Category Archives: Philosophy

Ideological conversion versus metanoia

Philosophy

Susan just read the latest rewrite of  the introduction of my book, and made a remarkable observation about ideologies. Her response was to this passage:

Unfortunately, the progress I made understanding texts with obscure meanings was gained at the expense of the understandability of my own thoughts, which were becoming obscure and poetic. I found that my most significant insights, the ones most central to the metanoia, were almost impossible to speak about directly and explicitly. They were expressed most naturally in practical responses to concrete problems, in how I framed problems and how I thought them through. If I tried to talk about these insights directly, I was at a loss for words and was forced to resort to analogies or images. Whatever it was that I had learned from Nietzsche, it was not primarily new thought content, but something else that took years to pin down with language.

Susan pointed out that where my metanoia experience opened me up to new insights that I could not directly express with language, the people she knows who have experienced ideological conversions seem to undergo precisely the opposite: they are given language to account for their (mostly negative) experiences and these accounts close them to new insights.

Types of rigor

Design, Philosophy

Design research is tormented by rigor anxiety. There is a sense that design research is a bastard child of the social sciences; that what we do is a sloppy approximation of what anthropologists, behavioral scientists, social or cognitive psychologists do correctly. We feel that maybe because we must work so rapidly or with limited resources, we sort of do things a slightly wrong way. Or maybe our design educations omitted some technical know-how or esoteric theoretical knowledge that real social scientists have.

This anxiety is compounded by a phobia of bias and a fetishization of anti-bias techniques purported to neutralize or counter-balance these biases. Scientific techniques are understood to be our best hope for undoing these subjective biases that distort objectivity, by selectively noticing, ignoring and twisting what we think we perceive to play nice with our own preconceptions, preferences and cognitive predispositions.

I’d like to challenge this view — or at least the social-scientistic remedy part — and to point out that  differences in purpose, funding and  form of output make academic social science and design research as different as they are alike, and that each genre of research achieves rigor in its own way.

I’m already getting bored with this post, so I’ll make it really damn quick.

Most academic social science work is done with the goal of contributing new knowledge to the field. The work’s ultimate form of output is a paper published in some kind of juried academic journal. The key success indicator is how many other social scientists find the paper valuable enough that they cite it in their published papers. But in order for any of this to happen, the knowledge must be defensible, if not unassailable. Otherwise, the paper is less likely to be selected and published. If it is published, it will meet even more challenges, as other academics test it and attempt to discredit it with their own critiques or research. It is a high-stakes game, and the game is played in single-shots. An academic must be rigorous to make the work stand, and also to show that the work deserves attention, so it makes a lot of sense to take time, do everything possible to remove doubts,  uncertainties and soft spots vulnerable to attack.

Let’s call this kind of rigor “single-shot rigor”.

Designers on the other hand, are often forced to show results days into their research. Stakeholder are impatient to see progress and evidence that the work will produce value. Others in the organization clamor to get something useful as early as possible. Directional truth is sometimes very useful, especially when an organization’s general direction is in question. For design researchers, usefulness is most important, and unassailability is valuable only to the point where the research will be assailed at that particular point in its lifestyle. But that point is not single-shot. There will be more points, not only in the research, but also in whatever work the research informs. Everything is, as designers say, “wet clay”, moldable and adaptable, open to further learning as it is applied. (To extend this clay analogy, academic social sciences fire their work in the kiln of publication, and if it is pressed too far, it shatters.) Only when the final product is released, and this is true only for some kinds of products (like material products), most stay pliable after release (like software and services).

But also, because design research is fast and relatively cheap, it can be done iteratively, with each cycle informing different stages of the design’s development, each building on and stress-testing the previous iterations. This means that any misunderstanding or oversight in one cycle of research will be discovered in a future cycle. For instance, if a need of a user or customer is misinterpreted during foundational research (research used to help teams understand the people and contexts where a design intervention might be useful), when the insights from  foundational research are applied in the design of generative research (research used to produce innovative concepts for design interventions) or evaluative research (research used to assess the usefulness and desirability of design interventions) omissions and misconceptions will be brought to light. Through successive cycles of learning and application, each cycle slightly less open-ended and formally exact than the last, the research gets more and more complete, specific and certain.

So, let’s call design research’s rigor “iterative rigor”.

Given infinite time and resources, perhaps one-shot rigor could have some value of a certain kind, but that time and those resources might be more wisely used adding more iterations. But also — especially in early stages of design research where research is used to inspire intuitive leaps into unknown possibilities — premature rigor can introduce trade-offs against innovation by closing off  the intuitive hunches, reckless speculation and informed imagination that make it possible.  Here, trading off possible opportunities for certainty is unwise.

 

Attitudes toward otherness

Ethics

Susan and I worked out a schema of attitudes toward otherness:

  1. Violence – active, suppressive hostility toward otherness (“This person must be silenced by any means necessary.”)
  2. Contempt – passive, disengaged hostility toward otherness (“This person deserves to dismissed and disregarded.”)
  3. Tolerance – passive, disengaged acceptance of otherness (“Everyone has their own thing, their own opinion.”)
  4. Respect – active, engaged consideration of otherness across individuality (“This person’s opinion is relevant and deserves a response.”)
  5. Relationship – active, engaging of otherness within commonality (“I want to maintain mutual understanding with my friend.”)
  6. Love – active affirmation of inexhaustible otherness within commonality — embrace of otherness, per se (“I will never finish knowing this person, thank God.”)

Defining eversals

Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Two common words I use in a very precise, but unusual sense, are apprehension and surprise. What I mean by them is clearer when they are defined against their opposites.

I define apprehension against comprehension. Where comprehension provides a convex form around which one can cognitively grasp (com- “together” + -prehend “hold”) a concept (con- “together” + -cept “together”), apprehension defies grasp (ap- “toward” + -prehend “hold” despite the fact that cognition can feel the reality of what remains ungraspable. It is analogous to touching the inner surface of a concave surface with one’s fingertips, feeling for nonexistent edges around which one can secure a grip. Apprehending but not comprehending makes us aware of a boundary between comprehensibility and (as yet) incomprehensible reality, and this awareness induces apprehension, anxiety in the face of an inconceivable beyond. The relationship is that of eversion, of flipping inside out. Apprehension is everted comprehension.

I define surprise against comprise. When we comprehend something objectively the contents of the comprehension is all the beliefs the understanding comprises (and if you are a pragmatist, all the implications of these beliefs). (“-prise” and “-prehend” are both forms of the same Latin root, “-prehendere“, “to hold”.) Surprise is that which is not comprehended which surrounds the comprehension with what was not grasped, due to its being beyond or over what is held, (sur- “beyond”/”over” + -prise “hold”), and which therefore is in a position to irrupt into what was comprehended and potentially to disrupt it. Here, also, is a relationship of eversion. It resembles the old “Russian reversal” joke: in Soviet Russia surprise comprises you.

Both of these words reflect a basic topological structure of my conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity. That is, they are eversions of one another. Every subjectivity comprises an objectivity derived from its interactions with its environing reality. But on the other side of these interactions, transcendent to its subjectivity and objectivity is a fellow subjectivity with an objectivity of its own which will both harmonize with and clash against the objectivity of other subjectivities. To make matters more complex, to the degree subjectivities manage to harmonize and share objectivity they form new, more expansive subjectivities. I participates within a transcendent We, without experiencing the kind of apprehension or surprise that signals transcendent otherness, radical alterity.

Without this subjective-objective topology, my ideas can only be partially comprehended — and largely only apprehended.

I think my next book will need to be another chapbook, I’ve been calling “the pearl book”. It might also be called Everso, every possible pun intended.

We need speculative metaphysics because we need nouns

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Phenomenology

Ok, I just had a small, decent-quality tantrum into the margin of Guenon’s The Great Triad, which helps define my own perspective on religion against that of the Sophia Perennis:

The manifestation of the Buddha is therefore the ‘redescent from Heaven to Earth’, as the Emerald Tablet describes it; and the being who in this way ‘incorporates’ the celestial influences in his own nature and brings them into this world can justifiably be termed the representative of Heaven as far as the human realm is concerned. Certainly this is a concept far removed from the rationalised form of Buddhism with which Westerners have become familiarised through the work of Orientalists. It might well be that it corresponds to a ‘Mahayanist’ point of view, but that for us is not a valid objection because it seems clear that the ‘Hinayanist’ point of view which is commonly presented as ‘original’ (no doubt because it fits in all too well with certain preconceived ideas), is in reality simply the result of a process of degeneration.

I say “define against it”, but it is possible — maybe even likely — I’m defining my perspective within it. Philosophy is, after all, the perpetual humiliation, and it has gradually undone my monstrous arrogance and replaced it with a moderate arrogance, which today took the form of this comment written in the margin of the above passage:

What if Mahayana is the degeneration of Hinayana’s/Theravada’s phenomenology? — A strict phenomenology can degenerate into speculative metaphysics.

That last bit is central to my conception of “Design Instrumentalism”: the idea that faiths (systems of implicit generative conceptions) can be designed and outfitted with symbolic forms, which allows one to:

  • maintain a stable, enduring self,
  • while also opening and orienting one to one’s own subjective selfhood, toward objective reality and toward intersubjectivity,
  • and to interpret, interact with, and think about the world,
  • resulting in the development of effective belief systems (truth).

I call the full practical manifestation of a faith, an enworldment.

When a convert undergoes a profound conversion experience, the convert invariably reports (assuming the convert is a true Scotsman) that the world was reborn with them, or that it appears transfigured, that they have entered the Kingdom, or something similar suggesting a holistic change in their experience of the world. Everything changes all at once.

Not only everything changes; more-than-everything changes. One of the artifacts of a deep shift in enworldment is a changed sense of beyondness, extending past the world of immediate experience, and this beyondness is naturally viewed as the source or support of its very existence. This is the speculative metaphysics of an enworldment.

Phenomenology cultivates a sharp awareness of that line between phenomena (what is show to our experience) and the mind-independently-real thing-in-itself which we instinctively project beyond our experiences (as speculative metaphysics).

Phenomenology brackets all metaphysical projections and focuses strictly on phenomena. It doesn’t disbelieve or believe in metaphysics; it methodically suspends metaphysical interpretations in order to study experience.

My understanding of Buddhism, at least of Theravada Buddhism, which I studied closely and practiced intensively for almost a decade, is that Buddhism is a phenomenological religion, which focuses relentlessly on what is immediate and practical, and gently brackets standard doctrinal elements we might assume to be essential features of any religion.

The Dhammapada’s opening lines support this view:

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with an impure mind one speaks or acts, suffering follows him in the same way as the wheel follows the foot of the drawer (of the chariot).

All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made. If with a pure mind one speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his shadow that never leaves him.

But here is where my design experience kicks in, and causes me to both admire Theravada, while also seeing great practical wisdom in Mahayana.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from a life in design, it is this: Humans have a tough time living without speculative metaphysical beliefs. This is true even for — especially for? — those of us who imagine ourselves immune, and project elaborate “scientific” material underpinnings, such as brains, behinds our experience of I, now and here — or sociologies populated with mixtures of individual, collective and even ideological actors, that produced the world as we experience it.

Our brains seem wired to need nice solid nouns, to serve as the doers of verbs or as the substantial bearers of adjectives.

And you know what? As a designer, I don’t think we should have to do without speculative metaphysical beliefs. I believe that denying people metaphysical beliefs is asking too much of them. We humans need our nouns!

In my professional work as a designer, I put enormous effort into crafting “mental models”, which are, in effect, speculative metaphysical projections that help people conceive their experiences of what I am designing. It makes it an experience of a coherent “something” instead of a series of arbitrary events. Behind a designed experience, there is both a concept — what the designed thing is — and a brand — who is responsible for it. These provide solid grounding the why of the experience — the purpose and value of it — and provide some direction for the how, in the form of affordances — things with which a user can interact.

These mental models, these brands, these affordances, however, are never what they seem to be. They are “true fictions” which, when taken as given, are, for all practical purposes, true. These are, to put it in perennialist terms, upaya, skillful means

But designers cannot afford to be literal with their mental models. We must straddle logics, and be able to think from the perspective of an interacting user, but also work with engineers to craft the actual technical metaphysics (vis-a-vis the user) that are the real underpinnings of a system, which digital, mechanical, procedural, etc.

Every faith must function similarly. The faith must produce a holistic sense of I and world, that generates the relevant affordances that suggest appropriate actions, and it must provide us with an overarching sense of value and purpose in our lives.

And if it is a good faith, it will also have some awareness or at least some attitude of humility and respect, that suspects that metaphysical-reality-in-itself is mysterious and inexhaustibly surprising, so it does not confuse its speculative metaphysics with that deeply mysterious source of being that manifests itself in myriad ways, each with its own speculative metaphysical image…

The Buddha, I believe knew this deep reality, and managed to establish a faith tradition that functioned as much like designers as users.

*

So, my moderately arrogant (but apprehensive) hypothesis is that Guenon and the rest of the Sophia Perennis school project a thoroughly beautiful and true speculative metaphysics beyond their profound, clear and precise phenomenological understandings, but take it as more Absolute than I am ready to accept. (* see note below)

However, the closer I study Guenon, the more of what I take to be speculative metaphysics is subsumed by phenomenological description. I can very well imagine a day where I will understand that extremely sensitive and disciplined phenomenological description carries us much closer to the threshold of the Principle than I’ve suspected.

  • Note: My metaphysics is a radically indeterminate, inexhaustibly surprising beyond — an infinitude that we come to know through our finite interactions with it.

I believe morality is bound up with knowing that this beyond exists and that it obligates us to respond to it and relate to it, but part of our effort must be to treat it as a reality existing in part within, but also beyond the mind, and therefore only imperfectly conceptualized by the mind, lest we reduce transcendent reality to immanent speculation and succumb to ideo-idolatry and misapotheosis.

We know that the beyond is, and we know some important things about our relationship with the beyond, but we are limited in knowing what the beyond is. Or so it seems from where I currently stand.

Lesser mysteries

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

From my phenomenological, hermeneutical and pragmatic inclinations and self-education, I cannot help but read Renee Guenon (and to a degree, Frithjof Schuon) critically, as conveying extremely sharp, clear and, above all, grounding insights into the human condition — that is the condition of finitude within and toward infinitude — but proceeding from these to unwarrantedly objective speculations about the structure of what extends beyond what can be objectively known.

Having ridden this planet around the sun more than fifty times — which, believe it, or not, continues to surprise even after twenty or even thirty rides, and not in ways you might derive from the first thirty — and having been spiritually humiliated out of (I hope) most of my youthful hubris, I’m saying this not only tentatively, not only cautiously, but with acute, apprehensive modestly.

When I say “I cannot help but” I say it with anxious awareness that this might very well situate my stage of understanding to someone who has transcended it — but also, to those who most definitely have not.

Such is the nature of transcendent insight: those who know can’t tell and those who can tell don’t know nearly as much as they believe. When evaluating claims to transcendent knowledge, one crucial thing I look for is signs of awareness of this “horizonal” condition. If you have been given a divine gift of unshakable certainty, I will suspect, perhaps wrongly, you are still in the early and paved stages of your journey. The first appearance of new-to-me always is always new-to-the-world, most of all with the most commonplace wisdom.

So, here it is, laid out flat for convenient scrutinty: The same human tendency that compels us to ground our subjectivity in an objective world, to attribute mind to the functioning of a brain, makes metaphysicians ground our subjectivity in a positive metaphysics. Or, to put it in Guenon’s language, from where I stand I see the Lesser Mysteries (of “true man”) as greater than the Greater Mysteries (of “transcendent man”).

There.

Hineini.

I must really be where I really am if I wish to really go to other real places.

*

If you know better, please speak up.

Bias biases

Ethics

TLDR: We are most biased in where we see bias.

*

We can certainly work to overcome our biases, once we notice them.

But what about our biases toward where to look for bias? We can only notice biases where we direct our attention.

And what about those intense and stubborn biases that we take for moral insights? We affirm some moral claims as really important and really moral, while dismissing others as irrelevant or immoral — and this guides the positions we take in controversies. We call it taking a stand, but, we just taking the side toward which we are more subjectively biased.

If we decide to justify our moral biases using objective arguments, the criteria we reach for are — guess what? — those toward which we are biased. But of course, we give our biases fancy objective-sounding names. We pick the most relevant, salient or reasonable criteria.

And why these criteria? Everyone agrees they are the right criteria, except those other deluded fools — against whom we are biased.

So, sorry, sahib! It’s bias all the way down, even in what we regard as bias.

The deeper you go, the less likely you’ll be to identify and counterbalance your biases, and where you are most biased, in the abysmally ignorant depths, you will refuse to counterbalance them — on principle.

The best we can do is be fully self-aware, as opposed to partially self-aware enough to pretend that our highly biased counter-biasing calculations have privileged us with moral objectivity.

Apprehension toward transcendence

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To have a positive relationship with transcendence means approaching reality as something that essentially exceeds understanding. Whatever understanding we do have is unavoidably partial, and closer to zero than infinity.

Around the inside edge of our understanding, in the liminal region between comprehension and total mystery, we can touch, but not grasp truth. Toward whatever we encounter in this liminal region we feel apprehension.

For those with a positive relationship with transcendence, apprehension is conceived as part of one’s relationship with transcendence, unavoidable, meaningful and good, despite being painful.

—-

People out of relationship with transcendence — that is, those who are alienated from what is beyond their understanding — approach reality as essentially understandable. Whatever defies understanding as not real. While gaps in knowledge are acknowledged, gaps in understanding are not understood.

The liminal region on the inside edge of understanding has no positive value, and is experienced as mere anxiety with no positive value, something to be avoided or eliminated. This anxiety can be attributed to many things, but often it is interpreted as threat or malevolence detected in objects of apprehension.

—-

A person is a strange being, a third-person object among objects, a first-person subject to oneself, and a second-person fellow-subject to other persons.

Our subjectivity is, to an extent rarely appreciated, our relationship to all of reality, first-, second-, and third-person, and to that of reality which transcends us.

This relationship-to-everything constitutes who we are to ourselves and who we are to other subjects.

If our relationship to transcendence differs greatly from others who try (successfully or unsuccessfully) to relate to us, we ourselves can become, vis a vis the other person, part of transcendent reality, and we can become partially incomprehensible and a source of apprehension.

If the other has a positive relationship with transcendence, they are more likely to recognize this transcendence for what it is and respond accordingly, with the hope of reaching understanding, or with uncomprehending respect.

But if the other is averse to transcendence, and cannot conceive of the existence of anything beyond understanding, the response may be contemptuous or hostile.

—-

It can be incredibly hard to discern apprehension from malevolence, and often it is a practical impossibility. This is part of the human condition. It is also difficult to communicate when one is only misunderstood, not malevolent.

Fictive Midas

Biography, Ethics, Love, Metaphysics

I want to define and describe a human type. It is a personality frequently found in the creative classes, especially among writers, but it is also common in religious communities and ideological movements. I am calling this type the Fictive Midas.

*

Everything a Fictive Midas touches turns to fiction.

The Fictive Midas inhabits a memoir, an unfolding story toward which they are both intimate and dissociated — intimate because it is their own creation about themselves; dissociated because they a character in this story they are telling, while also existing in the background as the one telling it.

This dissociative intimacy pervades their lives, inner and outer.

The inner life of imagination, ideas and emotions, of course, predominates.

For them, there is nothing peculiar about it, because this is the only existence they know. But for those around them, especially people attuned to the self-transcendent reality of other people, a Fictive Midas is unnerving, and the closer they believe themselves to be with them, the more disturbing they become.

This is because, to the Fictive Midas, the outer life is important mainly as source material for their inner lives, and other people are part of the outer world. This causes them to relate to people and things with disturbing disregard, the kind of disregard authors have toward the suffering of the characters they invent.

*

A friend of a Fictive Midas might from time to time get the feeling that they are not actually fully real to them. Nor is the Fictive Midas really present in the relationship.

There is an alienating barrier — a membrane that separates self from self, and keeps each respective Me in strict parallel, precluding any participation in mutuality, in shared being, in any We. In relations involving a perceptive Fictive Midas, this membrane might develop increasing precision, nuance, even insight — but this is only advanced character development, not interpersonal intimacy. Whatever closeness there seems to be is only a closeness of resemblance between the Fictive Midas’s rendered character and the real person sealed outside. The membrane is impermeable.

This truth hard to conceptualize, and can cause pain and anxiety in those who mistake a Fictive Midas for a friend.

And it only gets worse once the alienating membrane is noticed. Anyone who presses against it too hard or tries to puncture it, by appealing to the Fictive Midas’s humanity will find themselves repelled and expelled as a nobody. The character and the person peel apart, and the Fictive Midas keeps the fiction and discards the person, letting the reality drop over the horizon into the outer void. The Fictive Midas is uncannily unconcerned, incurious, almost hostilely indifferent to the divergences between the person and the character. The person finally knows — feels in their soul — the fact that they do not and never did exist to this stranger.

*

Ruthless people are said to leave a trail of blood. Heartbreakers leave trails of tears. Fictive Midases leave trails of emptiness.

Susan says we call it “ghosting” when a person exits a relationship without resolving it and providing any closure, because we are haunted by the absence. The absence is peculiarly present, much in the way the recently deceased are with us after they die.

Those of us who experience the world pluralistically — that is, those of us who feel that their sense of truth is only part of the bigger story and who want to complete our understandings of important things with the perspectives of others — experience the void created by Fictive Midases intensely painful, an aching phantom limb that cannot be treated, because it is a nonexistence, despite being a real part of us.

Pluralists tend to seek reconciliation with others as a means to reestablishment of shared friendship, or failing that, closure, so the relationship can lie peacefully in its grave.

The Fictive Midas, however has no such need, not because they feel none of the pain we feel, but because this pain is all they know. They dwell among their fictional characters, experience their fictional satisfactions and gratification, nurse their fictional grudges, all the while starving of loneliness, isolation and unreality.

Like Midas, they hoard their treasures, and deprive themselves of all nourishment and love.

Only their pain is something that intrudes from outside themselves, oppresses them from without, despite their attempts to defend themselves against it. But no matter how much they keep the cause of their pain — other people — outside, and the source of their happiness — their truth — inside, somehow the loneliness, alienation and envy gets inside and torments them, anyway.

*

It is tempting, when one is written off by a Fictive Midas or written out of their story when the story undergoes a heavy edit or rewrite, to retaliate and return the treatment — to write them out or write them off — and to make up a story where we have done this successfully and no longer care about them or what they did to us.

But this is only to become infected with fiction, and to succumb to the Fictive Midas’s condition ourselves.

And if we are honest, isn’t it true that we would never have fallen into a Fictive Midas’s snare, or worse, stayed there, if we weren’t already doing some significant fictionalizing ourselves? If not, why didn’t we notice the relationship we imagined ourselves to be in was largely imaginary?

It is better to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge the voids, while maintaining hope that reconciliation or closure might actually happen someday, if they find their way out of their isolating enworldment.

Meanwhile we can be more alert, and more aware of the reality of others, and more dedicated to reality, however elusive, so we can cultivate real mutual relationships with people capable of mutuality.

*

I have invented the abstract type of the Fictive Midas as a therapeutic effigy — a theoretic fiction of my own — as a general phenomenon onto which I can shift the weight of loss. I’m not going to reduce any person to this type, but I will regret the fact that this type can overtake a person and obscure and their personhood. It is a regrettable syndrome, not an archetype that manifests through regrettable people.

Fictive Midas is the superset containing not only my estranged friends, but the pandemic of ideologies sweeping the world, of epic stories where fictional identities oppress other fictional identities but then rise up and stage a revolution.

*

I believe John Milton knew this type:

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.

Nonlinear Golden Rule

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics

If we imagine the Golden Rule not as a flat, linear formula, but a generative iterative process which produces multiple depths or meta-layers of itself — GR1, GR2, GR3, etc. — I find that it trends toward an asymptotic point, GRx, but a point of generality and universality, so general it is practically void, so universal it is boundless. It is nothing more than “Treat real beings as real”. Real, as opposed to what? As opposed to mere extensions of one’s own being.

The formula of the Golden Rule is do to others as you would have done to you. (I think everything that follows also applies to the Silver Rule variant, “do not do to others what you do not want done to you,” but I can’t/won’t math, and that extends to formal logic.)

The first iteration, GR1, has us concretely treat others as we concretely wish to be treated, in accordance with our own personal preferences. But, if we stop to reflect, it is immediately obvious that this amounts to an imposition of one person’s taste upon another, and we would not want that done to us, so we must iterate again, this time more responsively to the other, as we would wish if the other were us, as GR requires.

The second iteration, GR2, has us do to the other according to their own preference.

But, now, perhaps the context is not fitting for the action at all, however much it would be preferred were the context right. Or perhaps another action is needed at this time, in this context.

So, GR3 indicates asking what this person prefers at this time in this context.

But does the person even want our involvement in this situation…? How should we even find out? Some might appreciate being noticed and want to be asked, others might want to be noticed but resent needing to be asked, others might hate even being noticed. We must respond the best we can.

Notice, in this GR series, the trajectory moves away from us treating the other as a duplicate of our own self, and involves more and more understanding and responding to them as real and different from ourselves. But what precisely, does this entail? What is the output of the application?

I would argue that here we apply one of my favorite insights from Richard Rorty, that sometimes progress is best viewed as movement away from something undesirable, rather than movement toward some known, desirable, pre-defined destination. The Golden Rule cannot give us any pat readout of an answer regarding what to do, but it can direct us away from what not to do (GR0 or GR1) and set us on a trajectory that to me seems unattainably, but absolutely good, non-relativistically in principle, but thoroughly relativistically in practice.

Good means trying with all our heart, soul and strength to approach GRx in our dealings with all beings in our complex, entangled lives — a universal, boundless, empty — but all-consuming, endless task.

*

I’ll also point out that if the Golden Rule is a nonlinear process, it should be expected to share characteristics of other nonlinear processes, most importantly, sensitivity to initial conditions (aka “the butterfly effect”), which entail radical unpredictability of outcome by means of linear formulae. The peculiar thing about the Mandelbrot Set is that each infinitely divisible point in the complex plane produces unique but similar and orderly behaviors, even points separated by an infinitely infinitesimal degree.

Pragmatic presequence

Philosophy

I just connected two of my favorite ideas, the hermeneutic priority of the question, and the pragmatic maxim.

Both are attempts to account for meanings of ideas.

The principle of the hermeneutic priority of the question (as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it) conceives understanding of any idea (or text) as a matter of hearing it as a response to an implied or explicit question. If a reader hears the idea as the response to the question intended by the author of the idea, the idea is properly understood. If the idea is heard as a response to some other question unrelated to the one implicitly asked by the author, it is misunderstood, even if the misunderstanding is a productive one.

The pragmatic maxim (originally conceived by C. S. Peirce) sees the meaning of an idea as the consequences that follow from the idea if it is believed to be true. William James called these consequences the “cash value” of the idea. (One excellent application of the pragmatic maxim is a religious one, the question of God’s existence. Instead of asking whether God exists or not, ask what follows from your belief or disbelief in God. In this, and many other cases, “therefores” are far more clarifying than definitions.)

These two ideas snap together with irresistible elegance, as the complementary upstream and downstream of meaning — the pragmatic presequence and consequence of ideas.

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the consequences that follow from it.

Subjective disposition

Philosophy

If, from our very earliest moments, we learn to conceive ourselves as beings who exist in space, an object among objects, within a world held in common — and then later to understand subjectivity as a way to account for differences in how we apparently experience this shared space-bound, object-filled reality we inhabit together, our basic disposition will be objective.

Is this the natural human intellect, or is it cultural? I don’t know, but I can say that this was the disposition I had when I emerged from the oblivion of early childhood, and it seems to be, if not universal, common to most people around me.

When I was very young, Unless I was confronted with evidence to the contrary, I assumed people experienced things the way I did. When they didn’t, this seemed to require explanation. Of course, every child learns the fundamental fact of subjectivity, that I have my experiences and others have theirs. I can feel pain or pleasure, when others do not, and vice versa. To recognize that an something painless or even pleasurable to me might be painful to another is less obvious. And to suspect that that the pain another is attempting to express or describe might be of a kind unlike any pain I’ve known is far from obvious.

But all of these ways of conceiving subjectivity, as means to explain difference in a common objective field, belongs to what I’m calling an objective disposition.

*

Somewhere in my early 30s I shifted my disposition to a subjective one — or rather, I began to — because the first event in the shift was a second objectivity.

I want to clarify what I mean here by shift, because this shift was not only a change in ideas, or assessment of what ideas were true or false, better or worse, more or less compelling or more or less useful for my purposes.

The shift in disposition arose from a mixture of interrogating my basic understandings and values, and experimentally entertaining new understandings and values, but did not consist essentially of new ideas or ideals. Something else happened, and it could not be communicated in any direct way. It could only be indicated or expressed, not explained. All I could say about the change itself was that it defied speech, that it changed literally everything and that I could not imagine a supernatural event more surprising or momentous than this.

Strangely, what I was able to talk about was the objective world as it reemerged in a very new way — what Richard Rorty calls redescription. This new world demanded redescription.

Later, the need to bridge this new objectivity and my own experience of it with the understandings of others around me, especially those closest to me, became urgent. As I reflected on the relationship between subjectivity and the multiple objectivities that had seemed true to me, and in fact, in both cases were indistinguishable from reality itself, I shifted from a second objectivity to what I am calling a subjective disposition, which sees all objectivity as arising from subjectivity.

I stopped feeling the need to root my metaphysical accounts in a shared objective, spatial world containing objects and subjects, as the primary setting of reality, and everted the relationship so that space, time, objects and fellow subjects were contained within subjects who have the strange ability to interact and even to commune into larger subjectivities and to individuate into smaller ones. Where consistent commonalities of experience occur across subjectivities, objectivity emerges, expands, stabilizes and establishes itself so firmly it becomes possible to evert truth so fully that subjectivity seems to be an epiphenomenon of objectivity.

*

So, now, I’ll ask you: Was this a religious conversion?

When I read accounts of religious people, I believe I know exactly what they are talking about.

However, if you were to ask a typical smart atheist to make a list of all the stuff they do not believe, I would probably share most of their disbeliefs (if not all of them).

So, I had a strange shift in pretty much everything all at once, and reached for the concepts available around me to make sense of it. Had I experienced the same thing a thousand years ago, I would have had different concepts around me. Perhaps I would have made sense of it with angels and demons and netherworlds, instead of subjects and objects and redescriptions.

Dadvice to Helen

Hermeneutics, Judaism

Helen sent Susan and me a page from her Mussar book, and asked “What does this mean?”

For some reason (probably because I was reading Fishbane) I found this question inspiring, and gave a reply that I want to capture here:

First, understand, there won’t be a factual answer. It will be more a tilt of understanding.

The best thing is to struggle. Ask yourself some questions: “The vengeance was toward Egypt via the waters, not toward the waters per se. Gratitude prevented Moses from using waters as an instrument of vengeance. Where have I seen situations where gratitude impedes vengeance?”

Or “Is there always collateral damage in seeking vengeance? Where have I seen it? How can I link gratitude to choosing not to be violent?”

Or “If we have a deep feeling of all-encompassing gratitude, is vengeance even possible at all? Is violence? Is hatred? What happens to our moral and emotional disposition if gratitude dominates our moral disposition?”

That is how to wrangle with sacred texts and commentaries.

Does that help at all? You should spend around 10 minutes meditating in self-dialogue of this kind for every minute you spend reading. Maybe even start by writing yourself questions. The tilt in understanding actually happens in the thrust of questions you discover to ask yourself.

Every factual statement we hear gets its meaning from an implied question. Most misunderstandings can be reduced to hearing a statement as answering a question the statement was not meant to answer. In philosophy we are trying to acquire conceptions capable of posing unasked questions and producing novel answers.

 

Depiction of villains

Philosophy

Whenever I want to know who someone is, I try to get them to talk about the people they hate. Whether in art or life, the depiction of villains demonstrates selfhood more than depiction of heroes.

*

Definitions de-finitize. They tell us what something is, by distinguishing it from what it is not. But we are most accustomed to third person definitions. How can a person seeing from the first person define my own self from the entire everything I enworld? “My” is somehow not first person, here, nor is “me”.

Me — first person object — is a deflected 3rd person who corresponds with I, first person subject.

*

Some people understand themselves only as first person object (me), while first person subject (I) is lost in oblivion.

Such people “look for themselves” but rarely \ask: who’s looking? They assume self is some kind of findable content instead of a container, a found thing instead of the finding agent, someone known instead of someone who knows — a thing among things within everything, not an everything of its own.

They are the I-less Mes.

A society of I-less Mes, also act as a We-less We who acts without detecting the We who acts.

They’ll each say “speaking as a…”, but they don’t realize there is a We who needs everyone to speak as a something. The political We remains as inconceivable as the Me who constitutes it.

Here  even subjects are objects, but the real subject always remains preconceived.

*

I-less Me, Me-less I seem to attract, as do I-full Me and Me-full I.

*

These mind states are not essential. They are produced by how we think and act in the world. They are varieties of enworldment, and can be changed.

When enworldments change, miracles happen.

Sacred and profane

Philosophy

The bits of reality that understand that they and all other bits of reality are finite participants in absolute infinitude — each its own center-point in the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere —  seem almost essentially different from the finite bits of reality that mistake themselves for the absolute itself, by seeing validity in only one of the myriad possible truth-conceptions.

One of the better essentialisms, if one must be an essentialist is the distinction between sacred and profane.

The sacred is deeply, humbly, mystically pluralist. If one commits to a single truth, this is a methodological decision.

The profane, on the other hand, is philosophically omniscient, conceptually equipped to understand every relevant fact, though lacking capacity to contain all facts, because nobody can know everything.

*

If I could make one change to the world it would be to persuade all parents to adopt this as their scold of choice: “You are not the sole center of the universe.”

*

We have sacred and profane confused. Sacredness is oriented toward living relationship with what is not ourselves — not comprehension, belief or identity, which has much more to do with our own sequestered mental processes, however passionately we process our mental product.

But we feel heat from high-voltage mental short-circuits and mistake it for the warmth of care.

This encourages us to view the most profane, fevered theological fanatics for the most devoutly religious people, despite the fact that the object of their devotion is ideoidols — not any being who transcends their imaginations. Similarly, we allow ideological identity-mongers to enjoy exclusive rights to the virtue of empathy, though their intense feelings are bound up now with real living people that they know personally, but with their own mental images, their own logics, their own sociological theories, and most of all their own ethical status — and they fail to notice that they dehumanize not only their detested enemies, but those they imagine themselves to champion. Worshippers of imagined gods, defenders of make-believe people, riding into epic battles on the side of good against the forces of evil — dangerous sleepwalkers in philosophical Augmented Reality goggles, swinging real weapons in real rooms with real people in them…

Meanwhile, sacredness goes about its work respectfully and unobtrusively, learning, sharing, forming relationships and making modest accomplishments.

Inherent truth

Philosophy

Today, we are inclined to take Michelangelo’s notion of forms inhering within blocks of marble more as poetic expression than factual assertion: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Perhaps someday we will reach a point where, similarly, we will hear the notion of truth inhering within reality as poetic expression. At the time we will experience even the driest, most matter-of-fact assertions that reality bears an inherent truth as one kind of poetic stance, without any inclination to argue over whether it is true that fact is a poetic mode.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.” – Jack Handey