Art is a thing from an everything — an emissary part from an implied whole. It might be a magical thing that seems to belong to an unknown everything, promising there is more to reality than we have known. Or it maybe an expressive thing that belongs to my own unknown everything, promising I am not alone in weirdness.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Liberal toughness
I cannot help but believe that liberalism requires a degree of toughness. Why? Because modern liberalism stands on a foundation of pluralism, and pluralism implies the permanent presence of incommensurable beliefs and radical conflict. Knowing how to represent one’s own positions, while maintaining respect and goodwill, where parties disagree on what the disagreement is and methods for resolving disagreements are themselves contested — in other words, the skills of agonism — this is basic liberal competence.
People who storm about demanding a public sphere so gentle it favors their kind of delicate development and eventual full flourishing are not liberal.
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In a liberal world, one cannot legitimately be offended by the raising of controversial questions — but perhaps we ought to be offended by refusal to participate in their asking.
OK, but who decides that?
“OK, but who decides that?”: this is the liberal question.
Society should be just? Ok, but who decides what justice is? All people should be given an equal chance to flourish? Ok, who decides what equality is? People should be free within reasonable limits. Ok, but… People’s basic rights should be respected. Ok, but… Etc.
In the realm of liberalism, where assertions of principle are followed by the liberal “ok, but” questions are rarely answered; they are hammered out with the crucial but possible impossible goal of eventual agreement.
(Having goals is more important than achieving them.)
Scientific gossip
When conducting design research in a team context we uncover general truths about groups of people, but in the process we uncover profound specific truths about our fellow researchers.
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To know someone deeply, reflect with that person on the thoughts and behaviors of other people.
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Maybe this provides us one charitable explanation of the appeal of gossip?: of all conversational genres, gossip gives us the most intimate glimpse into one another’s souls.
Babel
At Babel the dust and gravel stands erect, each fragment firm on its foundation, proudly piercing its own low heaven.
The kind of person I am not
I went to a Baptist church for a few weeks. They were nice people. They preach an ultimate reality who is alive with love for them. But they also teach a reality peopled with hateful and wicked neighbors.
If they are right, they are also not right enough. Their insufficiency is not in what they affirm, but in what they oppose: those who they are not.
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When I was young I was a left-liberal who thought all conservatives were stupid and mean. Then I met some smart, nice conservatives who helped me see how liberals opposed themselves to only the stupidest and meanest conservatives, and how they did this to justify their own flavor of mean stupidity. Years later I found some even smarter, even nicer liberals, and saw how my conservative friends were ignoring the best liberals, in order to elevate themselves above liberalism in general. And then I looked up into heaven and imagined alternating layers of better and better conservatisms and liberalisms, each trying to be more right and less wrong, and maybe at some rarefied altitude starting to crave justice for who they are not.
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Perhaps morality consists not in who we are, but rather in who we aren’t.
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“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”
Bliss
Find a quiet place and sit down. Still your mind. Breathe. Inhale and exhale naturally. Concentrate on your bare breath. Do not force your mind or body to do anything. Be in the present. Your mind will wander, and when it does, gently bring it back to the present, to here, to now, to awareness of here and now. Give yourself some much needed relief from the torments of transcendence. This is the dead opposite of religion, and for this reason it is bliss.
Souls
Every soul is the size of the entire known universe, containing every known thing within it, endures for all time from the earliest known pre-history to the most distant imaginable future, and encompasses every conceivable possibility. Therefore, no two souls are alike.
Souls vary in size, density, variety and complexity. Souls overlap in reality, but weave through realities differently, touching, entangling, moving and being moved by different beings.
Some souls have space in them for your soul, and are happy to extend you hospitality. Some souls seek your hospitality. Other souls need your soul locked up inside your silent body.
Postenlightenment harmony
Tillich (from The Courage to Be):
The whole [Enlightenment] period believed in the principle of “harmony” — harmony being the law of the universe according to which the activities of the individual, however individualistically conceived and performed, lead “behind the back” of the single actor to a harmonious whole, to a truth in which at least a large majority can agree, to a good in which more and more people can participate, to a conformity which is based on the free activity of every individual. The individual can be free without destroying the group. The functioning of economic liberalism seemed to confirm this view: the laws of the market produce, behind the backs of the competitors in the market, the greatest possible amount of goods for everybody. The functioning of liberal democracy showed that the freedom of the individual to decide politically does not necessarily destroy political conformity. Scientific progress showed that individual research and the freedom for individual scientific convictions do not prevent a large measure of scientific agreement. Education showed that emphasis on the free development of the individual child does not reduce the chances of his becoming an active member of a conformist society. And the history of Protestantism confirmed the belief of the Reformers that the free encounter of everybody with the Bible can create an ecclesiastical conformity in spite of individual and even denominational differences. Therefore it was by no means absurd when Leibnitz formulated the law of preestablished harmony by teaching that the monads of which all things consist, although they have no doors and windows that open toward each other, participate in the same world which is present in each of them, whether it be dimly or clearly perceived. The problem of individualization and participation seemed to be solved philosophically as well as practically.
It is the belief in a preexisting harmony that separates the classical Enlightenment view from a Postenlightenment view. I believe in disharmonious reasons, which is another way of saying that I believe in Pluralism. To extend the music analogy, reason does not produce chords, it produces a chromatic scale, from which harmonies can be made, but only if sour reasonable notes are muted, at least until the melody progresses and the key changes, making the formerly sour note sweet. A harmonious truth must be designed, and design always means making good tradeoffs.
What is design thinking?
Putting it as succinctly as possible, design thinking is a perspective on problems:
Problem finding
- All people-thing problems are design problems.
- Alternative wordier definition: all problems that involve systems of interacting objects and subjects (“soft system” problems) are design problems.
- Design problems are often misdiagnosed as engineering, management and marketing-advertising problems.
Problem shaping
- Design problems are “wicked problems“, which have peculiar and disturbing characteristics:
- The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
- Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation.’
- Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
Problem solving
- The best known way to resolve wicked problems is to use the methods and tools of human-centered design with a strong emphasis on prototyping and testing.
Admirations
Sometimes I admire people as examples of the kind of person I would like to be. This is a kind of admiration of an aspirational future self.
But I try to also admire people who are utterly unlike me, people I could never emulate without undermine who I am trying to be. I admire them as collaborative partners with whom I might accomplish things I could not accomplish by myself.
I consider this admiration of otherness in potential collaboration superior and rarer than admiration of potential likeness. Both of these, however, are superior to admiration of inaccessibly distant otherness, which in extreme form is worship.
Symmetrical egalitarianism
Can egalitarianism be disrespectful?
In some social contexts strict egalitarianism is the very embodiment of respect. An example of such a context is a gathering of equal peers deliberating on a shared problem. Each is understood by the others to hold an opinion of equal validity to his own. Each peer is entitled the same level of attention, the same time to speak and to be heard out and to be believed and also to be questioned. Of course, each participant has a personal opinion regarding the rightness and wrongness of opinions stated, but any expectation that others will give one’s own opinion more weight than any another’s undermines the equal peer relationship. Let’s call this symmetrical egalitarianism.
In other social contexts, however, strict egalitarianism can be disrespectful. An example of this kind of context is a group of people gathered to discuss a specialized topic, where some members of the group have invested significant time, energy and resources to continually improve the quality of their beliefs in this area, where other members have not made the same level investment. The former have worked to become authorities on the topic at hand and the latter have not. (Imagine an accomplished physicist in conversation with a group of less experienced scientists, or even scientists who are accomplished in fields outside the one being discussed). In such situations, giving equal weight to each person’s opinion would insult the authority’s hard-won expertise. For one reason or another his work has failed to accomplish its goal of improving his understanding — that is, elevating his initial opinion to informed belief, reflective practice, cultivated knowledge and refined judgment.
Why would an expert’s expertise be denied or ignored? Perhaps his field is not one where genuine knowledge is possible, and can never be more than a matter of opinion, where one person’s opinion is as good as another’s no matter how much work is invested in cultivating knowledge. Or perhaps the alleged expert has taken a bad approach, and has wasted years of effort following the wrong path further from the truth. Or perhaps the would-be expert has some personal flaw or limitation that has prevented him from acquiring real knowledge or has led him to aquire delusional opinions that only appear to him to be knowledge. Or perhaps the laypeople are convinced that genuine knowledge in the field necessarily and automatically leads an expert to an egaliarian attitude toward his own opinion: the superiority of his view consists in its paradoxical refusal to regard itself as superior, and any hint of judgment is a symptom of inferior knowledge.
This latter view actually has some validity. The world is stuffed with authoritarian experts who flash their credentials and demand submission to their authority. This ought to be resisted. No expert should require non-experts to obey without being persuaded by reason. This is non-egaliarian tyranny of experts.
But what true experts ask for is not unconditional obedience or uncritical belief. What they ask for from others is patience and effort The expert needs time not only to express their views, but also to impart enough expertise that others have the context needed to understand and fairly assess the expert’s ideas. Let’s call this asymmertical egalitarianism — an egalitarianism that acknowledges equality of reason and judgment, but also acknowledges the realities of expertise and permits it conditions needed to be heard and understood.
It is these conditions that symmetrical egalitarianism denies. From the point of view of symmetrical egalitarianism, the time and attention an expert requires to convey the background of his factual opinions is experienced as an unfair domination of a conversation. Each person is doled out the same quantity of time as everyone else, and this self-regarded expert is trying to take more than his share.
But from the point of view of expertise, this symmetry creates an unfair asymmetry of means to convey meaning. The laypeople are given what they need to fully communicate their views, but experts — the very ones best informed on the topic at hand — are forced to provide their views without context, which means their views will seem obscure, pedantic or nonsensical compared to the down-to-earth practicality and plain speech of the regular guy, or they try to provide context and get cut off before their point is made. Symmetrical egalitarianism guarantees the common sense status quo view always prevails, and those in the room with genuinely unique and deeply considered views will be subjected to a Bed of Procrustes truncation that allows them to talk but denies them the means to be understood.
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Incidentally, this symmetrical and asymmetrical egalitarian concept can be applied to other fields. For instance, in education symmetries of fairness are sometimes established on the basis of allocated resources, the right to reach some standard level of acheivement or to maintain some pace of improvement. These symmetries are often enforced at the expense of subtler forms of fairness, such as the ability to actualize one’s own potential. Obviously, this creates deep problems, including problems of measurement and objectivity, but the depth of such problems does not warrant ignoring these problems as essentially insoluble, or worse (and most commonly) denying the problem’s existence altogether.
Triads of triads
A phenomenological perspective, a semiotic perspective and a metaphysical perspective will produce different triadic ontologies.
And a meta-perspectival perspective might feel obessessive-compelled to arrange these triadic ontologies into a meta-triad. )O+
(A phenomenological perspective is one that organizes reality in terms of individual experience; a semiotic perspective organizes reality in terms of signs; a metaphysical perspective organizes reality in terms pointing beyond the direct experiences of human minds. Private experience; public experience; transcendent experience, respectively. 20th Century thought divided along these lines. Continental and analytic philosophy agreed on little except the importance of excluding metaphysical conceptions from their methods.)
Tradition of wrongness
If the moral shortcomings of our ancestors require us to despise them as vile , to reject the traditions these vile people valued and helped develop, and to renounce the moral ideals of the present which developed from these despised traditions — doesn’t consistency require us also to despise past generations of scientists, scientific method and current science, since the history of science is a story of successive delusion and malpractice? To satisfy the high standards we hold today, we need to find cultures founded from the very beginning on empathy, kindness and equality, and we also need to find an intellectual traditions with a better track record of knowing what is true and what is not true.
Distillation: a very literal analogy
Few simple ideas enter the world simple. Simple ideas become simple over time through enormous effort. Most ideas are born complicated, inelegant, and inarticulate and messy.
If the only ideas you are willing to entertain are simple ones, you will be limited to ideas other people have already simplified, which means, you will have original ideas.
Think of the word we reach for when we think about simplicity: distill.
The analogy not only bears extension, it demands it:
- Start with living ingredients. Not artificial synthesized chemicals. Things that grow out of the soil in the light of the sun.
- Crush that living stuff into a pulpy, messy mash.
- Let the pulpy, messy mash ferment. You allow it to bubble, froth, steam and start to smell funny.
- Identify what part of that fermenting mass of nastiness is worth keeping and start collecting it in its purest form.
- Sneak the nasty by-products out the back door and get rid of it before anyone sees or smells it.
- Bottle it all up in a beautiful tidy package that looks like it descended from the sky on a beam of light.
- Brace yourself for the phenomenon of retroactive obviousness: “If the idea’s that simple, it must have been here all along. In fact, now that I think about it, I had a similar idea not long ago…”*
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* Note: William James observed this phenomenon: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.” This passage has been distilled and popularized in this elegant form, which may or may not be James’s own words: “When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It’s not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say ‘Anyway, it’s not new.'”
Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation
Tillich via Polanyi: “Science, psychology, and history are allies of theology in the fight against the supranaturalislic distortions of genuine revelation. Scientific and historical criticism protect revelation; they cannot dissolve it, for revelation belongs to a dimension of reality for which scientific and historical analysis are inadequate.”
Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation! — I’ve needed this expression.
Just as resorting to magic to explain scientific phenomena ends inquiry prematurely and produces worse than useless knowledge, ending a religious crisis of faith with pat magical non-explanations prevents religion from doing its kind of work.
This is why I keep insisting that fundamentalisms of every denomination are anti-religious pseudo-religions that act to insulate faithless minds from the anxieties of genuine revelation. Fundamentalism is not extreme religion, it is a displacing counterfeit of religion.
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Faith is not a matter of factual belief, it is a matter of personal relationship with fact and what stands inexhaustibly beyond fact.
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Magic is the splattering of belief upon the inner walls of inadequate understanding.
Pop ideology how-to guide
Here is how to build a popular ideology:
Do rock-solid factual investigation. Satisfy the requirements of the critical mind.
Present the facts of the investigation in compelling stories that win over the heart, too. Adhere to the facts.
Encourage the heart and the mind to believe together for once. And what a relief wholehearted belief is in these fragmentary contradictory times. This rare peace is reason enough to believe.
Build fact and feeling together, higher and higher, to moral heights where gravity weakens and earth loosens its grip. Up here ideas are lighter and can be piled one upon the other with only sporadic logical spot welding.
The heart has the mind’s endorsement now, the newly unified soul hangs on your verdict.
Now is poetry’s moment. Passionate declarations, inspired insinuations, elegant analogies, and flights of spirit move mountains arguments cannot even touch.
Set your conclusion at the tip of the crescendo.
Then drop to earth again. Plant your feet where all can see where they are rooted. Return to facts. Build a second edifice like the first and crown it with the same conclusion. Then drop.
Repeat a third time, then a fourth.
Spread your conclusive points over the breadth of the sky. Now it is a worldview, supported on columns of excellent journalism. Readers will rise with you to hold it up, united in heart and mind, with themselves, with each other, as a community, as a collective mind, as a political body ready to act on behalf of your faith.
Nobody will notice the heavenly roof is suspended by nothing but a desire for sheltering unity. Nobody can believe the sky is not attached to the ground.
The columns of fact and argument bear no load. They are decorative stumps. They are monuments to the idea of reason.
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If you teach your poetry ventriloquism, when you let the facts speak for themselves they say what your heart wants to hear. This is doubly true if you think a complete knowledge of facts points to a single moral conclusion.
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The formula: Journalism; poetic ethical interlude; journalism; poetic ethical interlude…
Protected: A, B, C
Vice or virtue
The difference between vice and virtue lies not in original instincts, but what is done with those instincts and where they are taken.
This includes not only fundamental “Ten Commandment” type virtues, but loftier virtues that build upon them, such as the virtues of liberalism/Christianity, which treat the failure to forgive as deserving of forgiveness.
A universal apology
I need to get something off my chest: You are right, and were right all along. You tried and tried to tell me, but I would not listen. But I get it now, and I am sorry.
I feel like I owe you an explanation. I am not trying to justify myself. I already told you: I admit I was completely wrong. Not just factually, but morally. And practically, too.
But if you are willing to listen I would like to explain what happened, so you can understand why I was so stubborn prior to finding the the courage to repent.
Without excusing myself, of course, I see it as rooted in the human condition. Every single person on this earth cannot help but believe that he or she has privileged access to the truth. I was no exception.
Of course, there are always open questions and knowledge gaps. And much (even most) of what is known is known tacitly, intuitively, in a way that defies language. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t known. It really did look to me like I knew. I literally could not see how I didn’t know.
But I sure could see how other people didn’t know! That’s part of this semi-tacit comprehensive knowledge we all think we have. We all think we see plainly how those around us who do not or will not know the truth — people who are dumb, misguided, self-interested, complacent, corrupt or just too arrogant to listen — evade the truth by doing everything they can to avoid confronting reality squarely. They disregard real things as imaginary and reify imaginary things and treat them as real. They argue by their own self-serving, distorted or over-complicated logic, if they even bother with logic at all. They rest their whole argument on deeply questionable premises and spurious sources. They behave as if highly subjective and partial criteria are objective and universally binding.
We’ve all had to deal with this kind of nonsense in our lives. But I always thought I was on the right side of these conflicts. On the contrary (and just as you always said!) I was the wrong side. Until I shifted my perspective on it I was utterly unaware of what I was doing. I guess it was because I trusted my own eyes and ears and mind more than the testimony of people whose eyes and ears and minds perceived more clearly, and who knew to trust what truly deserves trust, maybe?
No excuses. I refused to listen.
Anyway, I hope hearing me say it out loud helps you feel better. You were not crazy. You were right. I hope you can accept my apology.