Category Archives: Philosophy

Hannah Arendt on who and what

Chord, Ethics

Two quotes on who and what from Hannah Arendt:

No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.

and

The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a “character” in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us. This frustration has the closest affinity with the well-known philosophic impossibility to arrive at a definition of man, all definitions being determinations or interpretations of what man is, of qualities, therefore, which he could possibly share with other living beings, whereas his specific difference would be found in a determination of what kind of a “who” he is.

 

 

My best voice

Ethics, Politics, Pragmatism

I believe I’m finding my best voice for this time. I have to say something, and I have to say it the right way.

A sample of this new voice, which I sent a friend of mine, explains why I need to speak up.

Who-respect vs what-respect

Ethics, Politics

Respect is a universal need.

Everyone wants and needs respect.

We need self-respect, and we need respect from others. Many of us are too proudly individualistic to admit it that we need respect from others, but we absolutely need to be respected. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. It’s bad for everyone.

*

Some people have learned to view everything and everyone in terms of power, and this is unfortunate.

Seeing the world through the lens of power invites comparisons, confrontations, competitiveness, defensiveness. A powerful person threatens the power of another.

Respect is different. A respected, respectful person is no threat to anyone. A respectful person gives respect, wins respect and makes respect increase everywhere respect is exchanged.

People with healthy self-respect who are deeply respected by people around them are rarely ruthless power-seekers. But power-seekers often do disrespectful things to gain an advantage or defend a vulnerability, and are more often resented or feared rather than respected.

We are better off understanding each other as respect-seeking beings.

Seeing the world through the lens of respect-seeking makes us more respectful and more respectable.

*

The best kind of respect is who-respect: the respect for who we are as a person.

If we feel that we cannot be respected for who we are, we will seek what-respect: a respect for what category of person we think we are.

*

What-respect, however, cannot substitute for who-respect.

What-respect can alleviate social starvation, but not much more than that.

When our self-respect is mostly what-respect, and whatever respect we get from others is mostly what-respect, we cannot be satisfied with ourselves, with anyone we know or with the world. A diet of too much what-respect and too little who-respect leaves a soul irritable, anxious and resentful.

What-respect is empty calories for the soul.

*

The only thing worse than what-respect is what-disrespect, a withholding of all respect on the basis of what someone is said to be.

Sadly, what-disrespect functions like an appetite suppressant. If you are starving for respect and lose all hope that you will ever get it — or worse, if you have never experienced who-respect and are blind even to its possibility — disrespecting others can dull the pain and replace it with a hot rush of ecstasy. There is no nourishment in it, but at least you aren’t the only one starving, and it doesn’t feel nearly as bad.

*

Respect means caring what another person is seeing when they look back at you. Etymologically, it means back-look. When I look at you, I don’t only care what I see, I also care what you see looking back.

Respect is an empathic disposition to try to understand not only how you feel, or what you think, but also for why you think and feel what you do. It does not mean I have to uncritically accept everything you say. Respect is exchanged, and that means we must expect to have our thoughts and feelings respected. For some people an argument is one of the best opportunities to show respect.

*

When we meet someone for the first time, we start a delicate respect process.

No matter how much we regret the fact, a new person arrives packaged in whats. Some people try desperately to shut out these whats and whatever implications they carry for us. Many of us think this is the point where we battle our racism. We try to force ourselves to think all the right things and produce all the right gestures and we get all tight and tangled and calculated like an over-scripted politician. This is forced what-respect, and it interferes with the real goal: letting this new person be who they are. That won’t happen when you are too terrified to let them know who you are, because what you are trying to be is a good what. Just give up on the what, and ask questions until you can calm down enough to be who you are.

Even the kindest what-respect obstructs who-respect.

*

For heaven’s sake, don’t attempt to mirror the contempt you imagine this what you are attempting to think and do all the right things for. Seeking affirmation by producing what-disrespect is no way to exchange who-respect with another person.

And if this other person you are trying to know does seem to require you to what-disrespect yourself as a condition for approval, you are in a difficult situation. It is likely they are addicted to what-respect and what-disrespect and might know nothing else.

A moral genius might know how to summon up enough self-respecting humanity to overcome the dynamic. More of us will fuck it all up by giving them the self-denigration or self-abasement we think they want, or attempt to defend our own honor by confronting and insulting them, or if we are wise we get out of that situation and avoid further contact with them.

Nobody should ever demand anyone to compromise their self-respect.

*

There is lots more to say, but this hits the main points.

I’ve been looking for a better way to represent why I care so much about liberalism, and why I believe it must not continue to be confused with selfish individualism.

When I cast liberalism as about producing optimal conditions for who-respect I feel that I am getting very close to why it matters to me.

We can argue over what those conditions are. But before I will even have that argument with anyone, I first have to know they share my commitment to liberalism.

*

I don’t think I have said this even close to perfectly.

I am asking my best-spoken and most socially smart friends to rewrite whatever parts they think they can improve. If this turns out well, I might have to make a book.

OOO: why?

Philosophy

Wow, I’m two pages into Graham Harman’s Tool-Being, and I’m already exasperated with its uselessness. What could drive a person to embrace a philosophy whose focus is on precisely what is least relevant to human life? Yeah, yeah — the apeiron is radically mysterious — but wow, guys, what is fascinating and consequential about the hiddenness of material reality is how entities constantly emerge from it, seemingly ex nihilo, and form relationships with us, not the simple, blunt fact that infinitely more remains submerged in nothingness.

Like with the Mandelbrot Set, it’s’s the edge region that is most interesting. But OOO guys are interested only in the points in the M-Set that escape to infinity, because no matter high the values go, they can go even higher. “Dude, that’s a really big number. Pass me the bong.”

Object-oriented ontology should be called crypotonomenology. Where phenomenology brackets what is ultimately beyond our experience, in order to make clear sense of what is within our experience, OOO brackets everything within experience in order to savor how impossible it is to make sense of what is beyond our experience.

The politics of design

Philosophy

The biggest milestones in my design career as a designer have been changes in my attitude toward politics — that constant need to persuade other people, to overcome objections and obstacles, and to build alignment around decisions.

I’ll tidy this process up into a simple timeline:

  1. When I was first out of school, I resented politics: “I put a lot of effort into building my design judgment and skills, and you’ve hired me to apply them to solving this problem, so get out of my way and let me work.”
  2. This attitude evolved into a grudging acceptance of politics: “Politics suck but they are unavoidable, so deal with them, so you can do your job.”
  3. But slowly I began to see that design is largely political: “Politics are an uncomfortable but necessary aspect of design that are best mitigated through human-centered practices.”
  4. Now I see the most important part of my job as political: “Human-centered design is a massive opportunity to democratize the workplace.”

In an effort to work the democratic spirit into how teams work together, I’ve been working on a Design Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. Like all documents of this kind, they anticipate the need to assert rights when they are infringed. As I am usually in the role of team lead, this means I am the most likely to do that infringing. So, this is the document I am giving to my teams, in the case that I step on their toes and fail to lead the way I aspire to. Here is the list as it stands today:

  • The right to a brief: every team member has the right to request a clearly framed problem to solve autonomously (as opposed a specification to execute).
  • The right to clarity: every team member can request a detailed explanation for any aspect of the project, and keep requesting elucidation until the matter is completely understood.
  • The right to argue: every team member can dissent or raise concerns with decisions, and expect to have the concerns addressed.
  • The right to propose alternatives: every team member is free to conceive and communicate different approaches to solving problems.
  • The right to be heard: every team member’s voice will be actively welcomed in discussions, meaning that opportunities to enter the conversation will be offered and space to communicate without interruption will be protected.
  • The right to be fully understood: every team member can expect active listening from teammates, which means they will be heard out and interpreted until full comprehension is accomplished.
  • The right to have pre-articulate intuitions: every team member can expect to have pure (pre-articulate) intuitions respected as valid, and to be assisted in giving the intuition explicit, articulate form.
  • The right to learn: no team member is expected to have perfect knowledge, judgment, grace or foresight, as long as imperfections are detected, acknowledged and used for learning, growth and improvement.

In the spirit of democracy, I’ll now turn it over to you. How would you change this list? What would you change? What would you add? What would you remove?

Useful usable desirable

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

My next book, Philosophy of Design of Philosophy, is still forming in my head. I know what I want to convey, but the conceptual ingredients are evolving. Some new ingredients I’m entertaining are liminality, conceptual integrity and multistability. These new concepts will help me simplify my system and link my thinking to other bodies of work. But incorporating them requires some demolition and reconstruction work. I am also struggling with some perplexities regarding the precise relationship between engineering and design, a heavily contested, linguistically and conceptually confused strip of turf — a true liminal zone. Consequently, I am finding it hard to write short pieces, and I am abandoning most posts I start, because they immediately diverge and get out of control.

What I plan to write about is already a reality for me, and has been for some time: the subject of the book is my praxis, which I use not only in my professional design work, but also in my private practical and theoretical life. My friend Tim joked that I am a design-centered human, and that is entirely accurate. I have come to see everything in terms of design, including philosophy.

Yesterday I interviewed design research legend Liz Sanders on her useful-usable-desirable framework. I am planning to extract the content of the interview into a second letterpressed chapbook, honoring the core concept of human-centered design. Pending Liz’s approval, I plan to call it just Useful / Usable / Desirable.

This framework is profoundly important to me. It was through this framework that design took over my entire life.

At some point, which I can no longer remember, I caught myself thinking about philosophy in a new way, which I never consciously chose.

I was reading, and I suddenly realized I was evaluating what I was understanding in terms of its usefulness, usability and desirability. And I realized I had detected an unconscious habit I’d acquired long ago.

I want to clarify something. I was not evaluating the form, expression or presentation of the ideas (though these are also subject to the same criteria) — I was evaluating the effect of understanding the philosophy. And when it comes to philosophy, understanding does not primarily mean being able to explain the concepts. In philosophy, understanding means being able to enter the conceptual system and to understand from it. Philosophical understanding is an act of intellectual empathy.

I found myself asking: When I enter this philosophy and understand from it — when I view a philosophical worldview instrumentally and assess it as something that can be adopted, lived from and used I ask: Is it useful? Do I become better equipped to make sense of what is happening around me so I can respond more effectively? Is it usable? Does it make it easier to get clear on what is most relevant, and does this sense of relevance help me avoid becoming confused or overwhelmed or cause me to make mistakes? Is it desirable? What does it do to my overall sense of meaning? Does life seem valuable and worth the effort? Or does it make life seem ominous and dark, or worse, empty, pointless and not worth working to improve?

So, Liz’s framework is very likely to be the backbone of my next book. The useful/usable/desirable framework will not only provide a framework for evaluating and generating philosophical worldviews, but will also serve as an exemplar of a successfully designed philosophical worldview.

Foregrounds and backgrounds

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy

I am looking in my anomawiki for a quote from Nietzsche about foreground and background philosophies. I am digging through one of the themes I’ve catalogued, “depth“, and noticing — somehow for the first time! — how many of these quotes involve water, and specifically cold water. Reading Nietzsche I slowly discovered a symbolic language — or did I invent it? — It is probably best to say that in experimental interaction with his corpus, I instaurated a certain symbolic language that invests Nietzschean passages with multiple layers of powerfully direct intuitive meaning. (These meanings have been so intense that at the peak of my early Nietzschean encounter, I sometimes got butterflies in my stomach in the evening anticipating waking up the next morning and reading him.) I’ve learned to interpret water as a symbol of chaos, not only in Nietzsche, but also in Jewish scripture, which is why my Hebrew name is Nachshon. Coldness is another symbol, signifying betrayal. Nietzsche speaks often of coldness at the depths and heights. When we immerse in chaos, when we undergo the deepest, most trophonian perplexities, we often find that our own value hierarchies get loosened and shaken up. And when we ascend so far that we can survey a more expansive whole, this can also effect an inner political shift. The valley is temperate and more stable, but Nietzsche’s preferred valleys were near cold lakes and icy peaks, to remind us of our tragic situation between beneath and beyond.

I did not mean to write this much about Nietzsche.

*

Here is the quote I was looking for:

The recluse … will doubt whether a philosopher can have “ultimate and actual” opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every “foundation”. Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that he [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.

This passage implies that a person can always dig beneath and undermine his own philosophy if he chooses, and raises the question: why don’t we keep digging forever? What are the “stopping conditions”, to put it in wicked problem terms?

My own suspicious stopping point — (and yes, you should ask “why here?”) — is a metaphysics of radical surprise. Due to the relationship between truth and reality, truth is pluralism which “goes all the way down”, that reality is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Truth is the attempt of each center to make sense of the whole — a whole which is constituted entirely of centers. No center can embrace this infinite whole, so we radiate our being outward into the other centers, and they in turn radiate back. The interwoven radiating centers congeal into real situations and overlapping approximate truths, most of which have some validity, and all of which contain significant blindness toward what others know, and which necessarily make tradeoffs, only some of which we are aware. From time to time we are shocked out of our wits by the irruption of some reality for which we are unprepared, and often we have no idea how to make sense of it, unless we actively make that sense. This making of new sense is philosophy.

Some of us even go looking for shocks. We especially seek them when we are dissatisfied. And especially once we learn how easily apparently stable, unquestionable truths can be undermined, and once we learn to handle some of the unpleasant hazards of undermining and gain confidence in our ability to make new sense where we’ve loosened up and broken down old sense, undermining becomes a tool for overcoming some of life’s occasional horrors. In other words we are free to design philosophies that support a life we want. Like all design, philosophy functions in real contexts, must make optimal tradeoffs to meet requirements while respecting constraints, and they will succeed and fail in different ways to different degrees.

My background philosophy tells me that we can and should design our philosophies using all the best practices of human centered design. This is the best we can possibly do. The closest a human being can get to truth is to believe ideas that work well, meaning they help us do what we need to do, they prevent us from feeling perplexed, or getting confused or making mistakes, and they help us feel the value of our lives. (These, by the way are the criteria for good design laid down by Liz Sanders in the most influential paper no designer knows about.) None of these philosophies should be expected to hold up in every possible context and withstand every criticism, and if that becomes our primary goal, it is certain that this all-encompassing generality and well-armed defensibility will demand tradeoffs that will harm a person’s quality of life in innumerable ways. This deeper philosophy is pragmatist through and through, and draws on many strands of pragmatist thought including Actor-Network Theory. I call it design instrumentalism. It is never far from chaos, and dips in and out of perplexity as a matter of method. I can only handle it in small doses. As I was reminded this morning, Nietzsche said “I approach deep problems such as I do cold baths: fast in, fast out.”

My foreground philosophy is what I designed for myself as my everyday conceptual models to shape and guide my understandings. I crystalized them in image and word in Geometric Meditations. The ideas might seem profound, but that is because of their careful design: this philosophy was designed to maintain value-stability ‘warmth” at depths of thought where a soul risks coming apart. That is not to say I do not believe them wholeheartedly, because I do, but I believe them with wholehearted irony, meaning that I see them as some among many ways to make sense. The conceptual models in Geometric meditations function as an interface I intentionally designed to shield me from the instability and complexity of design instrumentalism.

I am sure this has made sense to nobody, but I needed to think it through.

ANT, Postphenomenology and their mutant child, OOO

ANT, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

It seems obvious to me that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Postphenomenology are complementary lenses for understanding social situations.

ANT gives us the network viewed “objectively” outside-in, and Postphenomenology helps us understand inside-out how the nodes interpret inputs from the network and translate them into outputs.

An ANT practitioner will be the first to tell you that ANT is just one way an actor (a theorist) can interpret and translate the network into a coherent explanatory account — but one that mostly blackboxes how that network is experienced at any one point. The ANT account is one of many multistable descriptions that can be given.

A Postphenomenologist brackets the network in order to understand how certain nodes in the network interpret other nodes before acting within the network, on the network, thereby changing it.

ANT and Postphenomenology are each the everted perspective of the other. Each methodically excludes what the other describes, through blackboxing or bracketing, respectively. A cultural anthropologist might say ANT attempts a rigorously etic view of the actor-network, and Postphenomenology is the emic view of the actor-nodes within it.

To make a chaos theory analogy, ANT gives us a Mandelbrot Set view of a region of the complex plane, and Postphenomenology gives us Julia Sets of selected points within the region.

OOO is a peculiar cross-breeding of the two that focuses precisely on the actor-nodes in the network that resist emic understanding, and then marvels at the fact that they must have some sort of emicity that neither we (nor any other object) can get at. They seem to me to be a mystical branch of Process philosophy, given to authoring fanciful philosophical midrash where both physical and social sciences  fail.

To extend the chaos theory analogy, OOO enjoys boggling at how densely the points belonging to the Mandelbrot Set saturate the band of points along its psychedelically-enflamed perimeter, and at the impenetrable blankness of each and every one of them.

Right?

No?

Faith and belief-production

Philosophy, Politics

On Facebook Leafy said “My friend and I have been asking ourselves WHY people have so much contempt now for experts. … Stephen’s contribution is: Americans still fundamentally live in a culture informed by a team spirit that pits Science against Christianity, as if these things were part of the same sport. Even though many claim not to believe in God, we still tend to thus address all knowledge through the lens of authoritarianism, dogma, and faith. Since the development of the scientific method, modern science has always recognized that knowledge is a work in process, and that part of the Great Work is to prove ourselves wrong. But most Americans nevertheless now apprehend Science as substitute for Christianity, and blame it as if it were a bad religion with evil priests when it doesn’t immediately have all the right answers.”

I felt a need to clarify:

My point was that America still lives with unconscious habits of thought that form its beliefs, and that this is true not only for the right, but also for the left.
 
If your faith-habits lead you to reject explicit belief in, say, original sin, in invisible demonic forces, in metaphysical moralism, in the future coming of a kingdom of god, in a conversion that makes the scales fall from your eyes (so you can experience the true Truth), that the beliefs you claim are true change your moral status, etc., etc. etc., if your faith-habits remain the same as before, you’ll just trade out one believed-in entity for another, and they’ll perform very similar functions. The more ideologically-driven a person is the more conspicuous this becomes.
 
To root out not only the beliefs but the belief-producing faiths, you have have to examine the what, how and why of your thinking, iteratively design and try on new concepts and methods of thinking until something starts making new sense of our experience — and then the hard work starts of gradually rebuilding our habits around this new kind of conceiving, perceiving, thinking and responding. This is a much more arduous process than having a brilliant flash of insight into the true Truth that either wokes you or red-pills you, and knocks you right off your horse.
 
But our faith leads us to anticipate some great eureka that delivers us to righteousness. So if we happen to hear something that gives us a minute of conceptual coherence, we interpret it as finally seeing the light. Nope, it’s just the effect of ideological coherence when you’re not accustomed to it. Many other worldviews/lifeworlds are possible. And I promise, most of those many others will actually work better than the kind that bowls folks over who don’t think much about their thinking.
And then I added the following, because I just cannot resist beating two of my deadest horses 1) fundamentalism-is-a counterfeit-religion, and 2) scientistic-belief-is-a-form-of-fundamentalism:

…And further, [when someone rejects beliefs without rejecting the faith that produces and sustains them] because only the what of the belief has changed but the how of the believing is left untouched, most folks who “believe in science” do so in the same manner as those who “believe in Jesus”. In other words, they are scientistic, not scientific.

But to clarify, I do not consider scientistic thinking to be an infection of science with religious thinking. Believing in this manner ruins religious practice at least as much. “Believing in Jesus” with a faith that thinks that certain facts we can hold in our heads are like golden tickets that get you into the heavenly chocolate factory — that’s ideology, not religion. And the only thing it has to do with religion is that it body-snatches and reanimate religious symbols. It is a horrible shame that people equate fundamentalism with religion. Fundamentalism and religion couldn’t be more different.

Ready-to-mind

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Since the early 20th Century, much has been made of the role language plays in understanding. As a designer, I am tempted to say too much has been made of it.

In human-centered design we are accustomed to seeing people do things apparently unthinkingly, gropingly, experimentally — but then afterwards, when we ask for an account of the actions, we’ll get an explanation that clearly conflicts with what we observed. When I read about split brain experiments in Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis, which showed how the rational part of the brain confabulates explanations of parts of its own organ to which it has no access, it all rang familiar. Usability tests are full of obvious confabulations, and this is why we observe behaviors in addition to doing contextual interviews.

Designers quickly learn that users’ mouths are not fully qualified to speak for their own hands. But increasing I am doubting if users’ mouths are fully qualified to speak for their own mouths.

This spreading suspicion is derived from one important characteristic of well-designed things, especially well-designed tools: they extend the being of the person who uses them. A well-designed tool merges into a user’s body and mind and disappears. A poorly designed tool refuses to merge and remains painfully and conspicuously separate from oneself. Tools, even the best-designed ones, must be learned before they merge and vanish. Once the merging and vanishing happens, the tool is known.

This tool relationship was famously described by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. He used the example of a hammer. The normal, everyday attitude the user of the hammer has toward the hammer Heidegger called “ready-to-hand”. The hammer belongs to the equipment in the workshop and is invisibly available and used by its owner in his work activity. This is in contrast to “present-at-hand”: the mode of being where an tool is perceived as an object. Despite the standpoint most of us assume when we sit in a chair thinking about objects, present-at-hand is an exception to the rule. It normally happens only when something goes wrong and the hammer’s availability or functioning is interrupted, rendering the hammer conspicuously broken or absent, or when the tool is new and unfamiliar and is not yet mastered.

As a designer, I must also point out that a tool will frequently revert back to present-at-hand if it is badly designed and constantly demands attention due to usability snags or malfunctions. And now, 90 years after Being and Time, there is an entirely new situation that disrupts the ready-to-hand relationship. Currently our workshops are largely virtual and are equipped with software tools which are frequently updated and improved. With each improvement our tools become unfamiliar and are knocked back to present-at-hand until we can figure out how it works and practice using it, and re-master it so that it can merge back to ready-to-hand.

I find I have precisely this same relationship with concepts and with words. New concepts start out as present-at-hand, and they must be learned and practiced and mastered before they stop being logically connected bundles of words, become ready-to-hand (ready-to-mind) concepts which can be used for making sense of other words, arguments, objects and situations. A well-designed philosophy book guides a reader through this process, so that by the time the book concludes, a new conceptual tool has become familiar and has merged with — and, ideally disappeared into — the repertoire of concepts that makes up one’s worldview. Ideally, these concepts merge so fully into one’s own being that they become second-natural, and seem as if they are part of reality itself when we observe it.

The view that concepts and words are essentially tools (as opposed to representational models of the world) belongs to the pragmatism school of philosophy, and is called “instrumentalism”. It is a radically different way to conceptualize truth, and it changes absolutely everything once the concept is mastered becomes ready-to-mind.

There is something to be gained by refracting the pragmatic implications of instrumentalism through the theoretical insights of Heidegger’s tool phenomenology and then examining the result with the trained sensibility of the human-centered designer. My friend Jokin taught me a Basque saying: “What has a name is real.” To lend some reality to this synthesis, let’s call it “design instrumentalism”.

A design instrumentalist says “Ok. If concepts are tools, let’s design them well, so that they do what we need them to do, without malfunctioning and as life-enhancingly as possible. And let’s get clear enough on the intended purpose, users and use-contexts of each concept so that we are making smart tradeoffs and not overburdening the concept with out-of-scope requirements that undermine its design.” In other words, let’s construct concepts that produce truths that work toward the kinds of lives we want.

*

Design instrumentalism has some surprising and consequential implications.

One of them these implications concerns what it means to know. Normally, if we want to assess someone’s knowledge we request an explanation. If a lucid explanation is given, we conclude that this person “knows what they’re doing.” But is this true?

What if an ability to speak clearly about a concept is one ability, and the ability to use the concept in a practical application is a separate ability? The requirement to explicitly verbalize what one knows — as opposed to simply demonstrate mastery — might create conditions where those with linguistic felicity might appear more generally competent in everything, and those who are most able, because their ability is tacit, might find themselves under-rated and constantly burdened with false tests of their competence.

Another is an expectation that a competent practitioner can always — and should always — be able to provide a clear plan of action and a lucid justification for whatever they are setting out to accomplish. However, this is a separate skill, and not even one that precedes my ability to use the concept. This does not mean that we do not use words to assist our learning, because we certainly do rely on words as tools to help us learn. But these verbal learning tools should not be confused with the object of the learning or the substance of what is learned. They are scaffolding, not the building blocks of the edifice.

And like Heidegger’s famous hammer, which is invisibly ready-to-hand until it malfunctions, at which point it shifts into conspicuous presence-at-hand as the user inspects it to diagnose what’s wrong with it, concepts we are use are rarely verbalized while we use them for thinking. It’s only when concepts fail to invisibly and wordlessly function that we notice them and start using words as workarounds or diagnostic and repair tools for the malfunctioning concepts that are breaking our understandings.

A requirement to verbalize concepts before we use them, or while we are using them amounts to a form of multitasking.

must shift between wordlessly doing and translate the doing into words, and the two tasks interfere with one another, producing a stilted performance. Having to verbalize what we do while doing it is like embroidering while wearing thick gloves.

So, where am I going with this line of thought? The notion that all real understanding is linguistic is not only inaccurate but practically disastrous. My experience designing and experimentally evaluating designs has shown me that real understanding is, in fact, a matter of ontological extension — precisely the overcoming of language in formation of direct non-verbal interaction with some real entity. That is, unless the understanding in question is understanding how to verbalize some idea. Of course, nearly all academic work consists precisely of acquiring abilities to verbalize, so it is hardly surprising a theory that insists that all understanding is essentially linguistic would gain prominence among participants in the academic form of life.

Interposing words

Perplexity craft

Concept craft

Balking at the threshold

Philosophy

An idea I have repeated too much: We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.

At the threshold of deep change, in the face of something so new that it requires a preliminary forgetting of the old before true understanding is possible, a soul will sometimes balk. What can this balking look like?

  • Allowing the message to be interrupted before it is complete
  • Avoidance or distraction, switching focus away from the message
  • Interpretation of the threshold anxiety as evidence of a real threat
  • Questioning motives of the messenger, or otherwise nullifying the validity of the message ad hominem
  • Investigating the causes of the message, rather than receiving its content
  • Subjecting the message to formal analysis before listening to its content
  • Creating conflict, and destroying the conditions for understanding
  • Attempting to silence the messenger
  • Ridiculing the message or the messenger
  • Postponement of hearing the message to a more suitable time
  • Repeating the old truth in place of hearing the new message
  • Asserting personal incapacity to understand the message
  • Accusing the new message of having no coherent meaning to understand
  • Shoehorning the new message into old frameworks, rendering the message incomprehensible
  • Reducing the new message to existing old ones and blurring and denying essential distinctions
  • Assuming a superior spiritual status, rendering this and all messages pointless
  • Dominating the conversation; interrogating instead of listening
  • Shifting focus from content of message to the form of the message (for instance critiquing it as rhetoric)
  • Deflection; treating the message as something to be heard by someone else
  • Assessing the effort required to understand as a bad investment of time and effort
  • Performing active listening, while not listening
  • Letting the messenger talk, but not allowing message to penetrate; moving to the next topic before understanding has occurred
  • Jumping to associated ideas before understanding happens
  • Exalting the form of the message itself as a counterfeit for understanding
  • Adoring the messenger in place of understanding the message
  • Hating the messenger in place of understanding the message
  • Flattering the messenger in place of understanding the message
  • Interpreting the message as non-comprehensible magical incantation
  • Experiencing the message aesthetically instead of understanding
  • Listening to the message but deferring understanding until later

In many myths (including the Easter myth, which is on my mind because today happens to be Easter) an uncanny zone (of time or space or state) separating the old and the new. Traversing that zone is requires considerable skill and (as Joseph Campbell pointed out) often spiritual assistance.

*

Incidentally, speaking of Easter — which for Christians marks the passing of an old dead faith and the rising of a new living one — this morning I am reading an interesting paper by Bruno Latour, where he relates an amusing Babel-like story:

Jesuits who had settled in China in the XVIIth century, write to Rome complaining about the fact that, under pressure from the Dominican friars, they are obliged to utter the formula of the consecration in Latin. In effect, when the priest says: ’’Hoc est enim corpus meus,” it presents to the ear of a Chinese : “Hocu ye-su-tu ye-nim co-lo-pu-su- me-um,” which, if the Jesuits did not provide a French translation of what the unfortunate Chinese hear at the moment of the transsubstantiation, could pass for a fairly good approximation, give or take a few consonants, of : “emanation, ancient, lord, office, rule, handsome, rest, each, road, flee, thing, meditate, greening, meadows”.

I am imagining a short story where the Chinese receive this string of words as a magical incantation — a Latour liturgy — a rite around which a new religious faith revolves. The rite and its commentary is recorded in a Chinese Newer Testament which relates the miraculous story of a series of wild historical accidents that generated the string of Holy Words, despite the conceits of silly Hebrews and Europeans who thought they understood the meanings, but which were only preparations for something far greater:

Emanation, Ancient Lord!
Office rule handsome!
Rest each road.
Flee thing — meditate!
Greening meadows.

Amen

Raw experiential resources for my next book

Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy

I am making a list of some strange phenomena which are the daily fare of strategic designers, but which are seldom experienced outside the field, at least not in the way designers experience them. By designers, I mean anyone engaged in human-centered design. These phenomena do not occur at the same intensity and frequency in problems that do not explicitly contend with subjectivity. Designers must live with them at full intensity, for long durations, without any easy escape route. Here is the list, so far:

  • Dependency on conceptual models (which I will just call “models”) to guide the forming of a system that is experienced as clear and coherent to those who participate in them
  • Uncanny difficulties in agreeing on models among members of design teams, which render subjective differences stark
  • Difficulties in interpreting phenomena, and especially subjective phenomena, among different team members
  • Difficulties in weighing design tradeoffs among different team members
  • Existential pain associated with relinquishing (or even temporarily suspending) models that one has adopted — even in order to listen and understand another perspective — a phenomenon that can be called “pluralistic angst”
  • Dependence on profound respect, trust and goodwill among team members to navigate through and out of pluralistic angst
  • Tactics employed by well-intentioned people to avoid the pain and effort required to overcome pluralistic angst
  • The ubiquity and invisibility of models — and the best models are the most ubiquitous and the most invisible — not only in design, but all understanding, which only becomes detectable in pluralistic conflict
  • The miraculous way truths and unnoticed realities leap from nowhere (ex nihilo) when a different model is adopted and used
  • The weird way a change in a sufficiently foundational model can sometimes change (transfigure) the meaning of one’s life as a whole, even when the change is meant only to affect a localized problem
  • The fact that there are no determinate techniques, rules, criteria to overcome pluralistic angst (though there are approaches that can assist the process) — that people are thrown back into their bare unequipped souls to find the resources needed to overcome it together
  • The solidarity among team members which can result from overcoming pluralistic angst with respect, trust and goodwill

Anyone who has been through the harrowing experiences described about enough times 1) to recognize what is happening, 2) to find faith that these things can be overcome, 3) to understand the value of overcoming them, 4) to find the attitude of soul most conducive to overcoming them (which includes grace toward one’s own missteps, doubts and moral failings during the process) might start seeing similar phenomena everywhere, at all scales, from international politics to personal relationships to one’s own inner conflicts. Or, at least this is what happened to me.

I was driven deep into existential philosophy, including phenomenology and hermeneutics then into pragmatism and its offshoots in social science to try to understand the weird kinds of pain I experience as a designer. Philosophy has never been speculative or abstract to me. It is concrete, near and a matter of life and death.

As a result of this search for understanding, I have designed myself conceptual models to help me re-understand the human condition as largely one of conflicting conceptual models.

It is here that it becomes fairly obvious how philosophy and design connect and merge into something inseparable. That is what I plan to write about and publish next, now that I have crystallized my core conceptual models in the form I believe they deserve.

Ideological automatons

Philosophy

“On the one hand, design is determined by ideas and material conditions over which designers have no control, yet, on the other hand, designs are the result of designers exercising their creative autonomy and originality. To put the paradox in the most extreme terms, how can designers be said to be in command of what they do, but at the same time merely be the agents of ideology, with no more power to determine the outcome of their work than the ant or worker bee? There is no answer to this question: it is a fact that both conditions invariably co-exist, however uncomfortably, in the work of design. The same apparent paradox occurs in all manifestations of culture: any painting, film, book or building contains ideas about the nature of the world…” — Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire

More and more, when I read Marxists writing about ideologies and the material conditions that produce them, apparently automatically, with no trace of intellectual agency, especially not of a philosophical nature, I find myself reflecting on the ideologies and material conditions of academic life, especially in those fields where Marxism tends to flourish. What are the forces of academic production, and what is it about them that channels so much thinking into this odd Marxist materialist conclusion? As much as academics like to think of academia as a shelter from brutal commercial forces from which non-academic life can be studied, analyzed and reinterpreted, I’ve seen it up close, and the forces which shape the lives of academics are at least as brutal, and far more intellectually intrusive than any I have seen in out in the private world. If fact, if my only exposure to business were that of a social sciences professor reading newspapers and history books with the rigorously-trained eye of a Marxist, looking through the lens of my own first-hand experience of university committee politics and peer-juried journal submission, I can see myself becoming unable to see anything but materially-determined ideological mind-control behind individual efforts at autonomy.

I need to reread We Have Never Been Modern.

Ghost-hearted

Biography, Ethics

Some people in our lives won’t exist toward us from the other side.

They suppress response. They withhold respect. They plate themselves with loveless indifference. They cut things short, deflect, postpone, neglect. Vulnerable words are left unanswered, hanging, abandoned in a vacuum.

When they become angry and attack to wound, the humanity of the violence is relief from the nothingness they maintain the rest of the time.

As Susan says, their ghostliness haunts us.

When we are wounded by a ghost heart and try to reconcile with them — when we ask for collaboration to coauthor the ending of the story — this is when the ghost heart exists least of all. It turns out that you were written out from the start. This is (and was always) your problem, your story — and their story, and your part in it, is (and was always) theirs alone. And no human forgiveness will be exchanged. None will be given; none will be accepted. It doesn’t matter, because you are not real.

There is no choice, now. You must amputate this being — this real person whoever they were — from your biography. They will remain there for a long time as nothing, though — a question with too many answers, an aching phantom limb.

Design Collaborator’s Bill of Rights

Design, Ethics

Recently I’ve been asking my teammates to exercise certain rights I believe all design collaborators on projects should have. So far, the rights have been listed as occasions arise, but I’m starting to want to keep a list, because I don’t want to forget them, but also because they feel sacred and I would like to see them worded precisely and laid out systematically as a Design Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. I will be updating this list, and once it stabilizes I might letterpress it as a physical piece.

  • The right to a brief: every team member has the right to request a clearly framed problem to solve autonomously (as opposed a specification to execute).
  • The right to clarity: every team member can request a detailed explanation for any aspect of the project, until it is completely understood.
  • The right to justification: every team member can raise explicit concerns with decisions, and to have the concerns addressed.
  • The right to propose alternatives: every team member is free to conceive and communicate different approaches to solving problems.
  • The right to have pre-articulate intuitions: every team member can expect to have pure (pre-articulate) intuitions respected as valid, and to be assisted in giving the intuition explicit, articulate form.
  • The right to speak: every team member’s voice will be actively welcomed in discussions, meaning that opportunities to enter the conversation will be offered and space to communicate without interruption will be protected. 
  • The right to be fully understood: every team member can expect active listening from teammates, which means they will be heard out and interpreted until full comprehension is accomplished.

First sixteen copies of Geomentric Meditations

Biography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Philosophy

Yesterday, despite UPS’s best efforts I managed to get both boxes of the printed spreads of Geometric Meditations. I unpacked and organized the components, and assembled the first sixteen copies. I gave the first three copies to Susan, Zoë and Helen. I put the fourth in my library, in the religion section with the Kabbalah books. This is a book I’ve wanted in my library for a long time.

The process of making these books is labor intensive. Here’s the process:

  1. Collate the signature from six separate stacks of spreads.
  2. Fold each sheet.
  3. Use template to punch three holes (for sewing) through the signature fold.
  4. Measure 14″ of red waxed linen thread and thread it through the bookbinding needle.
  5. Starting from the top hole in the spine sew the signature, using a figure-eight pattern.
  6. Tie off the top and trim the threads evenly.
  7. With a craft knife (#11 Olfa) trim top and bottom edges in .75″.
  8. Trim outer edge in .75″.

I’m working on methods to streamline production, but it is still time-consuming.

If you receive a copy of this book, please take care of it. In each book is fifteen years of intense thinking, hands-on use and iterative design, five years of obsessive writing, rewriting and editing, one year of final editing and design tweaking, two months of production work and about half an hour of handcraft.

I made everything as beautiful as I could, and I am uneasily pleased with how it turned out.

Whitehead and Peirce

Ethics, Philosophy, Star

Currently I’m reading David Ray Griffin’s Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy after more or less giving up on Stengers’s more playful and imaginative, but tragically francofuzzled, Whitehead introduction. Griffin’s is far more straightforward and clarifying, and that is what I am after.

One of the central ideas in this book is prohibition of philosophical performative contradictions., or as Griffin summarizes it: “…it is antirational to deny in theory ideas that one necessarily presupposes in practice is that one thereby violates the first rule of reason, the law of noncontradiction. It is irrational simultaneously to affirm and deny one and the same proposition. And this is what happens when one denies a hard-core commonsense idea. That is, one is denying the idea explicitly while affirming it implicitly. This point has been made by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas in their critique of “performative contradiction,” in which the very act of performing a speech act contradicts its semantic content, its meaning.”

This reminds me of a passage from Charles Sanders Peirce’s seminal Pragmatist essay “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”: “We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

But there are interesting differences between Whitehead’s and Peirce’s objections to skepticism to commonsense beliefs. Whitehead saw self-contradictions, where Peirce saw counterfeit beliefs in the form of theoretical assertions. Both saw a peeling apart of the theoretical snd practical.

My view on this emphasizes the morality of denial: In most of these denials of commonsense I see an attempt at solipsism. Some claim of reality transcending mind is dismantled and reduced to a mental phenomenon that can be accepted or rejected at the discretion of the thinker. This desire to solipsize what is mind-transcendently real is the active ingredient of evil. Life requires small doses of such solipsism to shelter us from the overwhelming dread of infinity, but when philosophies move from emphasis and deemphasis to ontological negation, this should be taken as a possible symptom of autoapotheosis, the desire to mistake ourselves for God, the ultimate failure of philosophy, theology, which manifests itself as ideology.

Design-Centered Human

Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

Someone asked me, with respect to my work, what I call myself these days. If people understood 1) what design is, and that 2) all design, done competently, is, necessarily human-centered design, I’d want to be called simply a Designer. Because this is nowhere near the case, I call myself a Human-Centered Designer.

At that point my friend Tim called me Design-Centered Human. That’s pretty apt.