I love how 20th century intellectuals are always making grand generalities about “man”. This formula produces sentences that smell sweet and musty like a yellowing paperback.

“Man is the concept adopting and using animal.”

What have I learned reading millennia of eloquent bellyachers?

Every generation is convinced it is the last because life without self is inconceivable. What we can’t conceive, seems to us, nonexistent: thus, the eternally receding nigh of endtimes.

Every generation longs for the simplicity of earlier days, because all we want to bequeath the future from our hassled present is the relatively simple center, and the simple center of former times is all that is bequeathed to us. The present for everyone at all times is mostly hassling periphery around a tiny, vulnerable, simple center.

We are always stunned by the rapid change of present times, because that is what present times do: they change rapidly. “Ha, you call that rapid change?” says each generation to its stunned ancestors.

Now is always lonely, isolating, alienating. Human life is like this, or at least it is for the kind of person who needs to write.

We are always in a unique predicament. Every epoch, every people, every person: in the uniqueness of our predicament, we are all alike.

In our conviction that I, alone, at the center of my own universe, am in a unique predicament that nobody else can understand, we are all alike.

In our belief that all others must displace themselves and recenter around the absolute center of the universe — we might try to make this happen. Maybe we even should try.

And if life is especially malevolent, it might allow us to succeed for a time.

A friend asked me what I meant by interspection.

By interspection, I mean our attention is neither turned inward toward ourselves, nor outward toward the world, but rather otherward into each other’s inwardness.

Everyone else’s inner life is now everyone’s problem — both their phony public passions they pass off as their subjectivity, and their more authentic personal perspectives they mistake for objectivity.

We’re all interspecting interverts, and we are still pretty horrible at it. We celebrate it as “empathy” but very little of it penetrates beyond our collectively-believed, individually-imagined amateur sociologist fantasies.

Yesterday, I came upon this passage in William Barrett’s Irrational Man:

Yet a great formal style in painting has never been created that did not draw upon the depths of the human spirit, and that did not, in its newness, express a fresh mutation of the human spirit. Cubism achieved a radical ?attening of space by insisting on the two-dimensional fact of the canvas. This ?attening out of space would seem not to be a negligible fact historically if we re?ect that when, once before in history, such a development occurred but in the opposite direction—when the ?atness of the Gothic or primitive painters passed over into the solidity, perspective, and three- dimensional style of early Renaissance painting—it was a mark that man was turning outward, into space, after the long period of introspection of the Middle Ages. Western man moved out into space in his painting, in the fourteenth century, before he set forth into actual physical space in the age of exploration that was to follow. Thus painting was prophetic of the new turn of the human spirit which was eventually to ?nd expression in the conquest of the whole globe. Have we the right, then, to suggest that the ?attening of painting in our own century portends a turning inward of the human spirit, or at any rate a turning away from that outer world of space which has hitherto been the ultimate arena of Western man’s extroversion?

…The subjectivity that is generally present in modern art is a psychological compensation for, sometimes a violent revolt against, the gigantic externalization of life within modern society. The world pictured by the modern artist is, like the world meditated upon by the existential philosopher, a world where man is a stranger.

When mankind no longer lives spontaneously turned toward God or the supersensible world… the artist too must stand face to face with a ?at and inexplicable world.

Do we still feel like strangers to ourselves? Do we still recoil from a “gigantic externalization of life within modern society”? I don’t think so, but mostly because most of us were born into a nearly complete state of alienation, have never known anything else and consequently we have no contrasting state of being with which we can compare our own.

I would argue that the analogue to extraverted exploration or introverted introspection most conspicuously and painfully present in our time is interspection — a crisis of intimacy.

In our time, largely due to social media (sorry for this boring, but true analysis), a person’s inner self is subjected to an unprecedented level of external exposure and scrutiny, both in voluntary expression and involuntary behavioral monitoring and increasingly sophisticated means of linking, tracking and analysis. At the same time, a self is assailed and buffeted by other people’s personal expressions, spoken with sincerity cranked to the maximum — heartfelt responses to tragedy, anguished pain cries from assorted microagressions, agitated responses to these social phenomena from rando bloggers amped-up on ungodly doses of yerba mate.

Even the news is infused with a standard opining and emoting. All journalism is gonzo journalism now, even when the journo subjectivity admixed into the story, far from spicing it and tilting the perspective dilutes it and locks it into a standardized, redundantly radical viewpoint.

And at work, matters are even worse. Rather than leaving our controversial opinions at home, as etiquette once required, we are now encouraged to bring our opinions “authentic selves” to work — at least selves selected from the list of recognized identities. Unique selves require far too much effort to understand, and tend to strain busy peoples’ patience. From time to time these select authentic selves are invited/required to ritualistically confront one another in encounters that are intentionally “uncomfortable” and to affirm the necessity and goodness of the ritual and the social theory that prescribes it.

And, at least in the rapidly-expanding design world, teams are plunged into resolving problems of human understanding, unknown 20 years ago. These problems are pushed to the edges of comprehensibility, because these are the extremes that yield innovation. This kind of deep working produces a completely different kind of intimacy crisis than those of social media, editorialized news, workplace authenticity and the like, all of which are counterfeit intimacy performed by social actors whose whose selfhood is eclipsed by role and buried beneath layers of personae — or what was known in existentialist circles as “bad faith”.

It is no coincidence that design’s intersubjective intimacy occurs precisely where people are trying their best to be objective by directing their mind away from who they think they are toward what the think they are not. Ironically, here is where we encounter the raw realness of fellow-souls, in the schematic interference of divergent conceptualizations and those intuitions we resort to when our conceptual schema fail us.

We seek our selfhood in the object at the center of our own experience, which is exactly the wrong place to look for self. Self is more vividly present everywhere but there, especially in times when that egoic object is such a matter of concern that it is smothered in image.

This is why Pinterest is the only social medium where selves can be found. Everywhere else is just persona propaganda.

“The chief moral commandments which a people is willing to be taught and have preached at it again and again are related to its chief failings, and thus it is never bored by them. The Greeks, who all too frequently failed to evidence moderation, cold courage, fair-mindedness or rationality in general, were glad to give ear to the four Socratic virtues — for they had such need of them and yet so little talent for them!”

This is definitely true of me and my designerly virtues. I’ve struggled my whole adult life to acquire these bits of discipline — while simultaneously taking care to not smother out the vicious intensity beneath these virtues that is the true power source of my productivity. Right now, I’m reading Nietzsche to counterbalance my virtues, and it is making me much harder to get along with.

I added a phronesis entry to Designerly virtues.

Phronesis — Phronesis is tacit know-how acquired through hands-on experience. Being tacit, phronesis doesn’t always lend itself to explicit language, but rather, demonstrates itself in practice. When people who understand theory very clearly and who can explain it eloquently, struggle to apply that theory effectively and to adjust their methods to fit contingencies, phronesis is what is lacking. Another reason phronesis is important is “intuitive” design harnesses existing or easily-acquired phronesis to enable users to skillfully interact with a system without having to explicitly figure out or memorize how. Phronesis complements theory with tacit skills that enable mastery of theoretical and physical systems as well as effective improvisation where explicit methods are not available.

If I didn’t already own a copy of Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines, I’d have to buy it, if only to house this quote in my library:

As phenomena to be studied, discoveries are interesting, but forgettings are profound. Through the one, we explore and celebrate our insights, but through the other we discover our blindness. It is only through the encounter with a reality that we could not perceive that we see the limitations of our perception—and so begin the slow process of transcending them.

This morning, for no particular reason I’ve been poking around in Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer

In addition to the various particular errors we may make regarding particular thinkers, there is also a common mistake that we commit again and again in our interpretation of all thinkers. We mistake the philosopher’s surface, exoteric teaching for his true one. And again, these surface teachings, however much they may vary from thinker to thinker, all have one essential thing in common: they are carefully designed to create the false appearance of conformity to the most powerful dogmas of the time, which it is too dangerous to question openly.

Therefore, the established custom of reading esoteric writers non-esoterically has a very precise and predictable efect on the practice of scholarship. It gives rise to a systematically recurring misimpression: everywhere we look, we see the dispiriting spectacle of the human mind vanquished by the hegemonic ideas of its times.

It appears that even our most celebrated geniuses—our Aristotles and Shakespeares—with all their extraordinary gifts and agonized eforts, always end up just confirming the myths of their particular “cave.” It is difficult to overstate the profound inluence of this recurring experience. It forms a crucial but unseen part of the intellectual background of our times, motivating the late modern or postmodern predisposition to the radical critique and disempowerment of reason. In the age of the forgetfulness of esotericism, it comes to seem obvious to everyone that the human mind is not free but wholly contextualized, culture-bound, socially determined. And if that is so, then all our truths are ultimately local, accidental, and temporary; our highest wisdom, only the hometown ethnocentrism polished up.

The awareness of esotericism, by contrast, reveals the falseness, the calculated insincerity of this ubiquitous facade of philosophical conformity—which now comes to sight as an ironic and artful act of resistance. Behind this defensive wall, sheltered and encouraged by it, thrives a secret underground of daring and dissent, a freewheeling speak-easy of the mind. But we, who should celebrate this, are somehow reluctant to believe it. Yet, as an old Ethiopian proverb observes, “When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply—and silently farts.” Every subject class has its silent arts of resistance—the philosophers too. For where force is lacking, fraud and secrecy are the primary agents of freedom. If modern scholars thought more like wily peasants, they would be less resistant to the essential truth that there is always more freedom in the world than the compliant surface of things would lead one to suppose. Thus, the true history of human reason is of necessity a secret history: when the practice of philosophic secrecy is once seen, then the faculty of human reason no longer appears quite as servile and culture-bound as it inevitably does to us.

In short, the ignorance of esotericism, by blinding us to the hidden world of freedom, keeps us in ignorance of ourselves—of the surprising power and independence of the human mind, of its unsuspected capacity to resist time and place.

I am wondering if I might, through the art of esoteric writing, be better able to speak the truth about the systematic oppression, alienation and marginalization of the most vulnerable members of our society — while avoiding persecution by those who enjoy grossly unfair privilege and power so ubiquitous it seems normal and natural?

“A: Do I quite understand you? You are in search of something? Where, in the midst of the present, actual world, is your niche and star? Where you can lay yourself in the sun, so that you also may have a surplus of well-being, that your existence may justify itself? Let everyone do that for himself — you seem to say — and let him put talk about generalities, concern for others and society, out of his mind!

B: I want more; I am no seeker. I want to create my own sun for myself.”

We seek common ground to serve as a foundation for establishing new agreements.

However, common ground has another equally important, but often neglected, function: providing landmarks needed for precise triangulation of subtle but consequential disagreements.

Without shared points of reference, it is impossible to trace perspectives back to their originating standpoints — which, for each of us, is the precise center of the universe.