Category Archives: Philosophy

Irony deficiency

Chord, Philosophy, Politics

Today I wandered through several books touching on irony.

It began with Geertz.

Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. The common forms of it are familiar enough. In dramatic irony, deflation results from the contrast between what the character perceives the situation to be and what the audience knows it to be; in historical irony, from the inconsistency between the intentions of sovereign personages and the natural outcomes of actions proceeding from those intentions. Literary irony rests on a momentary conspiracy of author and reader against the stupidities and self-deceptions of the everyday world; Socratic, or pedagogical, irony rests on intellectual dissembling in order to parody intellectual pretension.

But the sort of irony which appears in anthropological fieldwork, though no less effective in puncturing illusion, is not quite like any of these. It is not dramatic, because it is double-edged: the actor sees through the audience as clearly as the audience through the actor. It is not historical, because it is acausal: it is not that one’s actions produce, through the internal logic of events, results the reverse of what was intended by them (though this sometimes happens too), but that one’s predictions of what other people will do, one’s social expectations, are constantly surprised by what, independently of one’s own behavior, they actually do. It is not literary, because not only are the parties not in league, but they are in different moral universes. And it is not Socratic, because it is not intellectual pretension which is parodied, but the mere communication of thought — and not by intellectual dissembling, but by an all-too-earnest, almost grim, effort at understanding.

Geertz and Rorty live side-by-side in my mind because I learned of both of them from the same wonderful, life-transforming book, Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Irony is central to Rorty’s work, so I dipped into what some consider his magnum opus, to refresh my memory of how he spoke of irony.

The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. Such metaphysical or theological attempts to unite a striving for perfection with a sense of community require us to acknowledge a common human nature. They ask us to believe that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others — that the springs of private fulfillment and of human solidarity are the same. Skeptics like Nietzsche have urged that metaphysics and theology are transparent attempts to make altruism look more reasonable than it is. Yet such skeptics typically have their own theories of human nature. They, too, claim that there is something common to all human beings – for example, the will to power, or libidinal impulses. Their point is that at the “deepest” level of the self there is no sense of human solidarity, that this sense is a “mere” artifact of human socialization. So such skeptics become antisocial. They turn their backs on the very idea of a community larger than a tiny circle of initiates.

Ever since Hegel, however, historicist thinkers have tried to get beyond this familiar standoff. They have denied that there is such a thing as “human nature” or the “deepest level of the self.” Their strategy has been to insist that socialization, and thus historical circumstance, goes all the way down — that there is nothing “beneath” socialization or prior to history which is definatory of the human. . . . This historicist turn has helped free us, gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics — from the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress. But even after this substitution takes place, the old tension between the private and the public remains. Historicists in whom the desire for self-creation, for private autonomy, dominates (e.g., Heidegger and Foucault) still tend to see socialization as Nietzsche did — as antithetical to something deep within us. Historicists in whom the desire for a more just and free human community dominates (e.g., Dewey and Habermas) are still inclined to see the desire for private perfection as infected with “irrationalism” and “aestheticism.” . . . I urge that we not try to choose between them but, rather, give them equal weight and then use them for different purposes. Authors like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov are useful as exemplars, as illustrations of what private perfection — a self-created, autonomous, human life — can be like. Authors such as Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls are fellow citizens rather than exemplars. They are engaged in a shared, social effort — the effort to make our institutions and practices more just and less cruel. We shall only think of these two kinds of writers as opposed if we think that a more comprehensive philosophical outlook would let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision.

. . .

If we could bring ourselves to accept the fact that no theory about the nature of Man or Society or Rationality, or anything else, is going to synthesize Nietzsche with Marx or Heidegger with Habermas, we could begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools — as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own half-articulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.

This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. It sketches a figure whom I call the “liberal ironist.” I borrow my definition of “liberal” from Judith Shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. I use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires — someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance. Liberal ironists are people who include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.

For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” — no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. . . . Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question — algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort — is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities.

The ironist intellectuals who do not believe that there is such an order are far outnumbered (even in the lucky, rich, literate democracies) by people who believe that there must be one. Most nonintellectuals are still committed either to some form of religious faith or to some form of Enlightenment rationalism. So ironism has often seemed intrinsically hostile not only to democracy but to human solidarity — to solidarity with the mass of mankind, all those people who are convinced that such an order must exist. But it is not. . . .

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. . . .

Then I began to dig into a book on the Socratic method by Ward Farnsworth. I did this not only because Geertz spoke of Socratic irony but because Nietzsche characterized Socrates as “the great ironist”, in multiple senses.

In Birth of Tragedy:

…that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, frugality, and cheerfulness of the theoretical man — how now? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of infection, of the anarchical dissolution of the instincts? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks — merely the afterglow of the sunset? The Epicureans resolve against pessimism — a mere precaution of the afflicted? And science itself, our science — indeed, what is the significance of all science, viewed as a symptom of life? For what — worse yet, whence — all science? How now? Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? A subtle last resort against–truth? And, morally speaking, a sort of cowardice and falseness? Amorally speaking, a ruse? O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O enigmatic ironist, was that perhaps your–irony? — —

In Beyond Good and Evil:

The old theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge” — or, more clearly, of instinct and reason — that is to say, the question whether in regard to the evaluation of things instinct deserves to have more authority than rationality, which wants to evaluate and act according to reasons, according to a “Why?,” that is to say according to utility and fitness for a purpose — this is still that old moral problem which first appeared in the person of Socrates and was already dividing the minds of men long before Christianity.

There it is: “dividing minds”, not necessarily between persons but within a single soul. This dividing seems essential to irony. He continues:

Socrates himself, to be sure, had, with the taste appropriate to his talent — that of a superior dialectician — initially taken the side of reason; and what indeed did he do all his life long but laugh at the clumsy incapacity of his noble Athenians, who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and were never able to supply adequate information about the reasons for their actions? Ultimately, however, in silence and secrecy, he laughed at himself too: he found in himself, before his more refined conscience and self-interrogation, the same difficulty and incapacity. But why, he exhorted himself, should one therefore abandon the instincts! One must help both them and reason to receive their due — one must follow the instincts, but persuade reason to aid them with good arguments. This was the actual falsity of that great ironist, who had so many secrets; he induced his conscience to acquiesce in a sort of self-outwitting: fundamentally he had seen through the irrational aspect of moral judgment.

So now I want to understand better Nietzsche’s attitude toward irony.

I’m seeing some general patterns. He associates it with decadence and non-nobility. By these terms, I mean something specific that is not purely vicious, just as in Nietzsche’s thought nobility is not purely virtuous. Nobility is simply a matter of psychic unicity. A noble soul is undivided, uni-perspectival, inert and impervious. It does not question its instincts but trusts them and acts instinctively. It is rarely curious, open to change or reflective toward its own existence. A noble soul is unironic. Socrates was ironic because he lacked nobility.

But he also seems to see an interpersonal dimension to irony. Consider this:

The clearest sign that two people hold alienated views is that each says ironic things to the other, but neither of the two feels the other’s irony.

Of course, the division is not just between the alienated friends. Each friend is speaking ironically, and has the inward division irony requires. But the irony is not registering, which raises the question: what is each friend missing in what the other is saying? Is the second meaning in the ironic utterances what each friend mistakes for the other’s belief, so the irony does not land? Or has each friend lost all sense of the other’s complexity and hears psychic polytonality as monotony?

For a while I was associating irony with pluralism, and I don’t think I was wrong to do so. Irony might be a necessary (or at least extremely helpful) condition of pluralism. But I want to understand their similarities, differences and relationship more clearly. I think irony is multiplicity of view in a single moment of experience (like a chord), where pluralism is more experienced sequentially (like a scale).

In irony we experience multiple, related and sometimes conflicting truths simultaneously. If we are pluralists, we can mute all but one of the truths in order to experience another as a purer and cohesive perspective.

I have become this way politically. I have become almost unable to straightforwardly speak about any single political position without simultaneously feeling the legitimate objections of two or more others — and more importantly the sheer magnitude of social complexity of the “hyperobject” each attempts to know and respond to.

But we can only do this if we have learned more than just the factual What content of other political positions. Even more we must know how to dance the How of its logic and feel the Why of its driving concerns.

More and more I find this kind of irony is what is most lacking in contemporary political and social discourse.

Geertz’s three lessons

Philosophy

I’m reading Geertz this morning. He and Rorty remind me of one another, not only in their style of thinking, but in their humor. Recalling his first fieldwork, and the 800 page dissertation he wrote on it, and the 500 page book he distilled from his dissertation, Geertz summarized what he gained from the years of effort in three offhand lessons:

1. Anthropology, at least of the sort I profess and practice, involves a seriously divided life. The skills needed in the classroom or at the desk and those needed in the field are quite different. Success in the one setting does not insure success in the other. And vice versa.

2. The study of other peoples’ cultures (and of one’s own as well, but that brings up other issues) involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, something a good deal less straightforward than the ordinary canons of Notes and Queries ethnography, or for that matter the glossy impressionism of pop art “cultural studies,” would suggest.

3. To discover who people think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think they are doing it, it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning within which they enact their lives. This does not involve feeling anyone else’s feelings, or thinking anyone else’s thoughts, simple impossibilities. Nor does it involve going native, an impractical idea, inevitably bogus. It involves learning how, as a being from elsewhere with a world of one’s own, to live with them.

Reading Geertz, I’m realizing how much I’ve imitated his tone, and that of Rorty and Howie Becker, specifically when I speak about design. It is the tone of those whose abstraction span stretches from deep space to the dirt under one’s feet because the ideas they discuss are ideas they have used for many years.

I am in a phase right now where I need absolutely everything I handle to have a traceable concrete lineage. I cannot tolerate the level of alienated abstraction I’ve been enduring.

Closest and most demonstrable

Biography, Philosophy

One of my favorite deep cut Nietzsche passages:

The two principles of the new life. —

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

Someday I should make a “Jefferson’s Bible” of Nietzsche quotes that freed me from the dismal faith of my youth and initiated me into a far better one.

The Nietzsche I revere and love is not the macho Nietzsche who emerges when you start with his most popular and most tattooed quotations. “God is dead.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” “When you stare long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” And, of course, there is the new antisemite favorite “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” Midwits love a paradox.

My favorite Nietzsche is the early-middle Nietzsche who wrote Human All Too Human, Daybreak and The Gay Science. I love precisely the books that were excluded from the two Walter Kaufmann collections, Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings, which is a little puzzling because I prefer Kaufmann’s translations to all others.

These were the books Nietzsche wrote mid-metamorphosis as he transformed himself from brilliant academic philologist to mystical firebrand. In them, he reflected on his war with his own received faith. The battlefront was questioning the sacred morality of his own culture — a morality so sacred that even asking is an unforgivable blasphemy.

Central to this drama is an intellectual conscience, sensitive, exacting, demanding, thorough and sometimes brutal. This is what Nietzsche awakened in me. He taught me to ask “Do I really believe this?” and to not confuse this question with “Can I argue this?” Because just as we must never confuse truth with reality, we must never confuse belief with faith.

Ethos, ethic, game and rule

Ethics

Borrowing from Wittgenstein and Garfinkel, I want to experiment with a rhetorical approach of speaking of ethics in terms of games and rules.

Every ethic belongs to an ethos and serves that ethos.

Apart from the ethos it serves, though, an ethic is meaningless.

Following an ethical rule outside the context of its ethos is absurd, just as following the rules of a game outside of game-play is absurd.

Imagine, for instance, a tennis player so fanatically dedicated to the game of tennis that, even off-court, they continue following the rules of tennis, and expect others to follow the rules of tennis at all times, too.

Or imagine the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Pittsburgh Steelers, and suddenly, without warning, the Steelers begin brawling. They are joined by their fans, who swarm out of the stands onto the field and overwhelm the Cowboys with numbers. Would the valiant Cowboys continue playing by the rules of football, avoiding holding and unnecessary roughness penalties, while the Pittsburgh hooligans subject them to atomic super-wedgies and hang them from the goalposts by their blown-out waistbands?

Now imagine, following their 821-0 victory over the Cowboys, the Steelers hooligans move up the street to the basketball arena and storm the court where the Dallas Mavericks are playing. The Steelers and their hooligans crowd onto the court and score touchdown after touchdown against the confused and defenseless Mavericks. The Mavericks take the high road and stick to the rules of basketball, but they score neither baskets nor touchdowns. They score only moral points, and these do not count toward victory. Eventually, using their new formula for victory, the Steelers become the champions not only of the NFL, but also the NBA, the WNBA, the MLB, NHL and every Olympic event.

When the game changes, the rules change with it.

The problem is, a great many of us mistake our own ethos for reality itself. And we mistake the rules of our own ethos, our ethic, for absolute universally-binding laws of human conduct, which all decent people must follow. We continue following the rules of the game off-court, and expect others to do as well, even if they’ve never agreed to participate in our ethos — or even reject our ethos.

In the future, when someone invokes an ethical principle, my first question will be: To what game does this rule belong? Am I obligated to play this game? Did I explicitly or implicitly consent to it?

If I am obligated, I will ask for clarification on the rules that bind both parties, and on who referees these rules?

If I am not obligated, I will recognize that I am in a far more interesting game: the game of determining the game, the rules of the game, and the referee of the rules.

Technicracy (sic)

Philosophy

It never occurred to me before today to understand a technocracy as rule by (or under) technic (or technik or technicity, depending on translation) as conceived by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology.

I prefer the term technicity. Technicity is the enworldment within which all things are understood, first and foremost, as means to ends. “What is it for?” is the compulsive next question, following “What is it?” It is the root of the industrial faith, and the true source of our misery under capitalism, and even more under various anti-capitalisms.

Trapped within the hollow, arid, robotically hostile strain we call corporate life, the technicity-bound rebel can dream nothing better than socialism. But socialism is a dream of technicity itself, guaranteeing the same miseries of capitalism, but in even purer form, without the vestigial consolations of pre-industrial life that have been smuggled into capitalism through liberal protections of the private sphere.

To sloganize:

  • The enemy is neither capitalism nor socialism, but their common faith, technicity.
  • Fundamentalism is what happens when the objects of religion are uprooted from their proper soil and planted in the sand of technicity.
  • Those trapped in technicity can only perceive, conceive, intuit and imagine inside the narrow limits of technicity. When the technicity-possessed say religion, they can mean only fundamentalism. When they dream escape from their misery, they dream leaps out of technicic pans into technicic fires.
  • It is trivially easy to swap out belief content within the same technic faith. Fundamentalist Christians can dump out their religious beliefs and replace them with Progressivist ones without much deep adjustment or change in life experience. But religious conversion is not essentially about beliefs. It is about the substratum that makes beliefs intelligible and persuasive (or sheer nonsense), the substratum of faith. You cannot stay in technicity and understand religious existence.
  • “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.” — Wittgenstein

The book we need

Philosophy

Fuck yes. Technic and Magic is exactly the book this time needs:

This book is not a political manifesto, or a general call to arms. More modestly, it is a reminder that reality-­systems are contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms, and that their modiication is always possible. Indeed, we are always able to modify our own reality­-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck. This volume is intended for those who lie defeated by history and the present, in the most general and most tragic sense. Regardless of the historical circumstances in which we ind ourselves to live, and even if we are completely hopeless about our power to modify the balance of forces on a macroscopic scale, we are always capable of modifying our own reality-­settings  – thus giving to ourselves a different reality, a different world and a different existential experience within it. Is it pure illusion? Not any more, or any less, than any other reality or any other world that is hegemonic enough to impose its own social institutions over a speciic historical period.

It was the book I wanted to write.

I’m disappointed and thrilled.

“Swiftvoting”

Philosophy, Politics

When news came down that DNC convention would be held in Chicago (based on my book purchases, it must have been in mid-January 2024, when I started reading Playing With Fire, followed by The Controversialist and King: A Life) I had a sudden epiphany that we are reliving 1968.

The October 7 Pogrom had happened three months before, followed by orgies of pro-Palestine / anti-Israel / anti-West demonstration, which invited comparison with pro-Viet Cong / anti-American activism of radical youth. I’d been thinking about Nixon’s seething “silent majority” and wondering how big today’s silent majority is. It is hard to know in times when dissent against the dominant ideology is discouraged, or even punished. I was also thinking also about how the Paris riots of May 68 disgusted a generation of ex-Trotskyite Jewish neoconservatives into existence, and how the pro-Hamas left is likely inspiring a neoneocon movement.

Then I heard that through some cosmic perversity, the DNC Convention would be held in Chicago and it all crystalized, and I hit the books and immersed myself in the era. Around that time (February 12) I posted to Facebook:

We are re-living 1968. Just keep watching.

To which I got comments like, “more like 1932”. Because Godwin’s Law.

And then I commented:

I just poked around to see if this idea is trending right now. It seems that is sort of isn’t — or isn’t much more than it always does every single election year.

Because at that point I hadn’t seen anyone make the comparison, or develop it.

Then I elaborated:

Keep an eye on the Chicago DNC convention, infantile activists, the silent majority, creepy right-wingers, deranged left-radicals, Democrat candidates bowing out, the spawning of a new generation of disillusioned ex-lefties disgusted by fellow travelers / useful idiots who support obvious psychopaths who reinforce their fanatical ideological commitments… Hopefully no political assassinations or bombings on US soil!

I’m not claiming to have prophetic foresight here.

I am claiming that I have something much, much better. I have 1) a modest knowledge of history and 2) even better, an energetically-cultivated independence of thought.

I read histories from political moments before this particular funhouse era. Do you really not understand that any history of totalitarianism is just as much about its own time as it is about the 1930s? For this reason, you’ve got to read histories written in a variety of times. You’ve got to read what totalitarians said about themselves. If you read contemporary ideologues like Timothy Snyder, Jill Lepore, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the like, you aren’t reading history — you are reading partisan editorial. This should be obvious to any critical thinker, but it is far from obvious to readers of NYT history bestsellers who read these books and are just shocked by their relevance to what is happening today!

And I read philosophy, so I can understand events from a plurality of logics. This enables me to try them on in turn, compare what each reveals, and find one that provides intuitive, cognitive and moral clarity on whatever I’m concerned or perplexed about. This hard work enables me to think things outside the narrow circular rut of Progressivist thought, and to see stark truths of which rank-and-file Progressivists are utterly oblivious.

If you are not reading philosophy, I promise you that you are running a philosophy you passively adopted through casual socialization. I have yet to meet an “original thinker” who thinks even slightly originally. Progressivists are ideologically automated to rethink the independent truths of the likeminded, and automatically dismiss thoughts from outside their logic as propaganda delusions.

But I am burying the living shit out of my lede under an avalanche of flex.

What I really want to do is make a new observation, and to mint a brand-new coinage. This morning I was expressing my belief that Kamala Harris can win this election. Here is what I said:

We live in a Taylor Swift Age where a stuffed sequined leotard can become an object of extreme adoration for no reason at all but a psycho-social need to adore.

I believe the autonomous mass-mind known as Progressivism can pull a “swiftvoting” propaganda operation to make Harris into a shining idol of hope for a Trumpless future.

I believe Harris can win.

Swiftvoting. That’s pretty good. An astroturf campaign to implement an engineered vibe-shift. Swiftboating for femme Gen-Zers and olds trying to mimic them.

And I bet you think you know why I think she’s a phony, terrible candidate. According to your omniscience, I can’t abide a woman candidate of color. If you had any capacity for self-reflection, which you do not, you’d see that the swelling backlash against progressivism has everything to do with this reflexive compulsion to condescend and progsplain people’s own motivations to themselves. You think you know better than I do what motivates my thinking? You? You’re an ideological automaton whose programming diverts self-reflection to harmless subroutines that simulate self-awareness.

The ressentiment generator

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I just said out loud a thought that has been gestating in me.

I posted it in response to Radical Radha‘s excellent Substack article, “Applying the Bhagavad-Gita to modern life”.

My danger is fury toward progressivism and its mind-boggling hypocrisy. Progressivism itself is blatantly guilty of everything it projects on patriarchy, whiteness, heteronormativity, etc. I’m constantly — obsessively, compulsively — trying to turn progressivism’s critique back on itself, trying to make progressivists acknowledge what they are really doing. I’ll say “Do a search and replace on DiAngelo, replacing ‘White’ with ‘Woke’ and you can see what’s really going on.” But it never works. They refuse to apply their principles to their own movement. They will never “do the work” when it threatens the real source of their privilege and power. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But in my better moments I suspect the problem has nothing to do with choice of target, and that the root problem is with the critical logic itself. Regardless of target — regardless of whether a real oppressor or some phony surrogate is in the critical cross-hairs — this philosophy itself is a ressentiment generator, and whoever uses it will radiate misery.

Design is human-centered design

Design, Design Instrumentalism

The introduction of human-centered methods to design did not just improve design methods. It didn’t simply improve the quality of design work.

The introduction of design research — the essence of human-centeredness — fundamentally transformed design.

It radically differentiated what engineers always meant by design from what designers mean by it — and what we all now implicitly mean when we speak of design.

A similar essential change might be in store for design as we move from design intended for solo use, centered on one person at a time to design meant to mediate interactions between multiple persons, each of whom is part of the other’s experience.

For years now I’ve experienced philosophy as a kind of design. I don’t mean that the theoretical concept occurred to me. I mean I noticed that I had already for some time been evaluating philosophies as designed artifacts. And I don’t only mean that I was assessing the objective content of the philosophies as well-designed or poorly-designed. More importantly, I was noticing how I responded to the world itself mediated by the philosophies I internalized as I read them. The medium of philosophy is its message, not the content of propositions or arguments. I treated the philosophy as an invisible mediation of my experience of life, which got worse or better, based on the deep design of the philosophy.

I call this understanding of philosophy design instrumentalism.

I now believe philosophy should be a kind of polycentric design.

We must design philosophies for interoperability within culture, or we are committing design malpractice.

Agonism overview

Philosophy, Politics

From Chantal Mouffe’s Agonistics:

Let me briefly recall the argument I elaborated in The Democratic Paradox. I asserted that when we acknowledge the dimension of ‘the political’, we begin to realize that one of the main challenges for pluralist liberal democratic politics consists in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations. In my view, the fundamental question is not how to arrive at a consensus reached without exclusion, because this would require the construction of an ‘us’ that would not have a corresponding ‘them’. This is impossible because, as I have just noted, the very condition for the constitution of an ‘us’ is the demarcation of a ‘them’. The crucial issue then is how to establish this us/them distinction, which is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism.

Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).

For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the ‘adversary’, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing about their interpretation. Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between adversaries is what constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.

A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If this is missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of identifications. Too much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion towards confrontations, leads to apathy and to a disaffection with political participation. This is why a liberal democratic society requires a debate about possible alternatives. It must provide political forms of identifications around clearly differentiated democratic positions.

While consensus is no doubt necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent. Consensus is needed on the institutions that are constitutive of liberal democracy and on the ethico-political values that should inform political association. But there will always be disagreement concerning the meaning of those values and the way they should be implemented. This consensus will therefore always be a ‘conflictual consensus’.

In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political principles are not only legitimate but also necessary. They allow for different forms of citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics. When the agonistic dynamics of pluralism are hindered because of a lack of democratic forms of identifications, then passions cannot be given a democratic outlet. The ground is therefore laid for various forms of politics articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or ethnic type, and for the multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable moral values, with all the manifestations of violence that such confrontations entail.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress once again that this notion of ‘the adversary’ needs to be distinguished sharply from the understanding of that term found in liberal discourse. According to the understanding of ‘adversary’ proposed here, and contrary to the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated, but ‘sublimated’. In fact, what liberals call an ‘adversary’ is merely a ‘competitor’. Liberal theorists envisage the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the positions of power, their objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place, without putting into question the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the relations of power. It is simply a competition among elites.

In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. It is a real confrontation, but one that is played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries.

I contend that it is only when we acknowledge ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension that can we pose the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace liberal theorists, is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how to reach a ‘rational’, i.e. fully inclusive, consensus without any exclusion. Despite what many liberals want to believe, the specificity of democratic politics is not the overcoming of the we/they opposition, but the different way in which it is established. The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’ those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.

Pragmatic metaphysics, continued

Metaphysics, Pragmatism

I’m having a fruitful conversation with Digitalap3 in response to yesterday’s post, Pragmatic metaphysics. It inspired one possible answer to the question I posed: What pragmatic difference is there between pantheism and panentheism?

I think the “difference that makes a difference” (to put it in Rortian terms) may be that pantheism sees nature as a stable, intelligible order, and panentheism does not.

Pantheism conceives both nature and God to be available to us through reason. We can expect linear progress in knowing more and more deeply and thoroughly.

Panentheism, on the other hand, expects deep, epiphanic disruptions to our understanding. Reason is always tentative, and its stability is never long assured.

By this understanding, Thomas Kuhn’s innovation was the introduction of a panentheistic conception of science!

I’ve said before that mine is a metaphysics of surprise. Maybe this gets at it:

Pantheism is a metaphysics of radical reason.
Panentheism is a metaphysics of radical surprise.

Pragmatic metaphysics

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Obviously, we cannot conceive something inconceivable prior to acquiring the capacity to conceive it.

But so what? Some realities are inconceivable. Some realities are incomprehensible. Why should we care? Is it such a problem that some things elude our understanding?

It would not matter if it were not for this truth: the as-yet-inconceivable attracts our attention and energy, and gives our lives purpose. The problem is not that we should already conceive or comprehend what we do not yet understand, but a living, active relationship with being who is beyond our understanding is a fundamental condition of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Understanding is a valuable by-product of such a participation in transcendent being.

This is where the Pragmatic Maxim is indispensable.

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

When we reach toward the inconceivable or incomprehensible, we cannot grip the “object” of our awareness (the ungrippable reality beyond our reach) but we can, in fact, work out some of the consequences of this incapacity, as well as some of the consequences of the possibility of acquiring a new capacity to comprehend what has been, so far, incomprehensible.

Strange. I wrote the passage above two days ago. Today, I was looking for an old post and stumbled upon exactly this same thought, which I’d forgotten.

I’ve never thought of pragmatism as something opposed to ontology, or as a methodological alternative to ontology, but this morning I am seeing it that way. I think mine is a pragmatist metaphysics, interested less in what transcends us, than in how a finite being (like each of us) interacts with being understood as transcending its finitude, and how such interactions are experienced. It is metaphysical because it concerns itself with transcendent being, but it chooses to not fruitlessly speculate on what is “behind the veil” but instead the properties of interactions that take place across the veil-line, especially the ones that surprise the anticipations, expectations and norms that comprise mundane existence.

A sliver of givens

Philosophy

What gives my thinking its unusual tone, which some might correctly recognize as religious, is a conviction at the root of my meta-understanding of understanding: We are able to experience, intuit and know only a small sliver of reality, because we lack the subjective capacity to receive any but a small sliver of givens.

Wherever we lack capacity for a given, we are oblivious.

I have termed enception any capacity to take as given some particular category of given.

Because I live in a practical world, in which I get things done with others, I have adopted a safe-for-work term for enception: sensibility.

We have five senses that allow us to perceptively intuit realities in our environment, and we have a great many more sensibilities that allow us to conceptively intuit many more realities of inter-connection among our experiences, memories, anticipations, beliefs and inchoate gists.

To put it in Kantian language, an enception is any transcendental faculty for intuiting some specific kind of reality.

It is important to note that the percepts and concepts we intuit are quite different from the connections we make manually in argument or causal explanation. Constructed/contrued truth is not the same as intuited truth. Intuition and construction complement each other. We need perception, conception and construction. Based on which enceptions we activate and cultivate and which we neglect or suppress, different realities will be intuited directly or construed indirectly.

Perceptive designers might recognize this distinction in their design work. Designers make tradeoffs between what elements in an artifact a user will wordlessly recognize and interact with, which elements require some degree of figuring out, and which elements will become focal objects of the experience.

The reason I keep insisting that philosophy can and ought to be regarded as a design discipline is once a thinker recognizes the role enceptions play in everyday understanding — in what stands out as self-evident and relevant — one realizes this is the deepest realm of personal responsibility.

If we do not take this responsibility and simply prescribe to what those around us prescribe to, we risk becoming participants in collective sociopathy.

The reason I read philosophy is to cultivate new enceptions.

Pragmatic panentheism

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

When I trace out the pragmatic consequences of panentheism they weave themselves into something I recognize as resembling the reality in which I participate.

Panentheists seem, on the whole, to be a pretty unaggressive lot. We don’t like to prescribe doctrines. I am starting to believe, however, that unexamined metaphysical assumptions are behind much human misconduct. I have developed a strong metaphysical preference, not only for myself, but for others. In other words, it is no longer a matter of personal taste, but of morality.

I might write a Borgesian book review of the nonexistent title, Panentheist Pragmatic.

Trouble, divergence, alignment, diversity

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Philosophy

In my field of human centered design, it is understood that before any group of people can collaborate effectively on anything, they must first align on the problem and then align on the solution.

What does this mean? Aligning on a problem means to share a conception of the problem — to think about it in roughly the same way. It is important to note here that until a problem is conceived, it is not even a problem — it is a troublesome situation.

And troublesome situations have the potential to be problematized in divergent ways implying diverging paths to a solutions. More often than not, groups confronting troublesome situations problematize the trouble in divergent ways, compounding the trouble, because now stubborn, troublesome people appear to block the way to a solution.

This happens for at least three big reasons.

Big Reason Number One is personality. Individual persons with different temperaments, sensibilities and capabilities understand and perceive the world differently in both subtle and dramatic ways, and notice different aspect of situations.

Big Reason Number Two is discipline. When people from different backgrounds confront a troublesome situation, they tend to notice very different features of the problem. Specifically, the notice symptoms of problems they specialize in solving. Different disciplines conceive problems in different and incompatible ways, and this is one factor that causes departmental strife in organizations.

Big Reason Number Three is the lived experience of incomplete information. Divergence of understanding is exacerbated by incomplete data. Given a smattering of facts, our habitual way of understandings (the combo of personality and expertise) fills in data gaps to complete the picture and perceive a gestalt truth. And we all have access to different smatterings and experience the smatterings in different sequences. Our early impressions condition our later ones. Being humans, a species with a need to form understandings, who prefer misunderstanding to an absence of understanding (perplexity), we immediately begin noticing whatever reinforces that sense, and tune out what threatens it. So the specific drib-and-drab sequence of data can play a role in shaping our impressions. The earliest dribs and drabs have “first mover advantage” in gestalt formation.

These three big reasons are not even exhaustive. It’s no wonder organizations are full divergent perspectives and controversy. (Contra– “against” + -versus “turned”). Generally, these circumstantial impressions and expert diagnoses of troublesome situations are not entirely wrong. Some are likely truer than others, but it is hard to determine which is truer than which. And it is somewhere between possible and likely that none are true enough for the purposes of solving the problem. As a matter of method, we designers assume none are right enough. (And if it does turn out that a preexisting truth turns out to be true enough, now we can support that truth with data and align the organization to it.)

Our job as design researchers is to go out and investigate real-life examples of the troublesome situation and expose ourselves to the profusion of data that only real life itself can offer. We see what emerges as important when we allow people to show us their situations and teach i\us how it seems to them.

This gives us a new, relevant conception of the problem rooted in the people we intend to serve with our design solutions.

Once an organization shares a common conception of the problem, they are better able to conceive solutions that they can align around.

And further evaluative research — getting feedback on prototypes of candidate solutions — allows teams to align around solutions that people consistently respond to favorably.

Aligned implementation teams can collaborate effectively on working out the solution in detail.

So, as I hope you can see, the designer’s task is largely a political one of cultivating alignment through collaborative research, modeling, ideation and craft.

I am unable to believe that this is not generally a better way to live.

When I am at my best, I conduct my life in a designerly way in accordance with my designerly faith.

My praxic taste

ANT, Anthropology, Ethics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Reading Fritz Perls, I’m struck by some common principles between Gestalt Therapy and ethnomethodology and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), two of my favorite (closely associated) flavors of sociology. What interests me about the similarities is that it indicates something about my own intellectual taste, or maybe my metaphysical orientation.

These ideas fill my heart with Yes! and inspire my to underline passages and draw big stars out in the margin. I am not even sure these are two distinct principles, but rather a single two-in one principle.

  1. Do not start with a pre-existing interpretive schema, but instead, follow the phenomenon wherever it takes you. Allow the interpretation to follow from the following. The interpretive schema is what is most in question, and it is the destination of the research, not the point of departure.
  2. Do not impose your own interpretation on the subject matter, but allow the subjects involved in it to teach you their way of interpreting what is happening. Assume interpretive competence and respect it. The researcher does not know better.

The highest principle of social learning:

Follow the subject matter and allow its truth to emerge.

And another is like it:

Respect your subjects as interpretive equals.

Beautiful instruments

Biography, Design Instrumentalism, Love, Philosophy

I love beautiful instruments.

These are useful tools — like pens, bicycles, guitars, blades, bags, digital devices, user interfaces — designed so well that they disappear in use, becoming extensions of our own being. They are, in Heidegger’s words, ready-to-hand.

But when we shift our awareness to present-at-hand, and contemplate them as objects, we find them aesthetically resonant. They reinforce our sense of value and meaning.

I love beautiful instrumental language. The words are transparent in use, spontaneously conveying meaning without obtrusion, distraction, obfuscation or distortion. When we participate in reality, doing and speaking, the words are part of reality and participate in its realness.

But when we attend to the words themselves, hearing them, seeing them on a page, experiencing them objectively, they are beautiful. The form of the language reinforces our sense of value and meaning.

The words extend our subjectivity and become part of us, but they are also objects that help us feel who we are, and what we care about.

Words, like selves, have subjectivity and objectivity, concavity and convexity, are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand depending on how we let them be for us.

When I sit in my library, among my books, I feel profoundly at home.

I love when people visit and talk with me in this beloved space, lined with books filled with the words of people I love, people I have done my best to incarnate and make immortal through my own share of moral life.

Philosophy is useful poetry.