What is inconceivable to you is nothing to you.
Conception of the formerly inconceivable makes existence immerge (sic!) from nothingness.
*
A witness of ex nihilo creation no longer trusts nothingness: infinity’s backglow betrays it.
Any apparent nothingness might be a blind-spot concealing a novel everythingness.
Witnessing ex nihilo creation transforms nihilists into exnihilists.
Art announces that a new way to exist as a person is possible. It is a beacon from the center of a novel enworldment. It is a peculiar quality of art that is promises something unsaid and unsayable that cannot be doubted.
Nick was asked by an old colleague to provide a simple, universally applicable definition of fruitfulness.
Earlier, I would have pointed to Thomas Kuhn’s paper on theory choice, where fruitfulness, along with accuracy, consistency, scope and simplicity, was a characteristic that might make a theory more attractive to a scientist, depending (scandalously!) on that scientist’s taste in theories. About fruitfulness Kuhn said “a theory should be fruitful of new research findings: it should, that is, disclose new phenomena or previously unnoted relationships among those already known.” In a footnote he added “The last criterion, fruitfulness, deserves more emphasis than it has yet received. A scientist choosing between two theories ordinarily knows that his decision will have a bearing on his subsequent research career. Of course he is especially attracted by a theory that promises the concrete successes for which scientists are ordinarily rewarded.” He could have added the point that a fruitful theory is likely to win attention from other scientists seeking fertile ground for their own work, and consequently generating citations, the currency of academia.
But Nick uses the term “fruitful” in a distinctly different and more interesting sense. His usage goes beyond simply showing new phenomena or connections among known phenomena, or even pointing to new areas to research. What he means is close to what I’ve talked about in terms of conceiving what was, prior to the conception, inconceivable — a conception which frees insoluble problems to solve themselves.
Nick, however is less interested in the production of novel solutions, than he is in the discovery of novel problems. Of course, each novel problem has the potential to yield novel solutions. But, also, inside novel solutions are the seeds of an unforeseen novel problems. Fruitful production produces products that contain the seeds of future production. (No wonder we call fruit “produce”.) It is like Hegel turned inside-out, where instead of new ideas containing the seeds of their destruction converging to one Absolute, they instead contain the seeds of invention diverging to an infinite Plurality. Where Hegel sees decaying fruit, Nick sees another generation of sapling born to effloresce.
Since Nick gave the word “fruitful” this new tilt, Susan and I have both adopted it, and it has become a household term in our odd household.
Of course, I had to go on and name a philosophy whose aim is fruitfulness “fructivism” — a word with unavoidable phonetic associations with other reproductive language, which polite souls see as a drawback, but for me seals the deal.
So, given this conception of fruitfulness, how can we define fruitfulness simply, universally (meaning not only for philosophers or design innovators) and accessibly?
Yesterday, Nick and I collaborated on this problem. We worked iteratively, starting with the essential elements — conceptions, reconceptions, unforeseeability/surprise, novelty, an inexhaustible, perpetual process of production, creativity generativity — and we spiraled in on a two-word definition.
Spiral 1: The generation of new practical possibilities through reconception of a problem space.
Spiral 2: Creativity born of conception of what was inconceivable.
Spiral 3: Reconceptive creativity. Creative reconception.
Spiral 4: Generative reconception.
*
The more I think about fruitfulness and fructivism the more I realize that its significance exceeds its definition. At its unsayable core is a taste — a taste for inexhaustible possibility, for non-determination, for radical unpredictability, for freedom.
I feel certain the last two generations of Americans have been deprived of this feeling and are starving for it without even knowing it. A taste of it will go up like a spark in a granary.
Susanne Langer calls conceptions “generative ideas”:
The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences. Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form for us before the light fell on them. We turn the light here, there, and everywhere, and the limits of thought recede before it. A new science, a new art, or a young and vigorous system of philosophy, is generated by such a basic innovation. Such ideas as identity of matter and change of form, or as value, validity, virtue, or as outer world and inner consciousness, are not theories; they are the terms in which theories are conceived; they give rise to specific questions, and are articulated only in the form of these questions. Therefore one may call them generative ideas in the history of thought.
We recognize conceptions (or concepts or generative ideas — Langer appears to use these terms interchangeably) less by the answers they give, than by the questions they know how to ask, and these are deeply and emotionally bound up with our sense of reality:
The “technique,” or treatment, of a problem begins with its first expression as a question. The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it — right or wrong — may be given. If we are asked: “Who made the world?” we may answer: “God made it,” “Chance made it,” “Love and hate made it,” or what you will. We may be right or we may be wrong. But if we reply: “Nobody made it,” we will be accused of trying to be cryptic, smart, or “unsympathetic.” For in this last instance, we have only seemingly given an answer; in reality we have rejected the question. The questioner feels called upon to repeat his problem. “Then how did the world become as it is?” If now we answer: “It has not ‘become’ at all,” he will be really disturbed. This “answer” clearly repudiates the very framework of his thinking, the orientation of his mind, the basic assumptions he has always entertained as common-sense notions about things in general. Everything has become what it is; everything has a cause; every change must be to some end; the world is a thing, and must have been made by some agency, out of some original stuff, for some reason. These are natural ways of thinking. Such implicit “ways” are not avowed by the average man, but simply followed. He is not conscious of assuming any basic principles. They are what a German would call his “Weltanschauung,” his attitude of mind, rather than specific articles of faith. They constitute his outlook; they are deeper than facts he may note or propositions he may moot.
But, though they are not stated, they find expression in the forms of his questions. A question is really an ambiguous proposition; the answer is its determination. There can be only a certain number of alternatives that will complete its sense. In this way the intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.
In philosophy this disposition of problems is the most important thing that a school, a movement, or an age contributes. This is the “genius” of a great philosophy; in its light, systems arise and rule and die. Therefore a philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problems than by its solution of them. Its answers establish an edifice of facts; but its questions make the frame in which its picture of facts is plotted. They make more than the frame; they give the angle of perspective, the palette, the style in which the picture is drawn — everything except the subject. In our questions lie our principles of analysis, and our answers may express whatever those principles are able to yield.
There is a passage in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, setting forth this predetermination of thought, which is at once its scaffolding and its limit. “When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch,” Professor Whitehead says, “do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.”
Some years ago, Professor C. D. Burns published an excellent little article called “The Sense of the Horizon,” in which he made a somewhat wider application of the same principle; for here he pointed out that every civilization has its limits of knowledge — of perceptions, reactions, feelings, and ideas. To quote his own words, “The experience of any moment has its horizon. Today’s experience, which is not tomorrow’s, has in it some hints and implications which are tomorrow on the horizon of today. Each man’s experience may be added to by the experience of other men, who are living in his day or have lived before; and so a common world of experience, larger than that of his own observation, can be lived in by each man. But however wide it may be, that common world also has its horizon; and on that horizon new experience is always appearing….” . . .
The formulation of experience which is contained within the intellectual horizon of an age and a society is determined, I believe, not so much by events and desires, as by the basic concepts at people’s disposal for analyzing and describing their adventures to their own understanding. Of course, such concepts arise as they are needed, to deal with political or domestic experience; but the same experiences could be seen in many different lights, so the light in which they do appear depends on the genius of a people as well as on the demands of the external occasion.
This material is highly relevant to my own project of designing conception-systems.
Later in the book, Langer also discusses the phenomenon of perplexity — of lacking all conception to filter and organize chaos — and of the apprehension perplexity induces in a person.
[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos. Because his characteristic function and highest asset is conception, his greatest fright is to meet what he cannot construe — the “uncanny,” as it is popularly called. It need not be a new object; we do meet new things, and “understand” them promptly, if tentatively, by the nearest analogy, when our minds are functioning freely; but under mental stress even perfectly familiar things may become suddenly disorganized and give us the horrors. Therefore our most important assets are always the symbols of our general orientation in nature, on the earth, in society, and in what we are doing: the symbols of our Weltanschauung [world view] and Lebensanschauung [life view]. Consequently, in a primitive society, a daily ritual is incorporated in common activities, in eating, washing, fire-making, etc., as well as in pure ceremonial; because the need of reasserting the tribal morale and recognizing its cosmic conditions is constantly felt. In Christian Europe the Church brought men daily (in some orders even hourly) to their knees, to enact if not to contemplate their assent to the ultimate concepts.
This brings me to a theory I’ve been developing about conspiracy theories. By this, I don’t mean the theories about conspiracies normal people may form. I mean those theories that function as central symbols to a certain conspiracy-oriented worldview. Conspiracy theorists are notorious for their compulsive need to discuss their theories, cornering people with no knowledge or interest in the material, forcing them to endure lectures or engage in one-sided debates. Why the drive to foist unwanted conversations on others? I believe these “conversations” function as rituals, and barely as personal interactions.
Conception precedes concept.
This principle in action may be called called intuition when it infers, perception when it senses, skill when it responds and common sense when it assumes.
Have I mentioned my belief that our worlds are constructed primarily of interactions? It was Bruno Latour who made this real to me about ten years ago, and this was my last really big philosophical breakthrough. I suppose I could call it my “interactive turn”.
Latour’s descriptions of the conduct of science, and of everything, in terms of networks of interacting human and nonhuman actors changed how I understood both subjectivity and objectivity, and finally broke down my ability to keep those two categories discrete.
We are constantly interacting with our environments in myriad ways — physically, socially, linguistically, reflectively — reactively, deliberately, creatively, imaginatively, prospectively, habitually, absently, selectively. What we make of what is going on, that is, how we conceive it, has everything to do with how we respond to it, and how it responds back challenges us to make sense of it.
We respond to “the same” reality as related to us by other trusted sources, as passed off to us rumors from sketchy sources, as experienced as a participant in a real-life situation, as conveyed to us by a member of our own community following methods of the community, as taught to us during decades of education, as reported to us by journalists on varying integrity and ideological agendas, and as recalled by our own memories formed from different stages of our lives — and our response assumes some common phenomenological intentional object, some metaphysical reality, some commonsensical state of affairs on the other side of our interactions. But this is constructed out of interactions with innumerable mediators — people, things, thoughts, words, intuitions — who are included within or ignored out of the situation as we conceive it.
We lose track of the specific interactions that have amounted to our most habitual conceptions — our syneses (our takings-together taken-together) — which shape our categories of things, our expected cause and effect sequences in time, of our social behaviors and how they will be embraced, tolerated or punished.
Science is one variety of these interactions, but one we tend to privilege and to habitually project behind the world as our most common metaphysics. But once I learned to see scientific activities, scientific reporting, scientific explaining and scientific believing as a social behavior useful for helping us interact with nonhuman actors with greater effectiveness, somehow the relieved by need to rely on the metaphysical image science projects. I can believe in the effectiveness of the interactions and remain loyal to the social order established by science to do its work without feeling obligated to use a scientifically explicable reality as the binding agent for all my other beliefs to keep them hanging together. I see many good reasons not to!
I was sent an image of an everting sphere.
Notice how the sphere becomes a shell-like torus midway through the eversion.
Note that we human beings can view reality from an inner first-person and outer third-person and experiences at once a metaphysical behind and a metaphysical beyond.
Recall that the Chinese coin was understood to be the negative space of Tao, the inner square, yin, the outer infinity, yang — but it is obvious these two are one and the same from everywhere beyond the coin.
In the creation myth this everting sphere just spawned, human being, human existence exists everywhere that the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and periphery is nowhere forms a torus at mid-eversion, creating a unique everything, a soul, a person.
I wonder if I could make a book on images of eversions and the torus. I would make a chapbook, a second signature, to Geometric Meditations, and it would be called Everso.
Here’s the material I have so far, starting, of course with a dedication to the gorging torus, who I am now wondering is more complicated than I thought only days ago…
Ouroboros,
Gorging torus,
Rolled up like an egg
Before us.
I have needed the word “evert” many times, but had to resort to flipping, reversing, inverting, turning… inside-out.
Evert – verb [with obj.]
Turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out.
DERIVATIVES
eversible – adjective.
eversion – noun
ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘upset, overthrow’): from Latin evertere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + vertere ‘to turn.’
*
Now I can say things like:
In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood;
and the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
they will lie about on the ground
like broken branches.
Shells and Pearls (a collection of previous pearl posts):
An oyster’s flesh is delicate. It cannot tolerate anything harsh, abrasive or threatening. So it coats everything around it with a lustrously smooth surface of nacre.
The harshest, most abrasive and threatening thing for an oyster is the ocean. The oyster coats the entire ocean with a mother-of-pearl inner shell. And anything from the outside that gets inside the shell is also coated, until it becomes a pearl.
Outside the shell is ocean; inside the pearl is ocean.
A pearl, then, can be seen as an everted oyster shell; a shell’s inner lining, an everted pearl. That which requires coating can be called father-of-pearl.
*
Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating reality with lustrous likeness.
*
Nacre
You are absurd. You defy comprehension.
That is, you defy my way of understanding. I cannot continue to understand my world as I understand it and also understand you.
That is, you do not fit inside my soul.
I am faced with the most fundamental moral choice: Do I break open my soul? or do I bury you in mother-of-pearl?
*
Father-of-Pearl
(A meditation on Levinas’s use of the term “exception” in Otherwise Than Being.)
We make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.
Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most etymologically literal way, when they try to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.
In my own religious life, this category mistake is made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and then, consequentially, explicitly and consciously. Just as the retinas of our eyes see things upside-down, our mind’s eye sees things inside-out. We naturally confuse insidedness and outsidedness. By this view, human nature is less perverse than it is everse.
*
Imagine, with as much topological precision as you can muster, expulsion from Eden as belonging-at-home flipped inside-out.
That galut in the pit of your gut: everted Eden?
*
A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.
The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.
The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.
*
Nacre
Pearls are inside-out oyster shells. Or are oyster shells inside-out pearls?
The oyster coats its world with layers of iridescent calcium. With the same substance it protects itself from the dangers concaving in from the outside and the irritants convexing it from the inside.
*
Irridescent Irritation
Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…
*
A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.
*
An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.
Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.
Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.
It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.
*
Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.
*
We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.
*
We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.
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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.
*
Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.
*
Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.
A change in one of our comprehensive conceptions (a conception that holds together other conceptions) can change our overall all-at-once experience of the world.
Let’s be clear: this does not only change how we think about, talk about or respond to life: a comprehensive conception shift happens preconsciously and preverbally; it reshapes our perceptions; it reworks the gestalt sense of reality that invests everything with its own significance — what we sense, recognize, think about, interact with, dwell within.
We and our entire enworldment are transfigured. Every thing within everything has new significance and promise.
Scales, however, do not drop away. No pre-existent heaven is revealed. We are not made possessors of a hidden truth. Magic had absolutely nothing to do with it. No supernatural beings intervened or bestowed grace. Nothing happened that should offend an honest atheist.
But we do learn something miraculous from this experience, something that adds a new dimension to life: transfiguration is a permanent possibility. If this can happen, anything can happen.
*
In my opinionated opinion, this, precisely is what the world has lost sight of.
We are trapped inside a constricted, bleak, angry but arrogant worldview that sees its only fascination and occupation in destruction of the world out there. Woody Allen’s paradoxical restaurant review applies to the whole world of todays unwitting nihilists: “The food is just awful, and the portions are too small.”
It occurs no none of them that perhaps they are not yet qualified to change the world for the better. Revolutionaries with a nihilist mindset will sometimes destroy the corrupt crust of convention expecting to find a Rousseauean Paradise beneath — but all they find is long-denaturalized apes stripped of their second-natural humanizing artifice.
No, on the contrary: we have reconceptive work to do before we are qualified to change the world out there to make it more accommodating and human. But that work is good work, even before we roll up our sleeves to materially re-make the world.
The story of King Midas is a parable of an unwise man given the power to change the world to make it conform to his ideal.
*
Winston Churchill never sounded more Marxist than when he said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
What kind of building should be entrusted with shaping a future architect?
*
The strategy of changing our lives, our life experience and our very selves by changing the world around us is somewhere in the vicinity of the heart of leftist thinking.
To the degree one is a leftist (or progressivist), one will see suffering and dissatisfaction as something which comes from without, and which is best remedied through outward action. The world is adjusted to standards set by the self.
To the degree one is a rightist (or conservative), one will see suffering and dissatisfaction as something that is part of the very essence of existence, and which is therefore remedied through inner work. The self is adjusted to standards set by the world.
Of course, the world shapes us into the selves who, in turn, want to shape the world. And the world has been shaped by selves who were, in turn, shaped by the world. So say those of us who want to take responsibility for the standards we adopt, those standards by which we reciprocally, iteratively, shape ourselves and our worlds.
*
Every one of us who aspires to change the world has a terrifying question to ask, the the more we need to ask it, the less likely it is to occur to us to ask it: Given the scope, depth and density of my understanding of the world, should I be trusted — should I trust myself? — with shaping it to my ideal?
Contemplate Wikipedia’s definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability.”
Of course, as any good progressivist will tell you, there is no “the world”. Each person inhabits some “lived experience” largely determined by their position within society. So, which parts of the world have shaped us, our desires, our ideals, our standards? Is one of them better suited to the task of re-shaping the world?
*
Years ago I went to a design event. We were all given self assessments on our own mastery of various elements of design practice. The young designers right out of school scored much higher than the experienced designers, confirming their suspicion: “Those old designers don’t know any more about design than we young designers do.”
*
But, of course, the world can dominate and break us. We can betray ourselves and become complacent and bitter. We can succumb to resentment of those who have not been broken — those who have not given up hope, who still have the will to fight. And these will look at the young and see the future: “Those young idealists think they will change the world, but reality will catch up with them, and they will end up like the rest of us.”
*
Even the smartest expert, even the smartest group of like-minded experts, has knowledge of a tiny, selective speck of reality. It takes diverse minds with a diverse range of expertise to produce an adequate knowledge of human life. And the further we get from the reality we “know” –the lesson-the-ground, hands-on experience we have of what we know — the less problematic our knowledge seems.
To cultivate awareness of the limits of our knowledge, to learn to detect the mind’s own devices for forgetting its finitude by bounding itself within a tidy horizon of relevance and painting over its ignorance and blindness with the concealing paint of nothingness, to know that we do not know not only with our minds, but with our hearts and our bodies, and most of all when we vehemently disagree — these bring us to pluralism.
Pluralism is a modest term for an old honorific that has become preposterous and fallen out of use.
Here is a three-note chord of Nietzsche quotes, followed by some intensely Nietzschean reflections on Rorty.
*
“Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that the philosopher came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper — there is also something suspicious in it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.”
*
“There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher’s “conviction” steps onto the stage — or to use the language of an ancient Mystery: ‘The ass entered / beautiful and most brave.'”
*
“It was ever in the desert that the truthful have dwelt, the free spirits, as masters of the desert; but in the cities dwell the well-fed, famous wise men — the beasts of burden. For, as asses, they always pull the people’s cart. Not that I am angry with them for that: but for me they remain such as serve and work in a harness, even when they shine in harnesses of gold. And often they have been good servants, worthy of praise.”
*
If, in pursuit of truth, you track it into the driest, harshest regions of the desert, you might emerge with a conviction that truth is best used for pulling little carts.
But does every car need to haul the same burdens over the same terrain from the same origin to the same destination for the same purpose?
*
Rorty says: “We can, of course, stick with Kant and insist that Darwin, like Newton, is merely a story about phenomena, and that transcendental stories have precedence over empirical stories. But the hundred-odd years spent absorbing and improving on Darwin’s empirical story have, I suspect and hope, made us unable to take transcendental stories seriously. In the course of those years we have gradually substituted a making a better future — a utopian, democratic, society — for ourselves, for the attempt to see ourselves from outside of time and history. Pan-relationalism is one expression of that shift. The willingness to see philosophy as helping us to change ourselves rather than to know ourselves is another.”
My response to Rorty is that Pragmatism taken to its extreme pan-relationalist point suggests that we approach philosophy as a design discipline, concerned not only with what allows us to reconcile what seemed true and valuable in the past and what seems true and promising in the present, but with what situates us in reality and orients us toward it in a way that helps us live a life that we experience as good.
My question is this: If as pan-relationalists, we are truly, wholeheartedly, wholemindedly, wholebodiedly able to conceive of ourselves as transcendental beings — each of us entrusted with one of the myriad center-points of the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere — where objectivity is viewed as a product of subjectivity, the brain produced by mind — and if by doing so we manage to maintain communication and communion with our fellow humans, interact with the world effectively to cope with it, predict it, shape it, but also find ourselves more able to love being alive, to love others, to love reality as a whole — what is to be gained by refusing this pleasure? Why kill God if God lives for us, and nothing — not even truth — can compel us to? And isn’t this what pan-relationalism gives us? Are we afraid, perhaps, to give up our last shred of compelled belief, and to enworld ourselves in a world that shows us our value?
Why can’t a pan-relationalist, seeing myriad possible ways to use tools and language to enworld oneself, not place pan-relationalism in the background, like a deep heaven populated by innumerable stars, and go into orbit around a sun of his own choosing? Why stay out in the vacuum of space, unless you actually like it out there? A cozy, habitable planet has as much right to call itself “space” as those colder, emptier and more common expanses that seem so strange and remote to children of Mother Earth.
So I will now trot my conviction onto stage, beautiful and most brave, and let it bray: “If your philosophy works, if it makes the world not only intelligible and practicable but also profoundly desirable, and you manage to adopt that philosophy with all your heart soul and strength, so that doubts do not trouble you, there is no philosophical reason to abandon it.”
Yea-Yuh and amen.
This morning I was finishing up reading Rorty’s electrifyingly provocative essay on pan-relationalism while sporadically talking with Susan about how she’s feeling stuck in her current project.
As always happens when I read Rorty, I’ve been thinking about words as one kind of artifact that humans devise and use, but which, to us humans (especially to Rorty!) seems somehow more fundamental and unique to who we are than all those other non-linguistic artifacts we make and use.
I suggested to Susan that she could try prototyping her idea. Then I realized people never understand what I mean when I say prototype. They imagine something much more finished, where in design a prototype is the fastest and cheapest way to get an idea out of one’s head and into form where it can be interacted with, so designers can learn from the externalized interaction and further develop the idea. To give her an idea of exactly how crude, I showed her the classic IDEO example.
Suddenly, I understood something new.
Language is a prototyping tool.
When we propose, suggest, speculate, plan we are prototyping possibilities using spoken artifact that we and others imagine, consider, try out, or try on. They, in turn, can descriptively manipulate our prototype, and present it back to us in modified form. Conversation of this kind is collaborative language prototyping.
Of course, language is not always the best prototyping material. As an idea progresses toward concrete actualization, it becomes more and more risky relying on what we learn from our spoken artifacts (unless, of course, the ultimate artifact is itself linguistic). The lessons gleaned from the verbal artifact may not apply as expected to the material artifact that is our “final product”. But this is true of any prototype. Proper use of a prototype always relies on interpretation, analogy and imagination. Failure to see the intended analogy between the prototype and the intended final artifact is similar to missing the intended meaning of a sentence.
This is why, after talking out an idea, then drawing it or acting it out, it prototypes are developed iteratively, in increasing levels of fidelity that successively approach the final product — but the whole time designers rely on language to prototype potential variants, before committing more resources. “Talk is cheap.” And this is what makes it such a great prototyping material!
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For me, talking, imagining, drawing, crafting are all products of nonverbal intention — intuition.
Yes, these things are tough to talk about clearly, and if talking as clearly as possible is your goal, maybe you’ll want to deemphasize the role of tacit intention in your descriptions of how humans think, perceive, value and behave.
But if you are a designer, and your goal is to produce artifacts (including verbal artifacts!) that people find desirable, useful and usable and you discover that usability in particular requires a direct coupling between intention and action without intervention of language, you’ll find conflations of intention and language counterproductive, and clarity gained in confusing the two to be more of a vice than a virtue.
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I seriously want to make a linocut print of the IDEO prototype.
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I wrote something last week in an email that I want to glue to this line of thought.
…I have a redescription of panrelationalism to try out on you — one that does more justice to tacit knowledge. I’m happy to call “tacit knowledge” an ability and not a form of knowledge, as long as we distinguish ability from instinct or reflex by specifying that an ability is an intentional act situated within a pragmatic network of consequential (often unstated) beliefs.
I see language use as a special case of ability, the ability to use a certain set of words — but that the ability to wordlessly do something with an intent — “intentional attitude” should take the place of the “sentential attitude.” A sentential attitude is one variety of intentional attitude, an intention to speak.
We do not have to form a sentence to have an intention, but every sentence is directed by an intention, which is why we discover the ending of sentences as we utter the last word of it. We are using a tacit ability as we interact with an already-said sentence and available vocabulary for extending it, guided by a tacit intuition of what we want to say, in the very act of speaking.
If we replace every linguistic term with an intentional one, and understand that language is a special case of intention, I’m a panrelationalist. I’ll even extend an olive branch and admit that our linguistic genius can, in principle, speak any intention.
But the tradeoffs involved in allowing words to metonymically stand in for intentions is unacceptable for this designer, since good design is so closely bound up with wordless intentional actions. The metonymy erases a crucial distinction designers need to make. But also, there’s a fine line between metonymy and conflation, and I think philosophy is best served when we split hairs when we can show that there is a difference there that makes a difference. I think the “good design” difference is only the tip of the iceberg of reconceiving and potentially redescribing how minds use language and other tools.
Enworldment is my preferred term for lifeworld. I think it’s prettier and it has some desirable overtones: enworldment sounds like something that we intentionally shape for ourselves, where one can easily imagine an amoeba inhabiting a lifeworld.
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Enworldments are held together by conceptions. Conceptions manifest in a variety of ways — only one of which is language.
Language is undoubtedly one of the most important manifestations of conceptions. Language provides our best access to conceptions, our readiest way to share them and also our best means to change them — to interrogate them, weaken them, break them, and to find novel conceptions, entertain alternative ones, to evaluate them and to adopt new conceptions in place of old ones.
Because language is so closely connected with conception it is easily to reduce conceptions to language or reduce change of conceptions to a change of language. To to conflate or confuse conceptions with verbalized concepts is to commit a logocentric category mistake.
Why should anyone care about avoiding this mistake? Changes in conception have consequences that extend beyond language. For instance, changes in conception can affect perception, not only in how a perception is interpreted (such as learning to see an optical illusion) but even how it is experienced aesthetically (such as when we acquire a taste, or when our tastes change in response to changes in our lives).
This should not be surprising if you understand perception as sensory conception (sensorily taking-together). A painter’s or musician’s style manifests conceptions in visual or auditory form, and a style resonates with us when we receive it via analogous conceptions, or they intrigue or disturb us when we intuit a conception that we are on the edge of learning.
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From here I want to develop the idea that these conceptions we use to enworld ourselves and make sense of, interact with and to value some things at the expense of other things is not something we only do to enable us to change our world — though it does do that. The enworldment itself transfigures the world even before we apply it to our actions, in ways that make some better than others for different people in different contexts.
This is Rorty’s maxim: “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”
I think irony may be the ability to transpose first and third person perspectives, so we can experience our first person tragic situation as a third person comic one, or, less commonly, to enter a third person comedy and experience it as first person tragic. But it might be that irony is established on the transpositionability of perspectives, so that comedy, tragedy and irony all come into existence simultaneously as a trinity.
If this is true, irony can be seen as the cornerstone of Christian theology, the origin of the Cartesian split and the necessary condition of pluralism.
Somewhere around 2005 people in the habit of condemning their fellow citizens as “traitors” for questioning the Iraq invasion started sobering up, and in various ways tried to distance themselves from what they could now see was unfounded certainty about matters of moral intensity. But right up until that point, there was no question: They were on the right side of history.
From this experience I took one big, important lesson: Certainty that you are on the right side of history is the furthest thing from evidence that history will agree with you.
(It feels a little like 2005 to me right now.)
I hate to borrow techie terminology for philosophical purposes, and I hate it even more when the term has already been heavily appropriated and bastardized by non-techie types, but here it works so well I’m overriding taste.
I’ve been playing with the concept of deixis as a way of accounting for differences in metaphysical conception so deeply sedimented beneath our explicit beliefs and thoughts that we don’t even know how to discuss them, think them or even to frame questions about them.
The hypothesis is a simple one: infants are implicitly inducted into a metaphysics from their earliest moments of postnatal existence. The way the parents respond to the infant, speaking and interacting, orients the new person to the world in ways that prepare the mind for conceptualization and speech by establishing a pre-verbal ontology that I propose takes the form of categories of person — I, we, you, thou, y’all, it, those, them, and so on. The sequence in which these persons (the deictic structures) occur in relation to one another — which one precedes and becomes the “experience near” reference point for the next layer in the “stack” — has profound implications for the overall character of existence as full consciousness emerges and develops.
When someone else’s basic conception of reality seems absolutely bonkers to us, I suggest this might trace back to their deictic stack. Someone whose original sense of reality is a Thou is bound to have profoundly different intuitions from one whose first sense of reality is It. or I or We — or Them.
Years ago I heard it claimed that Asian parents interact with their babies differently from European parents. Where European parents hand a ball to their child, they say “ball”, which orients the interaction to 3rd person singular, Asian parents tend to say “thank you”, which orients the interaction within 1st person plural. These parenting practices might account for the deeper differences in sensibility across cultures.
I want to keep in keep in mind, too, that the differentiation of self from not-self might come down to resistance. That is, we experience objective reality most tangibly in what is objectionable — what stands out as unexpected or unwanted . This might mean that someone with a perfect mother might experience the reality of It long before the reality of Thou, precisely because Thou is so anticipative, accommodating, comforting that Thou does not stand out as other but remains submerged in subject. In such a case, the world of It might be the first resisting reality the infant encounters. Or a sibling intruding as Them or unskillfully or obtrusively interacting as a semi-accommodating Thou or We might come first.
I’m less interested here in establishing a a factual hypothesis than a way to frame the question of why we have such different basic conceptions of reality, and why are these intuitions so painfully difficult to think about and navigate? If we recognize that just as every explicit statement has its origin in indexicality (we know what a ball is because someone handed us a red ball and said “ball” or “red” or “thank you”), I think all our actions, utterances and thoughts refer back to an enworldment, and that one way to understand the character of the enworldment is to study its genesis as a sequence of original differentiations.
Now I’m sounding like Hegel. Maybe I’m just crossing Hegel with Piaget and multiplying them with James to produce a more pluralistic dialectic rooted in early childhood development. Dunno. But my mind keeps dragging me back to this idea. Also my own philosophical conversions have all taken the form of metaphysical replatforming (ugh) on different persons. With Nietzsche I refounded my 3rd person plural universe (scientistic, objective metaphysics, in which minds were an emergent property of brains) on a 1st person singular base (phenomenological, subject-first metaphysics, where whatever its ultimate nature, our mind conceives a brain and then conceives the brain as emergently generating mind, but, importantly, without in the least changing the fact that the mind came first). I called the first view “ecliptic” and described it as I-in-world, and the second “soliptic” / “world-in-me”. It is important to recognize that with this shift in perspective the thoughts themselves everted, and stopped being objective facts I thought about, and became the subjective process from which my thoughts came. Get where I’m coming from? It was a conversion experience that mapped to everything converts say, but it all happened without any supernatural processes an atheist would rule out. And I should know, because I would have ruled it out, too. Yet it was a religious conversion, and it left me religious (albeit in a way that really, really bothers theists who look too closely). Since then Jewish thinkers, culminating in Buber with his I-Thou dialogical thinking, have shifted me to 1st person plural via 2nd person singular, then again, via Latour into a thorough blurring of I-Thou-It that has led me to root metaphysics in a predifferentiated adeictic point beyond persons of any kind, but which must, to a finite person, must manifest, or (shit!!) incarnate in person form (whether 1st, 2nd or 3rd person). And now with all this three-person incarnating God talk I sound totally Christian. I do love Christianity, too. But I love it in a Jewish way, as a Jew.
Ebony and ivory
live together in imperfect harmony
Side by side on a well-tempered keyboard.
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Wikipedia says this about musical temperament:
In musical tuning, a temperament is a tuning system that slightly compromises the pure intervals of just intonation to meet other requirements. … Temperament is especially important for keyboard instruments, which typically allow a player to play only the pitches assigned to the various keys, and lack any way to alter pitch of a note in performance. Historically, the use of just intonation, Pythagorean tuning and meantone temperament meant that such instruments could sound “in tune” in one key, or some keys, but would then have more dissonance in other keys.
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Not only musical tuning but ideology can be well-tempered and made to harmonize (albeit imperfectly) with other worldviews — if it will compromise slightly.
A principled refusal to compromise on ideals means that one’s own worldview enjoys perfect self-consistency, but any other ideal will produce beliefs that clash with it and produce sour notes.
Is it a coincidence that well-tempered tuning makes just intonation less pure in order to allow different otherwise incompatible keys to coexist?
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A well-tempered social description is one that makes slight adjustments to a shared story to allow it to be compatible with multiple perspective.
To those who seek perfectly just intonation within one “correct” key, well-tempered tuning looks ungainly, ugly, arbitrary and flawed. But when you look at the problem of tuning pluralistically and ask how multiple keys can exist on a single instrument, the small compromises made for the sake of many keys appears grandly perfect and ideological perfection looks narrow and monotonous.
I need to look into whether metaphysicians think in terms of deixis. The idea is that even when we speak in the most explicit way about the most mundane matters, and the local deixis of the utterance is utterly fixed there is an implicit deixis beneath that pertains to the interrelations of all particular realities to ultimate reality. I’m calling this metaphysical deixis. I’ll try to sketch out what I’m trying to get at.
Most of us (at least those who belong to the professional class) adhere — often uncritically to an ontology that is metaphysically founded on the third-person singular. Let’s call this metaphysical stance “atomistic objectivity”. Atomic objects (“that”, 3rd person singular) combine into atomic systems (“those”, 3rd person plural). From this emerges consciousness (“I”, 1st person singular) who form relationships with others (“you”, 2nd person singular) to produce relationships — (“we”, 1st person plural) and society (“y’all”, 2nd person plural). 3s, 3p, 1s, 2s, 1p, 2p.
Traditional western religious people tend to root their metaphysics in a very different ultimate. The ultimate being is God (2nd person singular), who created the universe (3rd person plural) and everything in it (3rd person singular), before creating each of us (1st person singular), and all of us (1st person plural) and the people outside our faith (2nd person plural). 2s, 3p, 3s, 1s, 1p, 2p. It would be interesting to look into whether the current progressivist metaphysics is the same sequence, but reversed.
Solipsists try to build out their metaphysics on the 1st person singular, proceeding from 1s to 3s to 3p, etc.
First person singular reaches first person plural by way of second person singular.
People say the word “justice” and unconsciously conflate multiple concepts that do not necessarily belong together. I’ll list a few.
The most common concept, in every sense of the word, is ensuring that whoever has been harmed by another is given the satisfaction of revenge. Sadistic pleasure is compensated with sadistic pleasure. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, dignity for dignity. Everyone gets the same chance to enjoy inflicting suffering on others, to humiliate others, to coerce others — and nobody gets an unfairly large portion in the delight of debasing, controlling and harming others.
A second concept of justice is upholding of law. When the law is inexorably enforced, it reinforces to everyone that the law is a reality, that all must follow it, and that all can count on the fact that it will be followed by others.
A third concept of justice is pluralistic. This justice understands that every subject acts by its own logic — even when it tries to live according to the law. The third justice tries to “do justice” to this logic and to understand why another person thinks, values and acts in the way they do — to get inside their judgment to understand how and why this judgment might deviate from the public judgment.
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When we say justice, it is helpful to know 1) which justice or justices we, ourselves, are pursuing, and 2) what justice means for the others involved in the adjudication.
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This thought is not mine. I am paraphrasing.