Category Archives: Philosophy

Kant’s glorious limits

Philosophy

I might need to go back and reread Critique of Pure Reason.

A great many of my core ideas came from this source, most of all my understanding of intuition. But strangely, I suspect that Kant underestimated the preconceptual, prelinguistic nature of intuition and its importance to our lives.

I also suspect — maybe recklessly — that Kant’s categories pertain most to what Husserl called the lifeworld. These categories are concepts necessarily universal to all humans beings. From these, all other concepts are derived.

But the conceptual derivations are motivated by myriad intuitions beyond our sensory perceptions.

And to complicate things, once we conceptualize our intuitions, we can intuit these second-order concepts and make second-order concepts of first-order concepts derived from the lifeworld. And these concepts and the symbols used to express them can also be intuitively connected, to make conceptual systems that can themselves be encapsulated as concepts. If I am not mistaken think this is the core of Peirce’s semiology.

Another possible divergence from Kant is my belief that human beings (or at least many of us) have a need to situate ourselves in something beyond ourselves (here, I believe, I’m still in agreement with him) that we are called not only to think about or acknowledge the impossibility of knowing — but somehow obligated to participate in this being. Closest to us are interpersonal and social realities.

I think many, but not all, human beings intuit these human relational realities in a direct way. (I know for a fact my wife intuits them very vividly and reliably.) Years ago I read an article by Jonathan Haidt where he suggested that Kant might have been on the autism spectrum. Autism appears to inhibit suprapersonal intuitions, and some have even essentialized autism as “mind-blindness” resulting in “absence of theory of mind”. This might account for why social categories were excluded from his table. But had he been more interpersonally intuitive he might never have produced his fantastically precise and elaborate philosophical system in the first place, so let us give thanks not only for Kant’s amazing abilities but also his blessed incapacities.

But I think these relational intuitions might register our situated relationship not only among other people but to being itself. The best metaphysics is not theoretical speculation, but rather articulations and conceptualizations of metaphysical intuitions. Metaphysical intuitions, of course bring us into spirituality and religious life and ideas. If we carry Kant’s conceptual moves with us into this domain of reality, we are now on Cassirer’s turf. I need to read more of him, too. Reading his great (maybe greater!) student Langer’s magnum opus Philosophy in a New Key completely changed my understanding of understanding (by showing me modes of understanding that are purely plastic or performative and beyond the grasp of explicit language) and prepared me for Latour. Another reason to feel grateful for Kant’s limitations: it left wonderful work for post-Kantians to do.

So many things to read! And I’m sitting here in this wonderful room with all these books around me, some of which I have read and loved and others electric with promise.

Ingratitude and alienation

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When someone gives you something that you value, either willingly or unwillingly, and you try to take possession of it “no strings attached” without gratitude toward the giver, something very bad happens to your soul. You suffer guilt.

This is especially true if you have no theory of relationship to help you conceptualize what gratitude is — or for that matter, any concept expressing one’s own organic belonging to living orders that transcend one’s own individual selfhood.

A philosophy of isolated self cannot make sense of gratitude, of jealousy, of loyalty, of belonging, of guilt or even of love beyond the inwardly felt emotional content. Such a philosophy takes these valid intuitions of spiritual realities as psychological hallucinations, or as biological responses to stimuli. It severs a whole category of direct intuition from the reality intuited, and this severing leaves the individual cut off from its own relational context. That is, it takes the perception of an apparent phenomenon as pure pheno- (appearance) with no corresponding superperceptual reality (noumenon).

A philosophy of isolated self is not only an expression of a spiritual state of social alienation, but alienation of all being who transcends the egoic self. All being of this kind is assigned names and explanations that strip them of the same kind of being that an egoic self has and reduces them to physical concepts.

And even this physicalization is distortive, because physical concepts do not necessarily involve any actual relationships with matter.

Physics, and science in general, is a particular class of theories about material relationships, substantiated by closely observed material interactions and rigorous tracing of causal implications of what is observed, expressed as theory. But a great many folks who never stepped foot in a laboratory or much concerned themselves with how laboratories generate theoretical knowledge, accept scientistic doctrine the way others have accepted Christian or Buddhist doctrine without ever undergoing the kinds of firsthand experiences that make immediate sense of these religious concepts, and in fact necessitate them. Scientism is an ungrounded dogma with exactly the same form as dogmatic religion, just populated with a different style of content. In other words, the medium is identical, and its spiritual effect (message) is the same.

The spiritual effect is compulsive playing of construction toy games with abstract concepts derived from physics (or theology) without ever contacting, or missing contact or even wondering about the concrete realities from which these abstractions were abstracted!

Notice how this dogmatic physicalization move resembles the self-isolating one: A revelation of a given reality is taken as the only reality, severed from the reality given. The experience of givenness of reality is accepted as real, but the given reality is denied reality. An intuition of relationship with being beyond oneself is taken as an experience within the self (an emotion one has). A theory of matter derived from disciplined and intensive interactions with matter is taken as knowledge of matter. And of course, infamously, a belief in a theology (a serious attempt to make sense of one’s actual religious life in relationship with divine being) is treated as religion itself, as if a religion is a belief system!

All these moves ignore the fact that all knowledge is abstracted from concrete reality, and concrete reality is given by intuition. Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

And if you habitually suppress intuited givens, especially intensely intuited givens, in order to preserve a construction of ungrounded concepts, you will suffer alienation. Less and less of reality will feel real to you. As social alienation increases, people will feel like phantoms or identity avatars. As world-alienation increases, the world will seem like a simulation or shadow play. And you, yourself, will feel like a ghost, dissipating and reappearing, today as one me and tomorrow another. A thunder-perfect nobody, alienated from self, precisely because that self is alienated from whatever is not of itself.

The strange thing about alienation is how all its various forms converge at the same abyss-point, the antipode of the esoteric summit: “Mind as its own place.” Milton knew.

But when we intuitively ground ourselves in a shared reality, intuited and valued diversely, but loved in common, we now have ground for participation in something realer than real in whom we subsist. We now have the participatory medium we need, connecting us to each other, connecting us to a world that feels real, connecting us to reality beyond our own sphere of experience and knowledge which may at any moment irrupt into our midst, apparently from nowhere, changing everything.

Guilt is real, gratitude is real, love is real because we belong to something greater than us. And that belonging is the source of all meaning. If we know this we will feel grateful for our guilt. If we do not, we will feel anxious hostility toward even love.

Kvetch

Autobiography, Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.

There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.

Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!

I can’t win!

And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!

I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.

I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.

I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.

St. N.:

Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.

Intuition, commonality and scalar being

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

In all three facets of my work — as a philosopher, esoterist and designer — intuition is central to what I do, not only in the content and goals of my work, but in how I approach the work and do the work.

By intuition, I mean something quite simple. To dumb it down to the simple essence, intuition means “without linguistic mediation”. Whenever we experience or know or do something without using words to explain it to ourselves or to direct ours actions, that is intuition.

We can have intuitive perceptions, intuitive responses, both with people (with others and ourselves), with things around us, intuitive understandings and with reality in general.

Intuitive perceptions and responses is the stuff of what Husserl called the lifeworld. We spontaneously effortlessly see-as and wordlessly deal with the things around us. We only reach for language if something resists our intuition, and we need to figure out what it is or how it works or what we ought to do.

It is almost the same with our social environment. Through what Garfinkel called ethnomethods, in social settings where we “belong”, we know how to spontaneously and wordlessly “read” other people’s symbolic actions, and to produce legible symbolic actions so we are understood. Here, too, we only resort to explicit language if things get awkward and an explanation is needed, or, in more extreme cases, demanded.

Finally, at the heart of it all, radiating to the furthest reaches, is our intuitive understanding of how particulars hang together within the universal. Prior to any explicit thought, we carry an intuited ontology within an intuited metaphysics. Or, if you prefer, we can say we have an intuited sense of everything, within which every thing is intuited, in intuited relation to everything and to every other thing. Some call this “worldview”, but the spectatorial overtones can mislead. I (perhaps confusingly) call this intuited ontology and metaphysics a faith. A faith is not what we believe, but that by which — by whom — we believe.

And all our activities, solitary and social, materially and symbolically shape the world we share. In our immediate environments, where we have ownership, we are able to shape it according to our own preferences. We have less and less influence at as scale increases. At smaller scales, we actively shape the material environment, often to make it more accessible to intuition. At larger scales we influence it only indirectly, if at all, and often what is outside of our control is also unintuitive, and, therefore in need of explanation. Here we use language to make as much sense of things as we can, to get it somehow to fit our faith — our intuitive sense of everything and things in general. This material shaping of our environment and of our general understanding of things we influence and cannot influence is what I call an enworldment.

As a designer, I am concerned with the shaping of environments. My goal is to shape them in such a way that they are readily intuited (with minimum need to figure them out), can be interacted with intuitively (with minimal need to verbally direct one’s actions) and most of all, intuited as valuable — as stabilizing and enriching one’s own enworldment.

As a philosopher, I am concerned with the shaping of symbols, primarily linguistic ones. But some of my most important symbols are visual or diagrammatic, and these help me extend the reach of my philosophical work. I have come to recognize that my philosophical work overlaps with the genre of hermeticism, in that it deploys words and diagrams and dense visual symbologies to say true things about reality beyond the scope of words. I’ve been talking a lot about objects held and valued in common, but one of our most important common objects are symbolic, linguistic and literary.

Finally, as an esoterist I am interested in what can be done with faiths. They are far from immutable. They can change in ways that can make life immeasurably and ineffable better… or worse. Think of this as soul hacking. There are many possible means for hacking souls, but my favorite means, and the one I am best at is hermetic philosophy. But design is also a powerful tool, because design shapes materials into media, and media convey and support (or block and undermine) faiths.

These three intuitive activities, initially separate concerns of compartmentalized parts of my self, over three decades have gradually converged and grown together into one complex multifaceted being. Three trees have intertwined into a lattice, and in their interilluminating density this shared set of ideas have gained reality and a palpable halo of significance. And I, as a person, have gained a sense of integrity, wholeness and reality. I am no longer spiritually fragmented, conflicted or of two or more minds on important matters.

I think, feel and act more wholeheartedly, because of my inward richness of common concerns.

I have enworded myself with enworldment.

It has been obvious to me for decades now that being is scalar, and that the individual person is only one of these beings.

Unfortunately, in this time, many of us have developed a great number of conceptual and linguistic habits, reinforced by scientistic metaphysics, to obscure and explain away the smaller and larger scales.

People who rely entirely on language for their thinking, and people whose thinking is purely instrumental (used to direct practical and social activity) will be entirely oblivious to this reality. People who depend upon ready-made words with ready-made definitions as their thought construction materials cannot think with the originality of those who articulate intuitions to develop new generative language. It is the difference between a person who enjoys constructing elaborate new things with LEGO blocks and the inventor of LEGO blocks. It is the difference between ingenuity and genius.

But if we take our intuition seriously, sub-individual and super-individual being is manifestly real. It is given even when we lack language-equipped concepts to receive it.

My first observation was of being at the smaller scale. I noticed that people became different in the company of different people. They used different words, behaved differently, exuded different energy. I intuited as different. I also notice some aspects of them were suppressed or marginalized. We see this when people fall in love. They can almost become strangers to us in their new intimacy with another.

I associated this with politics. For example, when the Germans invaded France in 1940, they met less resistance from the French Army than might have been expected. But this was not just weakness. Much of the French right felt more loyalty to the right wing spirit of the Nazis than they felt for their own republic. And when the Nazi successfully conquered Paris, they established the infamous right-wing Vichy government to govern southern France. For the Vichy French there was more solidarity across the right-wing parties than for the left and centrist French.

Similarly, across two people newly in love, spiritual factions within each can come together with such powerful affinity that it breaks the each person’s pre-love integrity, to create a new integrity between them. They become disordered and reordered, and both can estrange them from the people who had been important to them before they fell in love. This threat of estrangement and its reality is the substance of jealousy. Jealousy is the intuition of relationship-threatening psychic reorderings.

I already hinted at the larger scale beings with my Vichy France analogy. Nations are always uneasy alliances of ideological factions. Some nations have inward integrity. The factions might disagree on certain matters, but they hold other things about their nation in common, valuing them in different ways. People agreeing that they are valuable, even if what is valued differs. But if ideologies begin to value their own ideological ideas more than their nation, they may even become hostile to their nation for refusing to share their ideological loyalties. They might break faith with their own national tradition and betray it with dalliances with more like-minded foreign actors.

I first intuited this kind of ideological being as being (as opposed to simply agreeing on the same facts, preferable policies) — that is, as a shared living faith — during the charged time between 2001 and 2005 when a great many Americans discovered the intoxication of mass Standing United. Suddenly I head people adopting common language, concepts, lines of reasoning and attitudes that I’d never noticed before. I started feeling like something was speaking and acting through them, and I found it intensely and profoundly repellent. The same thing happened in 2020. People began to adopt new language, beliefs, concepts and behaviors en masse, which were not only different from before, but in direct conflict with the liberal values they used to espouse, seemingly sincerely. Now they were hardcore identitarians, who believed different categories of person should have different standing before the law, different social status, be awarded different privileges? and held to different norms. I had the same intuitive revulsion, but this time it was compounded with a sense of betrayal, because it was my liberal values they’d turned against. Their liberalism, it turns out, had been mere social conformism, not a principle of personal integrity. It seems that most people are like this. Most of us conform to a belief that integrity is important, but very few people have the integrity to resist if our tribe drifts into illiberalism, tolerance of evil or actual evil. This is normal, and this is why maintaining social order is so crucial. The majority of people, it seems, are potential extremists or supporters of extremism, because their primary mechanism of integrity is their social context, not a cultivated inner integrity. Many of the most spiritual-but-not-religious people who see religion as empty formalism (to put it in bigoted anti-Jewish language “pharisaism”) need religion far more than they can understand from within the debased faith they’ve accidentally drifted into on the currents of ideological conformity. Judaism, by the way, more than any other religion, precisely because of its formality, has emptied, fulfilled and refulfilled itself innumerable times, and has developed the richest set of symbolic forms diversely valued in common of any religion, very much including its brittle squabbling, splitting, warring offspring who believe they are the heirs of the covenant while dramatically demonstrating the opposite.

Of course, there are many scales of being between psychic factions within a person or across couples in love and ideological factions and nations. These are what interest me most, especially as a designer.

Organizations can have differing strengths of integrity. They can be integrated around common purpose, or they can be managed in siloes, or they can descend into departmental and factional wars. Organizations are beings composed of beings, belonging to larger scale beings.

To put it in the flakiest possible way, service design is in the egregore business. And design is their heir of alchemy.

I’ll just leave it there, to be rejected, neglected, forgotten or pondered.

+0(

What is horseshit?

Philosophy

Horseshit is whatever horrible stuff the far left and the far right can find to agree on.

It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

It is the crotchrot of the horseshoe.

Whatever else you find in any given pile of horseshit you can bet your life that there will be copious antisemitism.

Unsolicited advice to altruistic nihilists

Ethics, Polycentrism

Anyone who tells a child “You are not the center of the universe!” is arguing against the most immediate self-evident truth. Only an “adult” could fall for such a lie.

What we should be saying is “You are not the only center of the universe.”

When the child is a little older we can say “Polycenter yourself.” And “Center yourself around your own experiences, intuitions, understandings an?d purposes, but do so in affirmation of others doing the same. At minimum respect this reality, and to the greatest degree possible, love it.”

If we demand that children stop being self-centered and decenter themselves altogether? in the name of altruism, what we are really saying is “Abandon your own center and join me in this centerless abyss in which I abide.”

In this time and? culture this abandonment of center is what “adult” means. We don’t believe in our own cognition because it’s biased. We don’t trust our own moral judgments because our moral sense is unconsciously self-interested. But boy do we ever trust expert consensus. We trust it automatically and uncritically. We even believe the expert consensus that whoever conforms to these beliefs is a critical thinker, an individualist and an anti-totalitarian.

If someone ever commands you to “decenter yourself”, you should firmly refuse.

The appropriate reply is “I have polycentered myself. You should polycenter yourself.”

This advice to “polycenter yourself”, however, means something different from the exhortation to the self-centered child, who needs to know that other people, like themselves, are the centers of their respective universes.

This “polycenter yourself” means “The nowhere in which you abide, is not the center of the universe, nor of anything. I will not join you in your centerless abyss.”

It means “Recover your center. Then develop a capacity to inhabit a polycentered universe.”

Qualitatively, we are neither infinity, nor zero. Alchemically, we are like One, in that we are one; yet, we are not One. We are neither God nor nobody. We should all polycenter ourselves together.

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Shit theory

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct ??a?rtificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

The gift-rooted organization

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Exnihilism

The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.

In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.

The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.

Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”

But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.

Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”

Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”

Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.

The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.

Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.

Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.

This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.

Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.

Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become infused with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.

But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.

But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.

Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.

To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.

Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.

Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.

This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.

If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.

We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.

Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.

Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.

The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.

That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.

This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.

But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.

(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)

But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?

Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.

Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.

Dang. Out of time.

To be continued.

Cosmic collapse inspo

Autobiography, Esoterism, History, Philosophy, Religion

I have momentarily shifted attention from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Dodd’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Both books discuss the human condition after the fall of the Second Temple, in the years between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. This was also the time when ideas emerged that would eventually converge, coalesce and crystallize into Kabbalah.

Why this book? Because that time feels uncannily similar to now. It was a time of political instability, social dissolution and personal alienation. It was a time of intense, pervasive anomie. Public life could no longer serve as a source of meaning. The few who sought meaning, sought it within themselves and in small communities of others who did the same. The rest lived lives of quiet, noisy or violent desperation, delusion or predation.

This was the time that developed new forms of religious culture which have become so second-natural to us that we find it difficult to conceptualize religion or culture any other way. It dominates even our imaginations. And I think this time resembles that one in that both are ends of apparently eternal orders suddenly revealed as mortal, fragile, rapidly expiring. The main difference is that what is ending now, is what started then. I am — at least in my own imagination — recollecting our cradle from our deathbed, remembering how that cradle was, too, a deathbed. The books I am reading now are intellectual histories of that time, that give samples of how some of the seminal geniuses of the time experienced, interpreted and responded to a cosmos in collapse.

I suppose you could say I’m collecting cosmic collapse inspo and “best practices”.

Fertile overlap

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

Material, medium and goal

Enworldment, Philosophy

Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Where was I?

Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.

(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)

This is not a tree

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.

I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.

Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.

Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.

The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.

So many things are not a tree.

A city is not a tree.

A service is not a tree.

An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.

Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.

History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.

A culture is not a tree.

A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.

The Tree of Life is not a tree.