If someone tells me that they are distressed, I tend to believe it.
If they tell me why they are distressed, I tend to question it.
If I catch myself believing that I know why they are distressed before I talk with them, I make myself disbelieve it.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Humility
We people are sparks inclined to mistake ourselves for galaxies. There is truth in the indentification of spark with galaxy, but a truth is true only when its limits are observed. Humility is the observation of this particular truth, the fundamental truth of relationship between finite part and infinite whole.
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Humility is proactive humiliation. Do it yourself or it will be done to you.
Torn
What do I think about this or that controversy? I’m torn — on principle. If I am not torn yet, I have more learning to do.
Going first
Being morally responsible means going first. Trying first. Opening first. Listening first. Repenting first. Giving first. Disarming first. Showing goodwill first. Seeking forgiveness first. Acting first.
We can speculate on how others will respond — whether they will or won’t reciprocate, cooperate, collaborate, exploit or humiliate us — but we cannot really know what is possible until someone actually makes that first move toward mutuality.
Being morally responsible means being that person.
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Being morally responsible means acting on faith that other people do not live inside our own minds. They can shock us with the reality of who they are and how much it differs from our ideas of them.
The varieties of othering experience
Othering occurs in a variety of forms which can look highly dissimilar or even opposite.
There’s a complacent incurious othering: Those others are not really part of my life. I don’t know them, they’re not my problem, I don’t know how to help, and I don’t even know if I can help.
There’s an objective othering: Those others have different characteristics from us, which can be studied and comprehended factually.
Another objective othering: I have studied those others and concluded that their problems are self-inflicted. They must solve their own problems.
There’s a smug and superior othering: We, unlike those others, are moral or talented or informed or enlightened, etc.
There’s a hostile othering: Those others want to do us harm, and will do so if they get the chance.
There’s a resentful othering: The principle pain in my life would not have happened if I were one of those others.
Resentful othering can evolve into a vengeful othering: The principle pain in my life, which is the pain of my people, would not have occurred if it were not for those others.
There’s a post-liberal othering: Those others engage in othering me, and I have found that I cannot avoid doing the same — at least as long as they persist in their othering. Perhaps othering is unavoidable. Perhaps the conceit of overcoming othering is a tactic for preserving the status quo.
These are dissimilar in ways: they are the products of different power relations.
However, they are alike in that they all lead away from mutuality, further from dialogical understanding and toward reciprocal dehumanization, force and dehumanizing counter-force.
Mutuality
It is important to distinguish between feeling as though you are member of a community because you share its values and beliefs, and actually becoming a member of that community by mutually acknowledging shared values and beliefs with fellow members. This is true of communities of dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions, and it is true of communities as small as two, such as friendships and marriages. Community is essentially mutual.
Similarly, there is a difference between forgiveness that involves making peace with estrangement with an alienated friend or loved one and the deeper forgiveness of mutual reconciliation. Most feelings of alienation come from a sense that one’s reality has not been acknowledged — from a sense that mutuality is lacking. Reconciliation is restoration of mutuality. Sometimes this is not possible (yet), and we do have to make peace with that fact in unilateral forgiveness, but we should know and feel the difference between this and true mutual forgiveness.
Mutual relationships transcend individuality and that’s what makes them sacred.
This view feels Jewish to me, and when I articulate it I want to be Jewish.
The responsible and the free
It is easy for those who accept responsibility, especially those who feel unable to avoid accepting it, to resent those who have embraced irresponsibility and who consequently experience an ecstatic freedom. For the latter, “the free”, this is an accomplishment, a liberation or redemption won through courageous insight; but for the former, “the responsible”, this is a seizure made through ignorant luck, willful contempt, or both fused in complacent incuriosity — all subsidized by the responsible.
It is hard to get outside of these two ethical perspectives, or rather this one ethical perspective composed of two interlocked conflicting judgments. From any point between these two poles, the two poles define the ethical gamut.
Micro-omniscience
Micro-omniscience: because knowing very little is the surest way to know everything.
Dunning-Kruger, in other words.
Political orientations
Does the world need another political categorization scheme? Nope — so here’s one I just thought up:
Political orientations can be categorized according to two original social experiences:
- A) early feelings of membership in one’s society;
- B) early feelings of alienation from one’s society.
From the original feeling, political views can develop a variety of ways.
With respect to one’s own pursuit of membership/alienation:
- C) pursue increased degree of membership in one’s society;
- D) pursue increased degree of alienation from one’s society;
- E) maintain current degree of membership/alienation.
With respect to cultivation of membership/alienation feelings:
- F) toward intensifying feelings of membership for those who feel membership;
- G) toward intensifying feelings of alienation for those who feel alienated;
- H) toward deintensifying feelings of membership and alienation.
With respect to enlistment of actors into belonging/alienated camps:
- I) toward increasing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging, while reducing the number of people who feel alienated;
- J) toward increasing the number of people who feel alienated, and reducing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging;
- K) toward maintaining the numbers of those who feel belonging and alienation.
And finally, with respect to attitudes toward change:
- L) hope – optimistic belief that one’s life can be changed for the better;
- M) fear – pessimistic belief that one’s life will be changed for the worse;
- N) resignation – belief that things will happen however they happen and that one has little or no control over it;
- O) skepticism – things can be changed, but the consequences are radically unpredictable.
My own classification would be B.C.H.I.O.
I might need to make a political quiz.
Value of models
The field of sociology appears largely to have given up on discovering great universal theories and models. Whatever it is that these ideal forms give us, it does not appear to be truth (at least not truth as popularly conceived). My question is: do they give us something else, and, if so, how important is it, and can we do without it?
Are understandings tacit?
Concepts, prior to articulation, exist as hunches that some elusive but relevant similarity exists, then as analogies. From there, things get more explicit, but the root of every concept remain tacit — a spontaneous capacity to recognize likes and differences which can be stated in conceptual terms. I would argue, though, that these articulations are still articulations of something — something tacit, without which the language loses all meaning. In other words, concepts are not themselves constituted of language, but inform language. From this perspective, conceptual (know-what) understanding more similar to practical (know-how) and moral (know-why) knowing than if conceptual understanding is assumed to be essentially linguistic in nature. I’m not even sure if factual (know-that) understanding is necessarily linguistic.
Wanting to be wrong
If we want to live in relationship toward any transcendent reality, we must be prepared to be surprised by it, we must work to see the difference between our ideas of reality and the realities themselves, and we must desire to be taught new and better ways to think. If we want realities to exist independently, beyond the current limits of our knowledge we must also want to be wrong.
Narcissism is cardioid-shaped
When bodies in orbit around a center (x) are drawn as if they are in orbit around one of the orbiting bodies (i), i is situated at the center, x appears to move around i in an elliptical path and all the other bodies appear to move around i in a cardioid path. Only displacing i to orbiting x permits all the bodies (of which i is only one) to move in an elliptical path.
So, let’s be flaky and play with symbols: if i is viewed as I (ego); the other bodies in orbit around x are viewed as Others; the centering of i is narcissism; and the displacement of i from the center to orbiting about x is the Golden Rule… what is x?
Moral types
Some people listen carefully to others, learning from them how they perceive, think and act, and try to hear beneath it who this person is, what kind of life they live, what kind of world they inhabit, what might interest and benefit them.
Some live by the rules of reason. They look for compelling logical arguments and if they see that they have been overpowered, they proudly yield.
Others live by the rules of their ethos. They do what they ought to according to prevailing norms, in loyalty to that which gives their reality structure, substance and meaning.
Yet others follow rules for practical reasons. They avoid breaking rules in order to avoid the consequences of breaking them. They answer primarily to coercive social forces.
Finally, there are those who know only physical force. Everything that seems coercively social is only a few degrees away from physical force. They are barely removed from a state of war.
Each of these types represents a different relationship with transcendence.
Interliminal vacuum
Between conceptual understandings that describe the same phenomena lies a gap of unintelligibility: an interliminal vacuum.
Within this space we do not know how to make sense of what we experience. We don’t know what is what, we don’t know what to make of things or how to respond, and our feelings are unstable and conflicted. Our sense of what, how and why is upturned and scrambled, and no definitions, methods or moral codes are available to guide us out. In fact, we do not even know if a way out exists, and intrinsic to this experience is the profoundly anxious immediate certainty that no way out does exist! Indispensable is a faith trained to refuse to accept this certainty of impossibility at face value, and to rather accept it as one landmark of this interliminal vacuum.
As we come out — if we come out (many turn back) — we realize that each conceptual understanding reveals and conceals, clarifies and confuses, questions and suppresses different aspects of observed reality. We understand that tradeoffs must be made. Certainly, we have been pursuing truth, but it is not The Truth as it Really Is. We were after a finite truth better suited to our finite purposes. This truth must explain reality as we experience it — rigor is required — but this rigor is no longer a comprehensive objective truth capabable of answering every objection thrown at it. This notion of truth is a damaging fantasy — a misnorm that interferes with finding new truths. The only truth that is possible is a best-we-have-right-now-for-where-we-are truth, that emphasizes and deemphasizes different facts and knows the truth that this is what is required to have and share truth with other, finite human beings.
Success in this strange field (interconceptual navigation) requires at least three capabilities:
- A tolerance for distress intrinsic to traversing the interliminal vacuum,
- An understanding of what truth is, how truth works and why we need it,
- A surefooted sense of when we ought to stay put in a truth and when we must leave the truth we know to puncture the horizon and into the vacuum to find another more suitable truth, and
- Recognizing new truth when it is found, even though unsettled truth feels unsettlingly wild, swampy and soft and unsuited for settlement.
Logocentrism
I prefer to use logocentrism to mean believing that thinking is essentially a matter of logos: words, logic and other explicit components. A corollary, that unless an idea is expressed in explicit word-logic terms it is not thinking and cannot be characterized in terms of truth, is a consequence of logocentrism.
I believe words are handly, lightweight and abundant objects through which thoughts can move, but thoughts can also act directly on other objects without involving words at all. These objects can exist in many forms both inside and outside the mind, physically or symbolically. A tacit understanding can be stimulated by wordless observation to produce visual images indicating possible actions in certain kinds of minds, bypassing words altogether. A mind in this stare might feel a potential image before it is glimpsed by the mind’s eye. Thought feels a need for an imaginary object and creates it as a vehicle for its action. Thought can also act directly on physical objects without the involvement of words, and sometimes it requires protection from words to think its actions out through the body.
To a logocentric perspective these mental events cannot be thought. Logocentrism wants to place symbols at the very center of thought, or even to reduce thoughts and meanings to symbols. Consequently, between a mind and what the mind tries to accomplish, it casually interposes words as if they are not in the way because they are nothing but the thought itself.
But I believe we think best when our thought act without intermediating objects, including words. To use a tool instinctively means to dispense with intermediating words.
The best designed tools are disintermediable (or disinterposable?). As a new user you might at first use words (as briefly as possible) to make sense of the tool, and then to train yourself how to use it (also using as briefly as possible, almost as a verbal apprenticeship), but eventually all intermediaries between your intentions and your actions through the tool are dissolved, and the tool is a seamless extension of your being. This ought to be the target user experience goal.
Do we use, or even have, methods for designing this way? I think UX and all UCD design (at least in the mainstream) remains radically logocentric.
Ptolemaic social justice
To preserve the simple self-evident fact that the Earth was the center of the universe all kinds of complex mechanisms had to be devised, cranking the heavenly bodies in epicyclical orbits, around orbits of orbits.
Likewise, to preserve the simple self-evident fact that the principle active cause of inequality between categories of people is prejudice requires development and deployment of all kinds of ingenious critical, sociological and historiological mechanisms.
In both cases we do not wish to remove our minds from the standpoint of our eyeball, and we are willing to sacrifice intelligibility to preserve this one intellectual treasure.
Ontology
In the last week I’ve heard two accounts of Heidegger’s ontology that are wrong in opposite ways. 1) the psychologized pop-Heideggerianism of Est/Landmark (at least as represented by its students) that understands ontology to refer to the state of one’s own being. And now there’s 2) Graham Harman’s attempt at a human-independent ontology, which so far (page 23 of Tool-Being) appears to be a brilliantly systematic mismapping of Heidegger’s methodological idealism to a metaphysical materialism that has very little to do with Heidegger at all except for providing inspiration and a handy vocabulary to appropriate. Harman is working on something important, but it has little to do with Heidegger, and much more to do with Latour.
What I am getting from this error flanking is a renewed sense of indebtedness to Heidegger. I best feel how he thought from my indignation at hearing him misused. These visions of ontology are not the ones I want to challenge.
Software design in decay
At least five factors are drawing software design into a dark age:
- The death of Steve Jobs.
- The emergence of Lean Startup and the latest startup bubble/hype.
- The ready availability of UI frameworks that enable engineers to produce nice-looking UIs without help from designers.
- The entry of a young generation of software professionals, the exit of an older generation, and promotion to management of the middle-aged generation between.
- Apparent hesitance of platforms to impose consistency on developers.
Purpose
I cannot shake the feeling that whatever I end up doing or making, the real purpose of it all is to feed me opportunities for hammering out a philosophy. I’ve noticed this assumption in the background of my plans and choices. I think it is always there.
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In everything anyone produces, I feel a philosophy.
When we make things, including sentences, we place them within a sense of everything that is uniquely one’s own. This silent and pregant sense of everything* is philosophy, which even the most articulate philosophizing can only indicate. Any earnest attempt to pursue this indicated thing is bound to change the pursuer’s own philosophy, and this is the point of life as I know it. Philosophy cannot possess sophia — so it learns to want something better and more fitting for a bit of infinity.
In art, where apprehension succeeds in comprehension’s failure, I look through locked gates toward transcendent homes I will never inhabit, and being a mystic at heart, I love that. Where others attend to home life, I like looking out, as far as I can, past blue into black distance felt by my eyes like my feet feel the ocean’s floor when the water is unfathomably deep. Should I feel a philosophy out there or down beneath? Whether or not I should, I do, and this helps me feel who is behind who I am.
(* Note: This silent and pregnant sense of everything, which is one’s philosophy (or is it sophia? or that strange third being love produces that we call marriage?) — I will indicate it the best I can as a whatness behind every what, a howness behind every how, and a whyness behind every why. We do not know these beings directly, even in ourselves. We know by them, through them, and we are them.)