Category Archives: Philosophy

Trading off trade-offs

Design Instrumentalism, Wheel

One of the most interesting tensions in design, and the one least accepted by novice designers is trade-offs. Everything we choose to include as a consideration in design comes at the cost of an excluded competing consideration.

But against the tension of trade-offs is another tension: a) to solve the problem right away with this current framing of the problem, which necessitates these trade-off choices, or b) to search for a new framing that might put more considerations into harmony rather than into conflict and require fewer significant trade-offs.

This kind of reframing can occasionally produce the kind of miracles executives demand when they “push teams past their limits”. Sadly, the kinds of executives who tend to do this kind of aggressive pushing prefer to credit the miracles to the belligerent refusal to accept trade-offs, rather than to the reframing that really produces them.

And in the majority of cases where teams are pushed this way, especially when reframing is undermined through shifting goals or demands to show constant evidence of progress, the refusal to accept trade-offs forces the least acceptable trade-off of all. Good design is traded off for all-inclusiveness.

Loves

Love, Philosophy, Spiral

If we separate, seclude and protect ourselves from the harsh Otherness of the world for awhile; if we quiet ourselves down and refuse to scatter our attention and diffuse our efforts; if we concentrate our awareness and go deep enough into ourselves to discover what is there; blissful benevolence toward All may arise in our heart and overwhelm us.

We call this Love.

But isn’t love the instinct that drives us beyond ourselves toward a particular, individual other? Isn’t it the will to emerge from seclusion and safety to risk all, and if necessary to suffer or sacrifice? Isn’t it the desire to overcome our inwardness by joining our selves to a beloved other in togetherness?

These loves are so different in their trajectories and conditions it is hard to fathom how they can both be designated by one word. In other languages, such as Greek, they go by different names. Yet, there is reality expressed in marrying them under the shared name, love — as long as one doesn’t dominate or displace the other…

The odor of burning rubber

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Trefoil

When thinking about truth, we expect both clarity and effectiveness. These qualities are so expected, in fact, that they serve as criteria for truth. If they are present we assume what we think is true, and if we are surrounded by people thinking the same way we might even succumb to certainty.

Certainty is comfortable. We tend to try to stay in situations where we feel we know what is true, or at least have a gist of truth. Most of us, who work at living normal, orderly, productive lives, mostly succeed most of the time.

The life of a strategic designer is not like this. Strategic designers are routinely asked to help organizations innovate. This requires framing or reframing problems: re-conceptualizing known truths, or making sense of chaotic situations nobody understands or resolving conflicts where incompatible, incommensurable visions collide.

Working to discover/make (instaurate) a concept that manages to produce all three qualities at once — clarity, effectiveness and consensus — is tricky work. Normally it is necessary to try on and discard multiple framings that only produce only one or two of these qualities before one comes along the fully resolves the problem.

This process is instructive if we are observant and ready to meta-reframe what we think is going on. In other words, this activity of frame instauration can produce philosophical shifts. These experiences and my attempts to account for them have shifted my own understanding of pretty much everything.

What have I taken from all this shifting? First, I know what it is like to shift between frames. I know what it does to my experience of whatever problematic situation I am trying to understand and I know what it can do to my experience of the world, instantly, all at once, as a whole. I also know what it is like to do without a frame, and the harrowing things that does to my experience of the world. I am used to radical surprise, of having (literally) inconceivable possibilities become conceivable, and along with it, all kinds of ideas that were standing in front of my face, invisible, staring me in the eyes while I was rooting around in the shadows for knowable unknowns. I have a very vivid sense of pluralism, and of a transcendent ground from which truth in all its pluralistic glory emerges.

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An urgent question to ask: If an explanation is clear and effective why would anyone refuse to accept it?

A better reframing of this question is: What good reasons might a person have for refusing to accept a clear and effective explanation?

This question becomes even more effective if it is asked from a pluralistic perspective, assuming that multiple true answers are always possible because questions can be framed myriad ways.

What follows below is my answer to this question.

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It is important to us that our truths are clear; that is, they give us the means to think about our situations. This means, first, being able to ask a question that can be answered. Not knowing an answer to a question can be frustrating, but at least we know what the problem is. Perplexity, the incapacity to find the relevant question in the face of a crisis, is unbearable, when this happens we become anxious that we do not have the truth.

It is important to us that our truths are effective; that is, they work properly, orienting us to the situations we find ourselves in and enabling us to anticipate and respond to what is going on. If we lose this ability and we are constantly surprised and our responses falter we begin to suspect that we do not have the truth.

It is tempting to settle with truths that are both clear and effective, and for a long time many of us have, on principle, rejected all truth criteria but these. But there is another criterion that is just as important: it is importance itself.

It is important to us that our truths are significant; that is they make our own situation important to ourselves, and inspire us to care about it, whether caring means loving or hating, embracing or opposing. If we lose the capacity to sense significance in our situation we will become indifferent, and here we ought to learn to suspect that whatever truth we have is not worth keeping.

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I know a lot of people right now who feel irritated, agitated and dissatisfied. If they are not angry or sensorily stimulated or intoxicated, they are just blank in a horrible way.

These same people are certain they know the truth, and everyone they know agrees with them that they know the truth, at least the most relevant aspects of the truth. Part of the truth they know is that philosophy is an inferior precursor to science, a cousin to religion. Both philosophy and religion opine, speculate and invent, where science demonstrates and establishes truth. It never occurs to people who know these things about science and philosophy to think about how they think, because we’ve figured that out, and we can skip to the scientific bottom line and just scoop up all the factual information science has made available to us.

So, they know a lot of true facts, and they know where to go to get more.

But what about all this ennui?

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I heard somewhere that when we lose our sense of smell, we do not simply smell nothing. We smell something resembling burning rubber. It drives people into depression and sometimes to suicide.

Perhaps the moral blankness we don’t feel when we lose the capacity to sense importance is like the burning rubber we don’t smell when we lose our sense of importance.

 

Rendering a philosophical proposition present

Philosophy

I’ve tried to say many times what Stengers says here:

To try to render a philosophical proposition “present” means first of all to try to avoid the form of commentary that is suitable for the exposition of an author’s beliefs, of what he or she thinks. It is to make thought inseparable from the problem of “how to think” that obliges this thought.

This is why I warn people away from philosophy surveys that report the beliefs and outline the arguments of philosophers.

Philosophies are not “belief systems.”

Neither are religions, for that matter.

x = y zillionths

Biography, Philosophy

Zillion is a funnier word for myriad, which happens to be my favorite qualitative number.

For me, any exact quantity is only an approximate fraction of zillion.

If x is an exact value, x = y zillionths.

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Qualitative math. Operations performed on none, some, few, many, myriad…

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I suppose I’m still thinking about math today.

Little known anomalogue trivia: I have a shelf of math books, primarily about chaos theory (what Darwinism was to the 19th century and relativity was to the early 20th, chaos was to my itty-bitty generation) .

(Philosophical hermeneutics can be seen as a qualitative chaos theory.)

I also have a bunch of statistics for nonstatistician books (statistics seems worth knowing but not enough for me to actually do the work of knowing it), a few classics on teaching math and some flaky ones that explore mathematical aesthetics.

(If mathematical aesthetics interests you, see my “handsome math” Pinterest board. I love Pinterest. Because it emphasizes our responses to the world around us instead of enabling us to project our alleged personas (now known as “personal brands”!) to the world, Pinterest is where you can see a person’s individual axiologic (to me, the very seat of the soul) in their tastes and hopes, rather than watching their boring attempts to compete for medals in the cramped ethnomethodic olympics of our times. I learned a lot about my own aesthetic seeing collected together and juxtaposed all the pretty stuff I spontaneously liked and collected together.)

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“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exuperie

I had exactly this same thought 20 years ago, and was startled to discover that someone had said it almost the same way, word for word, which probably means I saw it and forgot about it. It is a beautiful, true, neglected insight.

 

 

Mathematician’s faith

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy, Spiral, Wheel

From Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead (bold mine)

Thinking with Whitehead today therefore means accepting an adventure from which none of the words that serve as our reference points should emerge unscathed, but from which none will be disqualified or denounced as a vector of illusion. All are a part of the problem, whether they refer to the whys of human experience or to the hows of “objective reality.” If compromise solutions do not suffice, it is because they try to circumvent the problem instead of raising it; that is, they try to mitigate the contra­dictions and to make compatible that which defines itself as conflictual. Whitehead was a mathematician, and mathematicians are they who do not bow down before contradictions but transform them into an ingredi­ent of the problem. They are the ones who dare to “trust” in the possibil­ity of a solution that remains to be created. Without this “trust” in a pos­sible solution, mathematics would not exist.

This truth is the one William James called faith or belief, his only an­swer when confronted by those who have declared that life is not worth living, “the whole army of suicides (…) an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening gun of the British army, fo llows the sun round the world and never terminates.” It has nothing in common with what I would call, to underline the difference, “to be confident,” that is, to continue, to carry on in the mode of “everything will work out fine.” The mathematician’s trust is inseparable from a commitment not to mu­tilate the problem in order to solve it and to take its demands fully into account. Yet it implies a certain deliberate amnesia with regard to the obviousness of obstacles, an active indetermination of what the terms of the problem “mean.” Transferred to philosophy, this indetermination means that what announced itself as a foundation, authorizing a position and providing its banner to a cause, will be transformed into a constraint, which the solution will have to respect but upon which it may, if neces­sary, confer a somewhat unexpected signification.

It is funny that Stengers calls this a mathematician’s trust and views it as a characteristic that can be transferred to philosophy. I see this faith as the essence of philosophy (I wrote “dialectical imagination” in the margin of the page) and the element of  intellectual creativity common to problem-solving in any field.

It is certainly crucial to design innovation, and it is finding conditions favorable to it — the right level of desperation (which translates to willingness to trust), the right collaborators (who share this faith), the right deadlines and pace — that separates great design projects from dull ones.

It is also the difference between tedious debates and true collaborative dialogue: Do both parties have faith that another conception of a problem can yield radically new solutions — and actively prefer pursuing this utterly inconceivable, imperceptible, utter nothingness of an impossibility in the face of the most extreme anxiety? Or do they demand exhaustive disproof of all existing hypotheses prior to submitting unwillingly to some futile search for who-knows-what by some mysterious method nobody seems able to explain much less codify? The latter attitude make philosophical friendship impossible (and for those few capable of philosophy, taking this stance, in fact, is to refuse friendship). I feel like I need to add this softening qualification: Luckily, many other forms of friendship exist besides philosophical friendship.

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I have wedded this “mathematician’s faith” (or dialectical imagination) with a religious faith that perceives infinite importance in the exercise (especially collaborative exercise) of dialectical imagination, for the sake of deepening relationship with that who cannot be conceptualized — of transcendence. I have a simple word for the instinct that drives of this collaborative exercise: love.

This latter faith, the faith that there is better, and that better is tied to our relationship with realities beyond our sphere of understanding, and that this relationship involves other people is why I call myself a religious person.

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It is clear that I have to understand Whitehead.

 

Paranoid style in American politics

Ethics, History

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

… Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

— from “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter, Harper’s Magazine, November 1964

Yes, 1964!

I’ve had a copy of Hofstadter’s book sitting on my side table for the last couple of years, but I have never gotten around to reading it. While I find conversation on the substance of specific paranoid fantasies to be tedious, interminable, unproductive and palpably degrading, as an object of inquiry I find the phenomenon of the intellectual style itself to be fascinating and, sadly, relevant. Maybe it is time to pick it up and read it.

Coping strategies

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy

I’ve met people who cope with life’s stresses with distraction, with narrowness, with willpower and with inspiration.

Distraction and narrowness are both avoidance strategies. Distraction often takes the form of a “work hard, play hard” life, oscillating between extreme busyness and extreme entertainment that never leaves time for sustained intensive reflection and the discomfort that attends it. Narrowness does the same thing with different means. Narrowness focuses all attention on a defined region of activity or knowledge, a subject that occupies one’s mind without pushing it past its own limits and producing discomfort.

Willpower does confront discomfort directly but pushes straight through it in order to achieve goals, and to develop skills for overcoming discomfort and maintaining control, focus and equanimity.

Inspiration can go multiple ways. Inspiration can seek sources of meaning that make discomfort seem worthwhile in the context of a meaningful life. It can also look for meaning precisely in the places that produce discomfort, so that sources of discomfort and meaning are the same, but the meaning outweighs and redeems the suffering. Finally, one can seek meaning precisely in suffering (or at least certain forms of suffering), so now the suffering isn’t balanced against meaning but is viewed as a signal of potential meaning and a path into meaning.

I’m sure there are more coping methods, but these are the ones that came to mind first. I’m watching many of my friends moving from avoidance strategies to willpower strategies through the practices of stoicism, and it’s sensitized me to differences among approaches.

Soulsizing

Ethics

If you are a person who invests your best time and effort into understanding what matters most to you, chances are you’ll end up understanding things differently from most people in your life.

But everyone has some kind of understanding of what matters most to them, even if they have not spent time explicitly interrogating it. And by virtue of the fact that these understandings attach to the most important things, the understandings are invested with great importance and might even be counted among the most important things.

This means there is not only a difference in understanding, but a morally-charged difference in understanding.

That moral charge often manifests as taboo against even hints of doubt, much less approaching in a questioning spirit, much less engaging in active interrogation.

So not only is there a morally-charged difference in morality, but also a morally-charged difference in whether we even ought to actively seek a deeper and possibly destructive understanding of understandings of precisely what we value most.

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The strangest thing about digging beneath prohibitions against digging into morally-charged understandings, it how much general understanding and how many quotidian beliefs get undermined in the process. These questions literally change everything, including, perhaps most of all, what is meant by the word “everything” when we say it, how much that word comprises.

Everythings come in many sizes.

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What is the basic unit of measurement of a soul? Everything.

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Our souls give each other’s souls space to live.

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The harder you work at understanding — whether you succeed or fail does not matter, but only how much you ultimately diverge from the norm — the less you can expect to be understood, because many cannot follow the thinking and many more refuse to. The difference between people who would if they could but really can’t, and people who could if they would but really won’t becomes starkly evident, and starkly significant.

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Existential FOMO

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy

A lot of longing for freedom might be best explained as existential FOMO. It is a fear of committing to one concrete future self and missing out on all the other future selves who could have been.

I’m reminded of an insight from Nietzsche, where he says something to the effect of: don’t tell me what you want freedom from; tell me what you want freedom for.

The problem with the freedom that existential FOMO craves is that it excludes the positive freedom of being someone, not only because being someone requires sustained effort and discipline, but also because substantial relationships with other people depends on us being someone who can be counted on to be there when we are needed.

A person who seems to be one person one day and another person the next… a person who values very different things depending on context and mood… a person who daydreams of one life one day, and another life the next… a person who’s constantly revising their autobiography and recasting characters (making heroes into villains and villains into heroes to suit the trajectory of the plot, or reassigning stars to bit-parts and bit-parts to star roles to fit the theme of the story du jour)… such people can be friends only with people who care little enough about relationships to skim over the whimsical inconstancy. Such lite friends can be very chill and easy to hang with, and they’ll give you all the freedom you want to be whoever you want to be in the moment, but they are as likely to relieve existential FOMO as a double shot of bourbon is to relieve craving for alcohol. That hollowness and that irritability that says you need more, more, better, better will intensify.

It is difficult to find that one future self you want to be. It doesn’t irrupt into your life as a grand fully-formed epiphany and blueprint. Nor does it appear as a person standing across the room — whether it’s that person you’ve waited for your entire life, or just someone who looks like the next fascinating nut to crack. Nor is it being discovered — first someone, then everyone! — finally realizing who I really am. If you are discovered this way, chances are you’re a by-product of someone else’s delusional self-discovery.

Too much chasing of this kind of self-actualization makes you lose your taste for everything that can make you into someone. Eventually you run out of time, energy and hope.

Being someone worth being takes alertness, sustained attention and a good eye, ear and nose for quiet and subtle hints of love — seeds of meaning that can be nurtured, grown, disciplined and made the core of life worth full commitment.

Understanding souls

Philosophy

Most folks who believe in souls think of a soul as the being who inhabits and animates a body. I agree with them, but I see souls as inhabiting and animating more than bodies. Anything understood to have an understandable purpose behind it, anything where answers to the question “why?” are more directly to the point than answers to “what?”, “how?” has a soul. When we try to understand something, we are trying to get at its animation.

I would argue that understanding itself implies soul, not only because souls do the understanding, but because souls are implied in the object of understanding, though in this case the object is another subject behind any objective knowledge. Objectivity is understood when it is understood in the context of a subject capable of comprehending that knowledge.

When we understand a loved one we become able to comprehend their words, gestures and actions, because our souls can animate our empathy and allow us to respond to what they mean by them.

But I would like to intentionally misapply homonyms to confuse categories, by suggesting that when we understand the subject of mathematics we become able to comprehend math problems, because our souls can animate mathematical thinking and move our thinking effectively.

No matter what it is that we objectively comprehend, we comprehend it only because we have subjectively — in the broadest sense — understood it first in a way that can animate our comprehension, and it is this alone that makes it meaningful.

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Big problems happen when we try to comprehend what first needs understanding.

Kids will try to do this when they try to solve math problems purely procedurally without understanding the concepts. Adults will do this when they try to explain other people’s confusing behaviors before they’ve attempted to know them as people.

Even bigger problems happen when things that cannot be comprehended are dismissed as nonexistent before understanding has been attempted.

This is where we see cynical dismissal passing as insight. “Postmodernism” is confusing because the emperor wears no clothes — there is no sense to get. Souls cannot be scientifically proven to exist, or defined in a precise way a rigorous positivist can do anything with, so it is nonsense. Institutions are even more aggressive about eliminating what they cannot measure and operationalize than individuals, and a great number of individuals think by the logic of the institutions to which they belong.

And when we forget that understanding and comprehension are different and require different kinds of approaches and efforts, we lose the capacity to recognize much less navigate and surmount failures of understanding and we end up entrenching in mutual miscomprehension against enemies. Gaining understanding is hard enough when both parties in misunderstanding seek understanding and know what understanding involves.

But when one side of a conflict of understanding comprehends only comprehension, peaceful impasse is the best one can hope for.

If both sides comprehend only comprehension and become convinced they comprehend evil intent on the part of the other, both are 100% correct. In this case one should stop praying for peace and start praying for the shortest, least lethal war.

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A soul is most a soul when lives as a soul among souls.

This is why I chose to live among souls. It is better.

Other names for design instrumentalism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy, Pragmatism

This whole line of thought I’ve been calling “design instrumentalism” — and the minimally technical language I use for describing it — has become increasingly productive. I can’t write in my own voice and exclude all philosophical language — especially those words and names that have become experience-near for me and are organic elements of my thinking.

I have, however gotten feedback that the name itself might be confusing or annoying, so I’m considering other names.

“Axiopragmatism” is one option — which has the virtue of explicitly introducing valuative/moral/aesthetic concerns to a school which has been accused of excluding them.

I’m still thinking, and I’m open to suggestions.

The pluralism of design instrumentalism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

Because design instrumentalism views knowledge as a result of conceptualizations of perceptions of particular experiences — that is, as a product of one of myriad possible praxes capable of producing different and even conflicting truths — with a particular set of design tradeoffs — that is, with varying degrees of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, logical, practical, valuative and social adequacy — and, further, because some designs truly are better than others — that is, they make fewer tradeoffs overall, or solve particular relevant problems far better than expected — faced with an stubborn and morally-charged controversy a design instrumentalist is more likely to attempt to resolve the impasse with intellectual reframing than direct argument for one or another position within the current conflict.

And intellectual reframing is just another word for philosophizing — finding our way out of the current conceptualizations that make agreement impossible, into that uncanny shadowy region where words provide little help, and tacit thought must grope its way by smell, touch and tone through perplexity from one end to the other, out into the new light, where new ways of understanding are possible, and different ideas with different tradeoffs, perhaps acceptable or even inspiring to a wider range of people, can be produced.

(There are some folks out there who are averse to such reframing and from inability or unwillingness cannot bring themselves to cooperate with it. In design workshops, I can spot them from across the room. They alternate between sitting and crossing their arms and leaning aggressively forward, pushing the obvious truth, insisting that people show how the idea or objection they are asserting is false. They are suspicious of reframing, seeing it as a last resort to use only after existing theories have been shown to be nonviable. They often see themselves as hard-nosed rationalists, proud to set aside personal feelings so that objective truth can be served. That people like this can also, with equal inflexible fervor adhere to magical religious beliefs appears as contradictory to some conceptions of religion, but not to mine: rigid rationalism paired with metaphysical otherworldism go together in certain souls like two wings on a bird. Through various wily tricks of the design trade I keep people like this separated from from where collaboration is trying to emerge, because they make conception of truly new ideas impossible.)

Design Instrumentalism

ANT, Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The best name for my approach to philosophy might be “design Instrumentalism”, a variant of John Dewey’s instrumentalism. According to Wikipedia,

Instrumentalism is a pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey that thought is an instrument for solving practical problems, and that truth is not fixed but changes as problems change. Instrumentalism is the view that scientific theories are useful tools for predicting phenomena instead of true or approximately true descriptions.

Design instrumentalism builds on Dewey’s instrumentalism by focusing on ideas as instruments that ought to be designed intentionally employing design methods and evaluated as designed products, using frameworks like Liz Sanders‘s famous triad of Useful, Usable and Desirable. These three evaluative considerations could be translated to the design of philosophies:

  • How well does the philosophy help its subscribers act effectively in response to concrete situations and produce good outcomes?
  • How well does the philosophy define, relate and elucidate ideas to allow subscribers of the philosophy to articulate clearly an account of reality as they experience it?
  • How well does the philosophy inspire its subscribers to value existence in whole and sum?

Philosophies, too ought to be designed as person-reality interfaces, which are should be viewed less as collections of true beliefs, than as as fundamental conceptions of reality that direct attention,  guide responses, shape beliefs and connect everything together into a comprehensive practical worldview (a.k.a. praxis).

Obviously, Design Instrumentalism has a lot of arguing to do to justify its legitimacy, but luckily most of this legwork has been done by Pragmatists and their various intercontinental offspring, and it is all solid and persuasive enough, and not in need of tedious rehashing. I’ll just skip to the bottom line, and rattle off some key articles of faith, which are basically the vital organs of Pragmatism.

This is a good start of a list of pragmatic presuppositions. The list is still incomplete and will be supplemented with ideas drawn from sources, including phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics and material turn philosophies.

One more thing about Design Instrumentalism: It is, like every ambitious philosophy, multilayered. Design Instrumentalism is itself (a) a philosophical tool used to explore what it means that (b) philosophy is a philosophical tool for designing philosophical tools, which are (c) applied to practical living. So Design Instrumentalism might be useful, usable and desirable for some thinkers who enjoy doing philosophy (the tool designers), but it also focuses on the design of philosophies for non-philosophers with little interest in doing philosophy (the tool users) who need concepts for thinking about their lives in general and for focused “single-use” for specialized purposes, such as finding frameworks that support the resolving of particular design problems.

Doing just this kind of work (strategic designers call it “framing”) in the context of professional design strategy, in combination with my private philosophical work is what brought me to this view of philosophy. For me, none of this is speculative theorizing, but in fact my best attempt to equip myself with the ability to explain myself, to function effectively in the situations I find myself in every day, and to infuses my work and my life with a sense of purpose. Something like an inarticulate Design Instrumentalism led me to articulate Design Instrumentalism.

Wordless ground of meaning

Philosophy

When we say we know what something is, or know how to do something, or know why something is valuable or worthless we implicitly assume we understand what it means to know these things. But how sure can we be of this?

Are we sure we understand exhaustively what understanding is and can be? Are we sure we know what understanding does and can do? Without a full set of possibilities to consider, can we claim to have a clear sense of what it ought to be like to understand? And what if multiple distinct ways of knowing exist — ways that can be confused for one another, leading to misapplications, misunderstandings or even misnorms?

I will claim below that we have impoverished and unclear understandings of understanding. My claim is based, not on speculation or empty abstraction, but on personal experience working in the field of design, and it is this experience that gives the claim and its constituent concepts meaning and urgency. Over and over, I have found that misconceptions around understanding and knowledge to interfere with the work of improving understandings and producing more effective knowledge. This is an attempt to create and justify conceptual space for a wider range of intellectual functioning, including, most of all functioning that is palpably real, demonstrably effective (when permitted to act) but profoundly language-resistant:

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First, we tend to emphasize explicit knowledge that is readily articulated, operationalized and agreed upon. This is done, I believe, at the expense of tacit, primordial, intuitive understandings that invest explicit knowledge with meaning, that allow us to inhabit the knowledge and have real mastery of a field or subject or genre.

We assume that if someone can clearly explain a practice that they have demonstrated an expertise that can be applied in practice, and that if someone has difficulty explaining how they do something, they do not know what they are doing. In both is an implied belief that language is directing one’s activities. But what if the know-how of explaining is one thing and the know-how of doing is another? And what if the meaning of the explicit explanation is predicated entirely on a tacit know-how (or do-how?), one that is not some latently explicit knowledge that, with effort, can be brought to the surface, but rather as a primary source of competence, one that is supplemented or equipped by explicit, formal language (verbal, mathematical, geometrical or otherwise) but never dispensable?

The same is true of valuing, whether emotional, moral or aesthetic. Often we assume unconscious principles or logical processes are working behind the scene to produce our valuative responses. A person who can say what these principles are or produce arguments for applying them in some particular way, must have clearer discernment of value. But again, what if the valuative response — a know-why (or feel-why?) — is primary? What if value is perceived directly or not at all, and explanations, accounts and expressions are supplements to something preceding them that cannot be replaced with principles or logic, which alone give these supplemental forms meaning? In value, if you don’t actually experience the value, you do not know the value in the way value is known. With love, “to know is to love.”

Last, perhaps even conceptual knowledge is like practices and values in that it is rooted in some kind of tacit response that produces awareness of relationships? A sort of analogical intuition, a wordless recognition, underlies the ability to make any kind of abstract connection and to speak about it, or respond to it. This is a tacit form of know-what. It is entirely possible to detect relationships prior to applying categories or articulating criteria. Without this relating, all categorizing by criteria is a mechanical formalism. It is abstraction in the worst sense of the word — language games conducted in mid-air, uprooted from the wordless ground of meaning.

Perhaps “wordless ground of meaning” provides a clue to account for why experience is so hard to encapsulate directly. We have to indicate it indirectly by telling origin stories of life paths, or show what it has done and can do through lists of accomplishments, or we sense it in the liveliness, skillfulness or gravity of actions, words or works. When I use the word, experience, of course what I really mean is wisdom — a fund of tacit know-what, do-how, feel-why that invests words, actions and responses to life situations with immediate significance.

*

Second, each of these kinds of understanding, these primary intuitions, ways of knowing, can take one another as objects, which makes them easy to confuse.

For the sake of comprehension I will call them intuition of What, How and Why.

(Unfortunately, this What-How-Why triad is already in prominent use elsewhere, but for different uses and in a different relation. This line of thought does not build on the other, and it will be necessary to at least temporarily forget the other system to understand this one. It does not build upon it, and might even be incommensurate with it, despite using the same three words. They’re the best words for the purpose, however, so I am using them.)

And for grammatical reasons I can’t explain or excuse, the “objects” are verbs… An intuition of What or How or Why can apply to whatness (as “is”), or to howness (as “can”) or to whyness (as “ought”), producing strange hybrids that are easily mistaken for one another. And to make it even worse, the hybrids can take other hybrids as objects, and produce long chains of associations. This is my explanation for the confusions I described above. Knowing how to speak about concepts describing how something is done (speaking expertly about expertise) is confused for the expertise itself. Mastering the vocabulary and rules of a language game is one thing, intuitively connecting the language to what it signifies is quite another, as many perplexed newly graduated scholars will tell you, if they’re honest.

Defining primary (What, How, Why) and secondary (What is, What can, What ought, How can, How ought, How is, Why ought, Why is, Why can) should at least create some distinctions to untangle what can and cannot be expected from the various forms of knowledge.

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Finally, there exist some vivid experiences that occur when we lack an understanding and are unable to use a counterfeit. These experiences also need names. I call an incapacity to intuit What perplexity, and incapacity to intuit How faltering, and incapacity to intuit Why indifference. These, too, should aid in sorting out what kind of understanding is operative and inoperative in any given situation.

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The above could serve as an explanation of my obscure as hell trefoil diagram and its attendant prose poem delucidations from my Geometric Meditations pamphlet, formerly known as The 10,000 Everythings.

Collaborative agon

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Synesis

It’s difficult, painful and uncanny to argue across fundamentally different worldviews. Not everyone can do it and even fewer will do it. It requires collaborative agon, and too much desire to avoid conflict or to make one’s own position prevail will destroy the conditions of success.

Recognizing a conflict that requires collaborative agon and conducting oneself accordingly is an essential dimension of reason, albeit an uncommon dimension, and entirely outside the limits of reasonable discourse for those who cannot imagine that all disagreements are not a matter of evidence and logic, nor is it a last resort to employ only after evidence and logic are exhausted.

Respect: experiences, versus interpretations of experiences, versus…

Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

I listen to other people speak of their experiences, and I also listen to their explanations of their experiences. The former is privileged knowledge: respect entails belief in the other’s testimony. The latter is not: our explanations for the experience belong to our own theories founded in our own philosophies. And here respect entails allowing each individual to hold their own beliefs on what caused the private experience.

Perhaps these two respects deserve different names.

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If you experience God speaking directly into your ear, I must respect your testimony or risk disrespecting you — but you must respect my interpretation of your testimony or risk disrespecting me.

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If my child throws a fit, I must believe she is experiencing real distress or I am failing as a parent — but I must interpret that distress and respond to it as an adult parent or I am failing in a different, perhaps worse way — a way that neglects the obligation of parents to teach their children to interpret their own emotions and to respond to them in a socially reasonable way.

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What should these differing forms of respect be called?

  1. The respecting of direct testimony of experience, taken on faith as true.
  2. The respecting of interpretation of experience, taken as one of a plurality of arguable truths.

There is a third respect I have not mentioned, one in which I might be deficient. This is respect for rigorous comparison of experiences (at least empirical, sharable experiences) and interpretations (at least interpretations that are strictly logical) and their consequences, which means abandoning one’s favored interpretations when another is shown to have more explanatory power. This would probably be called scientific respect. Or… (see below) positivistic respect…?

But, then, there is the respect for precisely those experiences that are least sharable and conclusions that are reasonable but not determined by any logic fed by empirical data, one that recognizes that relevance is a function of framing and that reality infinitely exceeds our perception, conception, comprehension and understanding, and when reality is beyond not only our grasp but even our our touch, it is indistinguishable from nothingness — not that dark nothingness that announces its present absence with a shadow, but that absent absence, the blind nothing that looks like the expected somethings, the reality that can stare directly into each of our pupils and breathe the air directly from our nostrils, unperceived, undetected, unsuspected.

Some assertions are experiential, some interpretive, some positivistic, and these deserve their own kind of respect, but some assertions are none of these and aim at what is beneath and beyond all of them together — and this commands an enforceable philosophical respect. Or is it religious respect?

Foucault on episteme

Philosophy

“If one wishes to undertake an archaeological analysis of knowledge itself, it is not these celebrated controversies that ought to be used as the guidelines and articulation of such a project. One must reconstitute the general system of thought whose network, in its positivity, renders an interplay of simultaneous and apparently contradictory opinions possible. It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.”

I like to mis-etymologize “archaeology” to mean, not the study of the archaic roots of knowledge, but rather the study of the arche of intellect. What is it, behind our thinking, that moves our thoughts to the only set of conclusions we can reach, given our variable tastes and interests?

Our episteme — not mysterious chthonic drives and biases within the psyche, our very own scientistic demons — is what channels our thoughts into their dogmatic ruts in pristine ignorance of alternative analyses.

The pop-episteme of our times limits the politically conceivable to identitarianism.