The distinction between discovering what is, versus creating what yet isn’t covers over a region of action that is far more important and common than either — a region Bruno Latour called (after Étienne Souriau) called instauration, the act of discovering-creating in collaboration with the thing being brought into existence.

Anyone who actually crafts real things, as opposed to merely uses things others craft — and who is therefore in a position to reflect on the firsthand experience of the thing-in-the-making, versus merely speculating how a thing-ready-made must have come into existence — will appreciate this word. Craft — or at least good craft — is responsive to what is crafted. In turn, what is crafted responds to the crafter in sometimes surprising and inspiring ways.

While he did not use this word in his early writings, Latour made it clear in his beautiful introduction to his first and only philosophical work, Irreductions, that while our preferred materials and forces might vary, when we work in these materials and respond to their patterns of yielding and resistance, we are always engaged in instauration.

It is very telling that we are inclined to treat instauration as a combination of elements of discovery and creation, rather than to see instauration as elemental and creation and discovery as abstractions from or edge cases of instauration.

We seem to like the idea that thing — especially a truth — is either discovered as an inalterable feature of nature, or it is a “construct” that we can arbitrarily will into being with no need for sensitivity to the thing, to ourselves, or to our relationship between ourselves and the thing. The fact that almost everything we do takes place somewhere between these two extremes, and the very best things we do happen toward the middle of the range does not play nice with our various modern faiths.

*

When I finish Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, I might need to consider rereading Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. Last time I read it (ten years ago) I was just trying to understand Latour, and I didn’t enjoy it much and it made little impact on me. But I suspect the problem he was exploring has become a live problem for me — perhaps even a crisis.

I will try to describe that problem: What is it about our popular philosophy that makes our detached and speculative thinking so overconfident in its understanding and its ability to respond effectively in accordance with these understandings? Why do we prefer understanding and acting from a distance to interacting directly in contact with the realities we seek to understand and influence?

I see this very much as a designerly critique of the industrial faith and its practices and doctrines.

By the way, my own faith is that truth itself is instaurated from our own reflective interactions with reality. You could call me an instaurationalist. I may even start calling myself that.

*

We can certainly construct ourselves any kind of truth we please. And we can preserve these ideas as “true” by ignoring whether we actually believe them or not, and by squinting our eyes to avoid seeing whether these truths are undermined by our own experiences. We ignore or explain away instances where practical applications of our truths mislead us, or simply cannot even be applied at all.

And we we can, if we have lack all sense of craft, ignore whether the truth formulations we concoct ever actually disappear into the givens of experience, or whether they must be manually recalled and imposed each time we want to force ourselves to understand in some arbitrary way. “But even if it feels strange now, eventually it will become habitual and familiar.” So says every ignorant hack who tries to do the work of a designer without understanding the craft of design.

And ideologues are hacks who try to construct truths without any notion of craft and without a craftsman’s integrity. They try to do social engineering and the results are the same as they always are when an engineer tries to do a designer’s work.

*

Most people I know are so accustomed to thinking what they are supposed to think in the way they were trained to think that they don’t even know what it feels like to actually believe or disbelieve a belief. They are not even aware we can experience truth and falsehood — if we foreswear bullshit and commit ourselves to strict intellectual honesty. Most people, especially highly educated people, are terrified of having impolite thoughts, because they don’t even know the difference between being offensive and being immoral. They are all very polite, very amoral, very banal conformists who think their apparent blamelessness makes them Good People. But to be a good person, one must first choose to be a person — as opposed to a role or an identity — and then to interact with other persons — as opposed to objectified instances of roles or identities.

(No, this is not yet another post confirming what you already know and feel about climate change. If that is what you are here for, I look forward to disappointing and perhaps even insulting you.)

*

If you are honest with yourself — and there are very good reasons not to be — you will discover that the universal rules of human conduct that you feel obligated to uphold — that all decent people uphold — are not only your own self-serving prejudices, they are only your momentary prejudices. With a change in power distribution, your universal rules of human conduct will change — or rather, you will come to see your earlier mistake and correct it. Because you have so much integrity, see.

(Do not even present me with the criteria that led you to adopt those rules. Those are part of your self-serving universality. Today you wave around history as if it bindingly objective. Tomorrow you will reject history as hopelessly subjective and perspectival. Today you throw statistics in peoples’ faces, or studies, and follow the science. Tomorrow, when the studies undermine your ideals, you will return to your previous skeptical constructivism. You selectively deploy credulousness and suspicion to make facts speak for themselves in your favor. And you really believe that the ventriloquist dummy sitting on your lap is an oracle. And you really do believe what you believe. You aren’t one of those cynical “bad actors”. No, you are such a good actor your believe your own act.)

When we are in power, we get very relaxed about the fact that some are always more powerful than others, and when fortune happens to favor us, this is our moment to reshape the world and make it better according to our definition of “better”. We might even begin to feel entitled to reshape other people’s characters or their children’s characters, in order to improve them according to our own ideals.

But if power shifts away from us and we find ourselves subject to an ideal that is abhorrent to us, reshaping of the world and reshaping of young minds seems like manipulation, deformation, artificiality, tyranny — and ought never to happen, regardless of who is in power. There should be toleration, inviolable rights, privacy, and all that other liberal stuff people out of power always demand.

Show me someone who has seen past the horizons of liberalism, I’ll show you someone who thinks he has a shot at cultural dominance. Progressivism only threw off its liberal sheep’s clothing when the professional class achieved class hegemony, no longer felt it needed to negotiate with other classes, and, like all hegemons, discovered that it was mighty enough to act on its conscience and do what is right. Progressivism stopped being postmodern and went grotesquely positivist and naive realist at the precise point that it gained the upper hand, or at least believed itself to have done so.

There are solidly good reasons to prefer liberalism even when one has sufficient power to be illiberal, but this requires philosophical depth few bother developing, so most folks spend their lives in hypocritical oscillation.

It is not about adhering to rules you set for yourself and never reflecting on them again. It is about being sharply honest enough with yourself that you penetrate beneath your momentary opinions to an understanding that holds steady across the changing weather of your life.

A colorblind painter looks at his painting and out at his world with his colorblind eyes and asks “If there were a problem with my vision, wouldn’t that be apparent in my painting?”

With whatever capacities we have for conceiving truth, we recognize truths in our experience. With whatever capacities we have for conceiving truth, we have a sense of how everything hangs together. With whatever capacities we have for conceiving truth, we compare the truth of our experience with what we know to be true and find that they match. “If there were a problem with how I think thinking, wouldn’t my errors be apparent in my thoughts?”

I was talking to Susan this morning about ideas I hate and can be counted on to attack on sight:

• Evolutionary psychology — used to relieve us of responsibility for everyday human behaviors and shut down possibilities of changing them. Or worse — used as a surrogate for observation of firsthand experience.

• Behavioral economics — used as a way to bypass conscious agency to manipulate behaviors

• Cognitive bias — used to replace personal judgment with calculations of technical formalities. Somehow it never occurs to cognitive bias obsessives that they are biased in where they look for bias or who is qualified to help them detect or correct their biases.

• Unconscious objects — imagery of submerged or suppressed thoughts has mislead our psychology for two long. Unwanted thoughts are not already present under the surface — they are constantly re-produced by corrupt faiths.

In general, I despise all concepts interposed between ourselves and our experiences.

Concepts are valuable when they offer us new angles from which we can experience reality and potentially understand it differently. And of course they are helpful when they allow us to relate experiences across time, place and persons so we can think them and talk about them.

But when concepts become substitutes for our experiences or even displace and replace what we experience, they are not only unhelpful for the practical conduct of life, they alienate us from ourselves. Similarly, if we try to adopt concepts that cannot be reconciled with the conceptions of reality we have developed through firsthand reflection they threaten our intellectual integrity with fractures, contradictions and chunks of uncomprehended conviction (notions we regard as true despite not understanding them).

It requires artifice to live in one world, as one person, among persons.

The explicated world, the participatory world, the valued world — these three worlds do not necessarily coincide, harmonize or integrate. Through our own effort, we work to draw these worlds together into a coherent everything. And we accomplish this through selection, suppression, distortion and invention, through concerted efforts of body and spirit.

Because we are finite toward infinity, tradeoffs are necessarily, and must always, to some degree, alienate us. The question is only from whom, from what, how and why do we detach and attach ourselves?

Enworldment demands de-cisions.

I got a massive jolt of happiness reading the passage below. Bolds are mine.

Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely proportioned to the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own results with reified form in the world. The philosopher tries to conceive the world, others and himself and their interrelations. But the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ do not rediscover an already given rationality, they ‘establish themselves’, and establish it, by an act of initiative which has no guarantee in being, its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers on us of taking our own history upon ourselves.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity which has to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution’, it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act which is validated by being performed.

I especially enjoyed this: “the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it.”

This brought to mind a quote from Robert F. Kennedy, which is supposed to be inspiring, but which I find alarming:

“You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’”

Anyone who has worked in the design field as long as I have will recognize this attitude. It is the attitude of dudes who still haven’t quite internalized the non-deducibility of reality from one’s brilliant ideas and current understanding of truth. It is the omniscience of the inexperienced who still believe that if they cannot see how something is wrong, that can be taken as evidence that it is right. Or if they can’t understand the reason why someone thinks or acts in some particular way, that means the thought or action is unreasonable.

And naive logic monsters of this kind, if their deductions want you to logically prove to them to their satisfaction that their thinking is wrong — which, of course, is not possible. To them, this proves that you have no point and that they are right. And they believe that your irritation with their insularity is a symptom that, on some level, you kind of know they are right, but just can’t bring yourself to admit it. Perhaps you lack the courage or imagination of a Kennedy.

…anyway, I wanted to be sure I got the RFK quote right, and looking for the original, I found this page, which provided me my second jolt of happiness:

AUTHOR: George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

QUOTATION: You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”

ATTRIBUTION: George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, act I, Selected Plays with Prefaces, vol. 2, p. 7 (1949). The serpent says these words to Eve.

President John F. Kennedy quoted these words in his address to the Irish Parliament, Dublin, June 28, 1963. — Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 537.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy used a similar quotation as a theme of his 1968 campaign for the presidential nomination: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy quoted these words of Robert Kennedy’s in his eulogy for his brother in 1968. — The New York Times, June 9, 1968, p. 56.

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” — Nietzsche

*

It is fairly easy to produce a coherent explanation of everything if we are willing to selectively ignore our experiences or disregard them as epiphenomenal — as caused by physical or societal processes.

If we try to do full justice to our most immediate experiences — and take seriously things like love, beauty, sacrality, relevance, intuition, offense, admiration, ambivalence, loneliness, jealousy, alienation, togetherness, shame, anxiety, perplexity — we find ourselves facing a harder problem.

And if we take seriously other persons’ accounts of their immediate experiences, and resist the compulsion to ignore or disregard what they experience, the quest for coherent explanation might even seem like a distraction from actually understanding what is going on around us.

*

Another Nietzsche quote: “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.”

When attempting to understand the world, far too many people rely too much on secondary accounts of distant events — and on what they, with their limited life experiences, can construe from these accounts. Much can go wrong with interpretations. Misinterpretive wrongness compounds when misinterpretations are subjected to theories untempered by praxis (that is, through iterative application, reflection and correction.)

And then, of course, there is the question of selection of accounts. Which are noticed as relevant, and taken seriously as something to accept or reject? Which accounts are never seen or sought or slip by as irrelevant noise? The selected accounts tend to be those that play nice with existing interpretive schemes and one’s own active theories.

And of course, each account is the result of a similar selection and construal process. Who are they paying attention to?

What this over-reliance on secondary accounts does to a public — a public which spends more time processing other people’s processing of other people’s processing — is alienating them from their own immediacy — and exchanging that personal immediacy for obsessive-compulsive theorizing on distant matters. This process produces tribal mass minds.

A person caught up in a mass mind will “think independently” — will rigorously ratiocinate using the interpretive schema and theories of a tribe — and reach the conclusions all reasonable people must.

*

My response to politics is based on my immediate experience of what ideologies do to those possessed by them.

Does an ideology’s interpretive schema and social theory justify coercion or violence to meet its goals? Does it seek and find exigencies that justify illiberal measures? If so, that ideology is potentially violent and illiberal. I do not have to calculate probable events to know this.

Does a popular ideology eclipse the possibility of genuine personal connection? Does it dismiss or explain away immediate experience? or does it reduce persons to categories with deducible properties? or does its judgment justify prioritizing its own judgment over my own? or does it obsessive-compulsively drive conversation back to distant matters? If so, I resent it for body-snatching people who might otherwise be friends.

*

“But what if I’m right? Then what?” “What if this conspiracy is real?” “What if your apparent agency is just an emergent property of unjust social dynamics?” “What if the devil is deluding you and preventing you from joining our church?” “What if?” —

Well… What if you are trying to talk me out of trusting my own immediate experience so you can seduce me to an intellectual circularity that will rob me of personal agency?

That rings true.

One of my favorite moods is something I’ve called “vehemence”.

I just looked up the etymology, and now I like it even more. Vehemence means “forcefulness, violence, rashness”. For me, it means getting carried away by my own intuitive force.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

vehemence (n.)

c. 1400, from Old French vehemence, veemence “forcefulness, violence, rashness” or directly from Latin vehementia “eagerness, strength,” from stem of vehere “to carry” (from PIE root *wegh- “to go, move, transport in a vehicle”).

Entries linking to vehemence: wegh- Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to go, move, transport in a vehicle.”

The root wegh-, “to convey, especially by wheeled vehicle,” is found in virtually every branch of Indo-European, including now Anatolian. The root, as well as other widely represented roots such as aks– and nobh-, attests to the presence of the wheel — and vehicles using it — at the time Proto-Indo-European was spoken.

Merriam-Webster adds an alternative account:

NOTE: Alternatively explained as a prefix v?– “faulty, excessive or deficient” and ment-, mens “mind,” in which case –ehe– is an unetymological spelling of the long vowel. Though this would account for vehemens in place of *vehimens (with normal vowel weakening), the word never has the sense “mentally deranged” (the meanings of the presumed parallel formations vecors and vesanus).

I creatively (mis)interpret this as a sort of faith in my pre-knowing gut to produce just the right fury-inspired thoughts and words and actions, without any need for conscious reflection.

*

But the most important thing about vehemence is that this is a happy anger at exactly those things that in weaker moments reduce me to bitter impotence.

From vehemence, I feel comic contempt for people who try so hard to believe unbelievable beliefs, adopt the ugly linguistic habits and perform the tortured etiquette of mass-minded tribalists.

I’m simpy not participating — not with it — but also not against it, because the antis are just a different variety of dangerously dumb.

It’s all incredibly dumb, and the tragic violence to come will just make it dumber, though the violence itself will probably throw some sublime sparks here and there. Mostly it will be a sea of bloody, muddy stupidity.

*

At least today, so far, I’m vehemently outside the nonsense.

I want to live here.

I woke up last night with an insight: fun is the objectification of the good life.

But the good life is essentially subjective.

By “essentially subjective” I mean that it is an participatory existential state, not a comprehensible event on a timeline with a start and finish.

This bit from the back cover of Blondie’s debut album impressed me as a child: “Blondie hates fun, but they have so much of it that they decided it’s time to unload the real meaning of fun on this LP.” Condemning entire categories of experience is hilarious. When I declare time as my least favorite dimension, I’m stealing this humor from Blondie.

We are responsible for our operative faith — for the underpinning conceptions that shape our interpretations, animate our thoughts and direct our intentions — and to the degree we become capable of philosophical reflection we become more responsible.

*

We are nihilists because we are afraid of the consequences of a meaningful world.

Can I prove this? No.

Can I doubt it? No.

Can you doubt it? That’s between you, yourself and your witness.

If Cooper’s ideal Existentialist is right, that a life project invests an I with cohesive selfhood, it can be extrapolated that a shared life project invests a We with cohesive selfhood.

Pushing it further, a project that transcends the comprehension of I but offers it a participatory role, might intuitively convey belonging in a society, but do so without an explicitly defined project.

Every self is a society. It is selves and societies all the way down, sahib — and it is selves and societies all the way up. But are they cohesive, purposeful ones? Should they be?

If, when asking “Why?” you require a response that begins with “Because”, you are committing a category mistake. Until you learn to ask differently, no response will satisfy you.

Justifications only link What and How to Why, it doesn’t yield Why. Why precedes justification — if it exists at all.

If you are asking “Why?”, this indicates that Why is absent.