ominous. The morality around this state of mind is problematic for me.

According to Buber:

The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.

According to Levinas:

In religions and even in theologies eschatology, like an oracle, does indeed seem to ‘complete’ philosophical evidences; its beliefs-conjectures mean to be more certain than the evidences – as though eschatology added information about the future by revealing the finality of being. But, when reduced to the evidences, eschatology would then already accept the ontology of totality issued from war. Its real import lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality; it does not consist in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality…

The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision – it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type – which this work seeks to describe.

I didn’t abandon Levina because I thought he was wrong.

But then, according to Nietzsche:

What is romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner, to name the two most famous and pronounced romantics whom I misunderstood at that time – not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as one need not hesitate in all fairness to admit. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to the excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed – if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence – for logic calms and gives confidence – in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; also the “Christian” who is actually only a kind of Epicurean – both are essentially romantics – and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and captious form of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to those who need it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the commanding need behind it.

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or super-abundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable – it is far more obvious – namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme (which is, as it seems to me, preferable). The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely.

The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion – one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.

(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type – this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseperable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word “classical” offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future – for it comes! I see it coming! – Dionysian pessimism.)

It might be possible to dismiss Levinas as a romantic pessimist if I view him through Nietzsche’s optic. However, this type of dismissive viewing is precisely what Levinas is calling into question in his work, and I cannot shake off that question. But hermeneutically engaging romantic-pessimist thought… is it dangerous or unhealthy? I think it probably is. I’ll return to Levinas when I have happiness to waste.

Morality, good and evil

February 3, 2009Ethicsanomalogue

The properties of objects generally remain constant or change predictably according to rules.

The properties of subjects may be constant or at least predictable, but they are also capable of drastic and seemingly arbitrary change. Change can come with little warning. When change comes it can alter the qualities of a subject so radically that the subject can even become unrecognizable. People say “you’ve become a stranger” or “I don’t know you anymore.”

If objects were like subjects a glass of water weighing a few ounces today could weigh fifty pounds tomorrow. The glass and its contents could simply vanish.

It would be difficult to exist in a world where this happened. But consider this: Our fellow subjects, capable of such arbitrary change, are (at least normally) what matters most to us in the world. To a large extent we are nourished, supported and sustained by our relationships to other subjects.

Behavioral disciplines gives subjects constancy and predictability. They provide assurance to those who love us, depend on us, or simply co-inhabit the world with us that we will remain with them as who we are, neither withdrawing nor encroaching in any way that harms them. It stabilizes our shared inter-subjective social world to levels approaching that of our shared objective one.

When I discuss morality and ethics as something good, this goal of behavioral discipline is one I have in mind.

When I attack morality I am attacking something different: the claim of one person to the right not only to require another person to be reliably and usefully what they are but to decide for them what they ought to be and how they ought to be useful. To the degree a morality justifies regarding another person in predominantly functional terms to the exclusion of subjective considerations – that the morality demands of other subjects not only the stability of objects but also the passivity of objects – I regard that morality as illegitimate. The extreme of moral illegitimacy, where subjective considerations are completely eclipsed by functional ones is evil.

To regard another subject subjectively is to regard the subject as essentially a subject: the center of a world that overlaps one’s own. The essence of morality is response to transcendent subjectivity. It begins with the acknowledgment of Namaste, and actualizes through living, enduring, mutually-beneficial relationship. In a mutually-beneficial relationship all members of the relationship feel improved by their own standards for participating in the relationship.

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