Category Archives: Philosophy

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Tricky life

Autobiography, Chord, Design, Philosophy

The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus.

The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators.

The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure the unfolding of events for each person involved.

The Trickster moves in a world inhabited by mono-focused beings, who, lacking that second vision, lack parallax and, therefore, depth-vision. The one-eyed live in a flat world where everyone, even Tricksters, are flat.

Tricksters are tricky because they constantly try to remind the one-eyed that there is much more to life than matter-of-fact flatness. The Trickster winks, to remind people that they still have that first eye that they closed, perhaps to protect its first-eye innocence, one sad day at the dawn of youth.

When the Trickster winks, it is the second eye that closes. The first eye remains open, bathing the beheld in magical sight. If the beheld has any vestigial intuition vital enough to penetrate the workaday flatness, this hermetic winksight is experienced as the opposite of an evil-eye. Most of the time, though, it is experienced as inefficient creepiness.

And now, as always, I am recalling a Nietzsche quote — which always ripples out into a blessed recollection and re-membering of Nietzsche himself:

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ — said John Stuart Mill: as though it were necessary to beg for forbearance where one is accustomed to render them belief and almost worship! I say: let us be forbearing towards the two-eyed, great and small — for, such as we are, we shall never attain to anything higher than forbearance!

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ appears to refer to an essay by Mill on Bentham:

The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important; but his non-recognition of them does not put them out of existence; they are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is reserved for us, to harmonize those truths with his. To reject his half of the truth because he overlooked the other half, would be to fall into his error without having his excuse. For our own part, we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers: though whether these new thoughts drive out others as good, or are peacefully superadded to them, depends on whether these half-thinkers are or are not followed in the same track by complete thinkers.

Nietzsche had much more to say about one-eyed being. Here is where my wiki bears fruit. From Human All Too Human:

The cyclops of culture. — When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies — those which are called evil — are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.

Another quote is from from Assorted Opinions and Maxims. Please note the “true-but-not-true-enough” winking acknowledgement of the one-eyed by the two-eyed, which was performed by Mill toward Bentham:

Cult of culture. — To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-too-human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities, extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire. For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any one-sided preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which these individuals would entice it. It has always been the greatest fatality for culture when men have been worshipped: in which sense one may even feel in accord with the Mosaic Law which forbids us to have other gods beside God. — Next to the cult of the genius and his force there must always be placed, as its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one-sided, incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper degree of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot be melody?

Here is an apparent Jew-eyed wink at Jesus. Blessed-but-not-blessed-enough?

A Christian friend of mine one quipped “Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes, true. But whose Jesus?

In my early days as a Nietzschean-on-fire, I thought Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian. But that was only because Judaism was still too far out of reach for me. I lacked landmarks for situating my new self in this new landscape. “Christian” was the closest available match, but it was not close enough. <— wink wink wink. Judaism has depths that supercessionists desperately need to truncate with aggressive incuriosity. And pogroms, if necessary.

Misapotheotics, especially, experience Jewish winksight as burning. This is the true origin of hatred of Am Yisrael, whether it the animosity is religious, racial, social or political — or some new expression, like the newly fashionable antizionism, adopted en masse by every independent-minded, politically-active, self-aware, NYT-believing nyet. Another Nietzche zinger: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –” Tell a million zeros they are independent thinkers, and they will all believe it in unison.

Another passage is from The Wanderer and his Shadow: and seems to affirm Mills’s forbearance of the one-eyed.

The democratization of Europe is irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour precisely the means which the democratic idea first placed in everyone’s hands and makes these means themselves more wieldy and effective: and those who oppose democracy most on principle (I mean the spirits of revolution) appear to exist merely to impel the various parties ever faster forwards along the democratic path through the fear they inspire. Yet one can in fact feel anxious for those who are working consciously and honestly for this future: there is something desolate and monotonous in their faces, and grey dust seems to have got even into their brain. Nonetheless, it is possible that posterity will one day laugh at this anxiety of ours and regard the democratic work of a succession of generations somewhat as we regard the building of stone dams and protective walls — as an activity that necessarily gets a lot of dust on clothes and faces and no doubt also unavoidably makes the workers a little purblind and stupid; but who would wish such a work undone on that account! The democratization of Europe is, it seems, a link in the chain of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the conception of modern times and through which we separate ourselves from the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally secure the foundations, so that the whole future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth impossible for the fruitful fields of culture again to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against physical and spiritual enslavement! And all this coarsely and literally at first, but gradually in a higher and more spiritual sense, so that all the measures here indicated seem to be an inspired collective preparation for the supreme artist of horticulture, who will be able to apply himself to his real task only when these preparations have been fully carried out! — To be sure, given the great length of time which lies between means and end, and given the very great effort of mind and body, an effort spanning the centuries, needed even to create or procure each one of these means, we must not hold it too much against those who are working on the present-day if they loudly decree that the wall and the trellis are the end and final goal; since no one, indeed, can yet see the gardener or the fruit-trees for whose sake the trellis exists.

There is no contradiction between these two attitudes toward one-eyedness. It is a paradox of ironic two-eyedness. In fact, all paradox is the speaking of two views in one utterance — either a lower and higher perspective, like this one, or two lower ones dialectically subsumed in an implied higher perspective that sees them together, unified yet still differentiated.

Soelling it all out: Forbearance between one-eyed and two-eyed is not a mutual arrangement.

It goes one way. It is an unrequited and unrequiteable gift.

Let us not forget: “free gifts” injure.

And this is true even when a gift is stolen.

Supercessionism is mispotheotic ingratitude. It is not enough to steal the gift. The giver is a living insult for ever having what was stolen.

I have got to do something about this rage.

On to the next one-eyed passage. We are going in chronological order, by the way. This one if from the Gay Science:

Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together — in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans — have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves — has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate — that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here — and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction — an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too.

Now we see a call for a bifocally directed cyclopeanism.

This reads to me, not like a description of the future, but of the recent past. It reads like a description of Cold War academia, before the West lost its best frenemy and collapsed into lassitude, which then deteriorated into the casually suicidal nihilsm of our denatured, dispirited, anomic proclass.

The last quotation is from Beyond Good and Evil:

Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a Cyclops.

I will conclude this quotation chord with an aphorism of my own,

Conflict divides the world into four halves.

Or two halves, if you are a cyclops.

Often in qualitative design research we will talk about how we thicken the What with insights into the Why.

The classic example we give is the difference between a blink and a wink. The former is a physical thin description. The latter adds thickness of the meaning behind the eye movement. Thickness is an attempt to say depth without all the spiritual and psychological pretensions.

The cyclops just wants the certainty of blink counts. And this counting necessary. But is not sufficient.

With this work I’m being forced to do, which occupies all my time and daytime headspace, it takes an entire morning to remember who I am.

Re + member. <— wink wink wink wink wink

Red Card

Ethics, Letterpress, Politics

There is room for disagreement on immigration policy.

As a staunch agonist, I honor even extreme, bitter conflict on such issues.

Those who disagree with current policy have every right to protest it publicly.

There should be less room around enforcement of current policy. Policies are designed to narrow possibilities into practical particulars of enforcement.

Protesting policy by actively interfering with its enforcement is a dangerous line to cross, if we wish to preserve rule of law, which is a fundamental precondition of liberal democracy.

But enforcement outside the bounds of policy is at least equally dangerous, and repugnant to any decent citizen of a liberal democracy.

Civil rights are non-negotiable and sacred.

This is why I have donated to the Red Card Campaign, and why I think every decent American liberal or conservative, ought to donate, too.

I am compelled to letterpress print Red Cards. All sacred ideas call me to the press.

Mission mistatement

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.

If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.

In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.

Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.

Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.

If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.

Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.

As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.

The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.

These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.

Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.

And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.

These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.

These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.

It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.

Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.

And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.

When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.

Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.

And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.

Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.

What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?

Faith.

Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.

Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies

The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.

Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.

A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.

Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.

That is our mission.

The world needs design so badly it rejects design.

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “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.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Commonality

Enworldment, Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.

I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.

Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.

Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.

At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.

For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.

But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”

Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.

This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.

Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+

Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.

L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.

Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

Kids these days.

The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.

What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.

I have at least one viable option for the future.

Sadly, everyone still knows everything.

There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.

Obfujection

Philosophy

Obfujection is a portmanteau of obfuscation and objection. It names a common and pervasive category mistake: taking a subject as an object, thereby obscuring subjective reality as attention is misdirected toward a phantom object with various objective properties.

A place where obfujection is the norm is selfhood. We obfuject ourselves into identities, roles, types, or personas — none of which is self, of course, which is subject.

Another place is virtues. Empathy is a big one right now. It is taken as a psychic virtue-thing that becomes an object of fascination, studied, discussed, extolled — but seldom actually done to acquire understanding of why someone perceives, conceives, and responds to things in ways that differ from us.

Another one that annoys designers: when appropriators of design language call an artifact they’re making “an experience”, they are obfujecting the subjective experience real designers aim to produce and replacing it with an object, which is a damn pity, since “experience” language was intended precisely to shift focus to the subject.

Religion is an obfujection wonderland. Atheists and theists alike obfuject God as a being who exists or doesn’t exist. Entire religious sects have been founded on obfujections that turned exemplary subjects, with whom we were to turn together toward God, into human idols.

We even obfuject academic subjects when we reduce them to factual knowledge.

Obfujection performs two useful functions.

First, it tames unnervingly incomprehensible realities by everting them into harmless graspable things.

Second, it absolves us from participation in realities that might threaten our current enworlding subject.

Exnihilist manifesto, opening?

Exnihilism, Philosophy

Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.

But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.

Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.

Making me feel like I’ve never belonged

Autobiography, Philosophy

When I was four or five, my parents gave me my first album, Beatles Revolver. One of my favorite songs on that album, and possibly my favorite song ever, is “She Said She Said”.

Strangely, all my life, until quite recently, I misheard the lyrics. Even now, if I don’t pay attention I still hear it as:

And you’re making me feel like
I’ve never belonged

That has been the dominant feeling of my entire life.

Enneagram experts tell me I am a five wing with a four wing. I’ve wondered if I might not be a four with a five wing. Five, for me, is how four expresses itself. I’m almost a four with an everything-else wing. I cannot get along with the other kids.

Part of my belonging problem might be that my judgments are very much my own.

On all important matters, I know exactly what I think. It is a direct result of effort. If I find myself at a theoretical, practical or moral loss, that loss becomes a philosophical problem. I have processed mountains of lead into gold with my industrial strength philosopher’s stone.

Further, I have paid close attention to what I admire (even when others disparage it) and what I experience as contemptible (even when others praise or “normalize” it).

I take my own judgments far more seriously than those who have not put effort into forming their own personal opinions, but who, instead subscribe to general expert-certified opinion, as if it were another cloud service, like Spotify, NYT or Netflix. I find the streaming beliefs of the people around me to be wrong at best, and more often vapid and embarrassing. The worst of these beliefs are the beliefs these subscribers hold about their own personal virtues. Self-awareness. Critical thinking. Empathy. Justice. Questioning of authority. Radicalness. The belief that they epitomize these things is pure metacognitive incompetence.

For this reason, whenever I am praised to condemned, I don’t think any better or worse of myself.

But that does not mean lame beliefs, stupid political attitudes, negative judgments or failure to appreciate my contributions do not bother me. They bother me a lot.

But they do not bother me as judgments of me as a person.

I experience them as evidence that I will never belong to groups who subscribe to such nonsense.

And it subscription nonsense, by which most groups are defined. The subscription medium, not the steaming content, that is the message.

I experience it as the hopelessness of ever having a place.

In times like these, we are forced to choose between social alienation or self alienation. Most take the road of self alienation.

They’re making me feel like
I’ll never belong.

The thing about design

ANT, Design, Philosophy, Politics

Latour, from “A Cautious Prometheus”:

Now here is the challenge: In its long history, design practice has done a marvellous job of inventing the practical skills for drawing objects, from architectural drawing, mechanic blueprints, scale models, prototyping etc. But what has always been missing from those marvellous drawings (designs in the literal sense) are an impression of the controversies and the many contradicting stake holders that are born within with these. In other words, you in design as well as we in science and technology studies may insist that objects are always assemblies, “gatherings” in Heidegger’s meaning of the word, or things and Dinge, and yet, four hundred years after the invention of perspective drawing, three hundred years after projective geometry, fifty years after the development of CAD computer screens, we are still utterly unable to draw together, to simulate, to materialize, to approximate, to fully model to scale, what a thing in all of its complexity, is.

So little design writing pays attention to the social reality on both sides of design — design-in-the-making and design-in-use.

Whenever designers wax political, they fall in line with politics-as-usual. They talk about all the ways design should serve the political goals shared by all good people, opposed by bad people.

It is as if they have never designed.

It is as if they have never aligned any diverse group of people around a goal before.

It would be so much better if, when politics comes up, people would wax designerly,

We do not need to politicize design. We need to designize politics.

Dysapparitions of material

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I read Bruno Latour very much as the best kind of Catholic.

I read him as a radical Marian (and the furthest thing from a “Sophiologist”).

I read Latour as the most rigorously devout disciple of Mary Mater.

And Latour knows better than anyone that, just as no woman can be reduced to what some man thinks of her, matter is not reducible to scientific fact — that is, what “the” scientific community thinks of Mother Nature.

Nietzsche, the devoted son of a Lutheran minister, once asked “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

But supposing truth is absolutely not a woman?

Supposing truth is a self-serving, unfaithful notion of woman?

Supposing this notion of “woman” makes relationship with any real woman — actual or metaphorical — impossible?

Now what?

Materialists are the incels of philosophy.

They are obsessed with an ideal object of thought they confuse with real being, and this confused obsession kills all possibility of relationship. The more the materialist obsesses over his object of thought, the more unreal and alienated his notions become. And she can intuit this. She feels it directly: this dude is interacting with some creepy doppelgängeress in his head, not with her. She recoils. Her devastating pronouncement: Ick.

She will open only to those who meet her as real, who converse with her as existent, who live life with her as companion, who become transformed by her, with her, in relationship with her.

She appears as herself only in relationship. She dysappears to those who grasp her as an object of hate or of infatuation or of distant worship.

Believe me, I raised two daughters, and I know an abusive profile when I see it.

The abuser’s tell: He arrives with a defined woman-role in mind, and he demands conformity to it.

“If you were a good girlfriend, you would…”

“If you really loved me, you would…”

Marxism is a collective abuser.

Marxism is an incel driven to psychosis by disappointment and resentment.

The world failed to live up to his high expectations, and he is extremely upset about it.

And he is making that disappointment her problem.

The existent real material order will not play her role, because she is a bad material order, and that is why she is unhappy.

A good material order would behave like a good material order, and then he would happy.

He would toil a little during the day, and write a little poetry in the evening. And the material order would smile sweetly and submissively. She would shelter him for free. She would cook for him for free. She would be an angel of compassionate care when he needs free healthcare. She would fetch his newspaper and slippers. She would perform her wifely duties, and not out of duty.

If she were a good material economic order, she would do all these things.

But she isn’t.

And now she will pay for it.

See what she made him do?

“What is Design?” chapbook

Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve been mulling over a project involving letterpress printed design wisdom.

Today, I am fantasizing about letterpress printing a chapbook, in an aphorism-reflection format inspired by Jan Zwicky’s beautiful Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor.

Here is my aphorism list so far:

  • “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)
  • “Design is everything. Everything is design.” (Paul Rand)
  • “Design should be invisible.” (Beatrice Warde)
  • “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
  • “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars” (Heraclitus)
  • “The best design tool is a long eraser with a pencil at one end.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “You can’t decide the way forward. You have to design the way forward.” (Marty Neumeier)
  • “Compete to be unique, not the best” (Joan Magretta, channeling Michael Porter)
  • “Usefulness, usability, and desirability: A useful design is one that people need and will use. A usable design is one they can either use immediately or learn to use readily. A desirable design is one they want.” (Liz Sanders)
  • “We think with our hands.” (Tim Brown)
  • “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Anonymous)
  • “Behind a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” (John LeCarre)
  • “Conflict divides the world into four halves.” (Anomalogue)
  • “Craft is material dialogue.” (Anomalogue)
  • “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” (John Dewey)
  • “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” (Albert Einstein)
  • “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” (Bertrand Russell)
  • “Start anywhere.” (John Cage)
  • “Nothing happens without a plan. Nothing happens according to plan.” (Anonymous)
  • “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” (Carl von Clausewitz)
  • “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
  • “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Willfred Sellars)
  • “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)
  • “What has a name is real.” (Basque saying)
  • “Never mistake motion for action.” (Ernest Hemingway)
  • “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” (Alan Kay)
  • “The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning.” (James Clear)
  • “It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.” (Adlai Stevenson)

I need more design-related aphorisms. If you have any, please share.

Ward Farnsworth on aporias

Philosophy

Ward Farnsworth‘s uncanny skill at putting the most difficult things in simple and clear words just amazes me.

I can’t even envy him. The man is in a whole different league, as thinker or writer, but obviously more than that.

I am especially loving his chapter on aporias in Socratic Method. It builds on the topic of ignorance and something he calls “double ignorance” from the chapter before:

…Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general. People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

Aporia is what happens when we apprehend our own double-ignorance.

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism. But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-EE-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind — a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question. Your feet are trying to find something solid to stand on and can’t.

Aporia can be a sign that its holder is departing a state of compound ignorance. You thought you knew something, but it turns out that you don’t understand it; you were ignorant of your ignorance, and now it’s clear. … People aren’t alarmed when they are questioned and know the answer. They aren’t alarmed when they know that they don’t know the answer. They are alarmed when they thought they knew and then realize that they don’t.

…double ignorance is, for Socrates, a kind of sleep through which everyone walks to some extent. Then you walk into a wall. The wall is aporia. The awakening is a rude one, but deeply valuable. The sensation of ignorance — of realizing that you know less than you had thought — is unpleasant, at least at first. It is experienced as loss by the ego, which has a built-in good opinion of its own wisdom. But Socratic study helps make that discovery feel more welcome. One comes to see that such a discovery isn’t really the loss of wisdom. It’s the arrival of it.

Then Farnsworth begins listing practical benefits of aporia:

…Aporia may be seen as a necessary stage before real learning can happen. You realize that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand them. Now you have a sense of something missing. Your confidence in your knowledge is gone. It needed to go to make room for something better.

…Aporia in this sense can also cleanse you of obnoxious qualities. Recall the discussion of the Theatetus … Theatetus had given birth to an idea that was pronounced stillborn. Socrates encourages him to keep trying, but says that Theatetus will be better off even if his ideas never improve. Aporia will have made him easier to put up with. Such humility may not seem a very exciting reward at first. But then think about how often people are too sure of themselves, and feel smart when they’re not, and how unendurable they are, and how dangerous, and how likely we are to be just as insufferable to others for the same reasons, and how many problems arise from nothing but this. Other people, it seems clear, would be better off if they realized how little they know, and with a suspicion that in the long run they show themselves to be fools in most of what they say. So would we all. Some shock therapy is a small price to pay for relief from those curses. — Aporia is a form of it.

…Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn. It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good-now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Then things get (at least for me) even more interesting…

We’ve just talked as though there are right answers to the questions under pursuit, and that aporia might inspire a harder search for them. But suppose you conclude, after many rounds of all this, that the answers will never be found. It still wouldn’t be time to give up. On a Socratic view it’s never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can’t possess the truth, you can get closer to it. Discourse that improves understanding becomes the valuable thing, but it works best if you forget that and act as though you’re in it to capture the truth.

And they start pressing into mystical regions. It becomes more apparent how Plotinus really was a neo-Platonist:

A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths — that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable. Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.

This way of looking at aporia might be inferred from the approach of the early dialogues. Why is the truth always sought and never discovered? Perhaps because it can’t be; that is the discovery. This idea finds some support in Plato’s Seventh Letter… “This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries — that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”

Now I will do a mic drop for Farnsworth by quoting Nietzsche:

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

This book exemplifies wisdom concealed in simplicity.

I’m halfway tempted to shelve my Farnsworth collection alongside my Marty Neumeier books.

Feeling better

Autobiography, Philosophy

The philosopher’s stone turns lead into gold.

You cannot spend a lead coin. You can’t even give it away.

So lead coins accumulate until they crush the life out of you.

Without my philosopher’s stone, my salary would be the death of me.

Job description

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

I do not aspire to be an expert, even in fields of expertise of my own invention.

If you need expertise, go find an expert.

But if no expertise exists to address what ails you, I’m here for that.

I’ll approach it as a philosophy design problem of the form “Here I don’t know my way about,” with the aim of reaching a common understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. I’ll design you a little localized philosophy that enables you and your collaborators to define and share a problem so it can be solved.

It will be messy and inefficient and unpredictable. But it will be interesting, if you can handle it.

It’s practical “beginner’s mind” without all the bullshit westernized Zen, with all its blissed out peace and escapism.

Etiquette and depth of faith

Autobiography, Philosophy

Life has taught me that some people will like me and others will not.

I don’t need to believe people who dislike or disrespect me are bad people. It just means I am probably not supposed to socialize with them, which includes working too closely with them. I’m sure that given the right setting, most of them are somewhere in the range of okay to awesome. They’re just not for me, and I’m not for them.

Others will like me right away — at first, as long as we do not exceed a certain depth — but past that point, they will like me even less than people who instantly dislike me. By “others” I mean everyone.

Of course, if my etiquette were better, fewer people would dislike me immediately. But that would require focusing on other things that I consider far more important than universal likability. In fact, it would require betraying those other things, since likability is something between real or feigned commonality of faith, and etiquette is the art of hiding difference. I’m out to differentiate, and deep disagreeability is the best means to that end.

One of my more pessimistic beliefs is that past a certain depth, we all diverge in faith. Deep down, we are all un-alike and perplexing to one another, and need to suppress this essential difference in favor of commonality. If you automatically drive to the maximum depth with every friend, you will be a friend-losing machine. I am understanding that my depths are just for me. Nobody’s going down there with me. Not only is that reasonable; it is good. I’m not going down into their depths with them either! Fair is fair.

(Oh, you’re different? You respect debate and difference of opinion? Debate and opinions are shallow. Perhaps limiting discussion to depths that debate can resolve is a weird sort of etiquette. Perhaps someday some Francis Fukuyama type of pop political theorist will write a book that casts liberalism as some sort of etiquette of the public sphere. See, this is the kind of rude shit I try to keep to myself, except here on my perverse public diary, this anomablogue. Abandon hope all ye who enter here and eavesdrop on my private thoughts.)

If you have talents in etiquette, that is, social grace, you can reveal more of yourself without irritating or offending others, but I am untalented in that area.

For now, my primary use of etiquette is keeping the few friendships I value.

Autobio DNA

Autobiography, Philosophy

In high school geometry I would never memorize proofs beyond the fundamental axioms. I found it easier just to re-prove them. It took me longer to finish tests, but my teacher let me work through the lunch break.

And this has been my life ever since, for better and for so much worse.

On youthful omniscience

Philosophy

Nietzsche: “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.”

I would add: “And he who thinks badly knows everything.”

Ideally, youthful hubris gradually matures as it is tempered  by repeated surprise.

By surprising others and being surprised by them, hubris gives way to a capacity and inclination for mutual respect.

The prerequisite for this tempering is integrity. The personality cannot be hard to the point of brittleness so that it shatters under the impact of shock, but it must be firm enough that it can hold a shape, however much its form develops. But it cannot be soft to the point of formless liquid that experiences ripple and slosh through it, leaving no enduring change. The ideal mean is probably not the halfway point between unyielding and unresisting, but more in the vicinity of 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unyielding.

An excessive appetite for domination or submission — often reflected in preference for authoritarianism tends to retard development of mutual respect. But so does an excessive aversion to all bonds of obligation, which makes mutual respect unnecessary and encourages social alienation, at a terrible cost to the human soul.

Liberalism is operationalized mutual respect. But authoritarians and alienated anarchist punks know nothing of this — while believing they are wise to it.