Category Archives: Philosophy

Faith

Philosophy

Faith is the strategic deployment of ignorance.

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Faith is less about the positive assertions that appear to constitute it than the will-diluting concerns it excludes.

Faith defines a way of life: a what-matters / what-does-not-matter, a what-one-does-do / what-one-does-not-do, a what-is / what-is-not. A separating of finite concerns from infinite non-concerns. A de-finition, a rendering of finitude.

Faith is easiest for those blessed with incuriosity, inexperience or absence of intellectual conscience.

Does it sound to you like I am disparaging faith, oh you of little faith, you who are anxious and troubled by innumerable hassles? The faithless are scattered, centerless, skinless, bleeding indiscriminately.

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So many things I want to not know.

 

Foot, eye, hand, heart and head

Philosophy

I’m working on a simple framework for aguiding the instauration of individual and collective common sense.

Foot: Where have you (and others) stood within the situation, and where are you standing now?

Eye: What are you (and others) trying to observe?

Hand: How are you (and others) acting on the situation?

Heart: Why do you (and others) feel the situation ought to be changed (or not changed)?

Head: How are you (and others) conceptualizing the situation?

The interaction and interrelation of all these elements is indispensable to understanding. Every element of common sense must participate — foot, eye, hand, heart and head — or we end up with an ungodly soup: dissociated chunks of non-common private sense floating in a broth of common nonsense.

Continue reading Foot, eye, hand, heart and head →

Faithlessnesses and faiths

Judaism, Philosophy

I’ve speculated that the extremes of exoterism (fundamentalism) and esoterism (mysticism) have little do do with the faiths they are thought to exemplify.

They are faiths of their own — the former a faith in a divinity who dwells beyond (who demands particular observances), the latter a faith in a divinity who dwells within (who bestows universal insights).

Neither fundamentalist nor mystic can be told anything new, and in this they are strikingly similar. Both have already arrived at the truth. I suggest that this is the entire point of them: they are perennially convenient evasions of religious struggle. They are certainly faiths, but not religious ones. And “spiritual” dissociation from religion (with the insinuation that religion is essentially exoteric), only shows the extent to which transcendence is misunderstood, and confused with what ought to be called “inscendence”, an intensification of self within itself.

Perhaps it is a symptom of my essentially Judeo-Christian nature or second-nature that I believe so strongly that 1. religion is essentially struggle with the truth of transcendence — of relating oneself to the reality that exceeds and involves each particular person and demands that one participate in universality as custodians of a particular and unique everything among innumerable everythings — 2. that the primary locus of this struggle is not within the individual, nor between the individual and supernatural beings, but rather between individuals in the medium called the world, and 3. that the primary action of religion is transformative learning: metanoia — unlearning and relearning for the sake of relationship with beings beyond the mind’s bounds.

According to this view, avoidance of being schooled by one’s irritating neighbor is symptomatic of an avoidance of religion itself, and a removal of oneself from the realities religion seeks to inhabit with increasing intimacy, extent and awareness. The loss of religion is not wrongness but loss of the desire for ever greater rightness.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

The medium of action

ANT, Philosophy, Politics

Had Hannah Arendt lived to read Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: she would never have written this:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.

This last sentence is perfectly, elegantly wrong, and overcoming this belief is at the very heart of Design Thinking.

The design of truth

Design, Philosophy

What kind of truth do you know? That depends on what kind of reality you inhabit and what kind of life you are trying to lead.

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A truth relates a knower to some part of reality and allows that knower to participate in that reality in some capacity to some degree.

Two truths can conflict in the same way that two good user interface design approaches can be incompatible with one another. And this is barely metaphorical: truth is a person’s interface with a local bit of reality.

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A choice of truth can be between truth and falseness: Does it represent accurately, or does it distort or obscure? But a choice of truth can also be between effective and ineffective: Can the truth be used to do what needs doing, or does it lead to paralysis or mistakes? And finally, choice can be between valuable and valueless: Does this truth lead to something good and beautiful, or something depressing and repellent?

Truth is a mixture — and sometimes a designed system — of factuality, actuality and importance.

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We can design truth, and we are allowed to, but what we design can succeed or fail at what it aims to be and do and mean. Is this relativism? Absolutely — but it is neither purely subjective, nor arbitrary.

(This is what my book The Ten-Thousand Everythings is about.)

Practical xenophilia

Philosophy

It’s not enough to feel xenophilic, nor is it sufficient to make efforts to think xenophilically (to engage in speculative empathy).

Xenophilia requires action. These actions are a radical implementation of the scientific method, applied to all things: immerse in a reality you wish to understand, observe, listen carefully, submit to being taught, participate in it, test your understandings…

Over the last three decades much work has been done to develop and implement practical xenophelia and this work has gone by many names: User-Centered Design, User Experience, Design Thinking, Service Design, to name a few.

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From now on for me UX does not stand for User Experience: it stands for Ubiquitous Xenophilia.

 

Making a book

Philosophy

Removed from a letter to some friends:

The book I’m working on is about designing well-crafted, habitable delusions, and it is itself a well-crafted, habitable delusion.

Viewed from my angle, philosophy is a species of design. We are allowed to design truth.

Who’s going to stop us? Objectivity? God? Pretty much the only authority who can drop the hammer is the intellectual conscience of the individual reader, but this is where those qualifications “well-crafted” and “habitable” enter the picture.

I’m not saying reality is not meaningless as Rust says, but I am saying that if you put a good UI on reality, you can design a better experience “using” it. And that UI is what we call truth. Philosophy is the UI we interact with to make sense of and interact with the OS that is our daily lives, running on the overwhelmingly hopelessly complex platform called reality.

A philosophy can and should be run through the framework of Useful / Usable / Desirable: A badly-design interface might be useless (it will be buggy, conflict with daily experience, and will prevent us from interacting with reality and accomplishing what we need to accomplish). In other words, it can be FALSE. But it can also be unusable — just too complicated to actually use well. So we are confused or forced to muddle, or we just decide not to think because our philosophy makes thinking such an awful chore. Or undesirable.

Remind me later to connect all this with Leo Strauss and the neocons.

The creativity of agnonism

Philosophy

The predominance of war or appeasement undermines the creative accomplishments of diplomacy.

The predominance of corporate capitalism or communism undermines the creative accomplishments of politics — and the market.

The predominance of collectivism or individualism undermines the creative accomplishments of friendship.

The predominance of conviction or skepticism undermines the creative accomplishments of philosophy.

The predominance of lust or alienation undermines the creative accomplishments of love.

The predominance of intolerance or tolerance undermines the creative accomplishments of religion.

And so on.

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Releasing ourselves from the painful tension of internal conflict by neutralizing one force to liberate another — it gives us energy and all the answers — but the foundation it provides is less fundamental than it is base.

 

 

Art in the age of work

Philosophy

I just stumbled upon a very relevant passage from The Wanderer and His Shadow:

Art in the age of work. — We possess the conscience of an industrious age: and this conscience does not permit us to bestow our best hours and mornings on art, however grand and worthy this art may be. To us art counts as a leisure, a recreational activity: we devote to it the remnants of our time and energies. — This is the most general circumstance through which the relationship of art to life has been altered: when it makes its grand demands on the time and energy of the recipients of art it has the conscience of the industrious and able against it, it is directed to the conscienceless and lazy, who, however, are in accordance with their nature unfavourably inclined precisely towards grand art and feel the claims it makes to be presumptuous. It may therefore be that grand art is facing its end from lack of air and the room to breathe it: unless, that is, grand art tries, through a kind of coarsening and disguising, to become at home in (or at least to endure) that other air which is in reality the natural element only of petty art, of the art of recreation and distraction. And this is now happening everywhere; artists of grand art too now promise recreation and distraction, they too direct their attentions to the tired and weary, they too entreat of them the evening hours of their working day — just as do the artists of entertainment, who are content to have achieved a victory over the serious brow and the sunken eye. What artifices, then, do their greater comrades employ? They have in their dispensary the mightiest means of excitation capable of terrifying even the half-dead; they have narcotics, intoxicants, convulsives, paroxysms of tears: with these they overpower the tired and weary, arouse them to a fatigued overliveliness and make them beside themselves with rapture and terror. On account of the perilousness of these means it employs, ought one to denounce grand art in the forms in which it now exists — opera, tragedy and music — as the most deceitful of sinners? Not at all: for it would a hundred times prefer to dwell in the pure element of the quietness of morning and address itself to the expectant, wakeful, energetic soul. Let us be grateful to it that it has consented to live as it does rather than flee away: but let us also admit to ourselves that an age which shall one day bring back true festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art.

Why design research is the greatest

Philosophy

Why do I love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Design research often destroys existing knowledge and expertise,  creating new philosophical problems (as Wittgenstein elegantly defined it: “I don’t know my way about”). This is what I do.
  2. Design research produces social solidarity. When a team observes the same realities, reflects together, produces hypotheses and prototypes together and tests them together, and develops a “common sense” — the members of the team become friends in a uniquely substantial way. It is the exact opposite of loneliness.

Why should companies love design research? Two reasons:

  1. Problems that defy existing knowledge and expertise are the ones with the most innovation potential. Radically new problems produce the most radical, freshest-feeling innovations. Design research exposes these new expertise-resistant problems.
  2. The team alignment resulting from design research creates more cohesive, efficient and inspired teams.

 

The intolerable span

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

If something is lacking in an organization, the deficit rarely persists from simple unavailability of whatever is missing. More often the deficit is actively maintained, either from a direct allergy or an indirect displacement.

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People and organizations selectively include and exclude people, ideas, practices — this is how they preserve themselves as the being they are.

When something is introduced that cannot be simply subsumed or appended to what already is there — if a new entity requires deep change of political structure, of conceptual framing, of habits — the organization will repel that thing as a threat to its existence.

This is why organizational change is so hard. Organizations want to persist — to survive and grow and thrive in its own way, just like every individual biological organism wants to survive and grow and thrive.

And this is also how it is with individual souls. A soul knows in a wordlessly certain way that deep change is death. A soul can detect even the faintest trace of deep change in an idea.

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A soul can find many ways to excuse itself. We lead very busy lives. The more important I am, the busier I am, and the more brusque I am permitted to be. The important man is allowed more and more to fend off anything new. This is why the weak get smarter and the powerful become more… conservative.

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Of course, deep change is also ground-clearing for rebirth, but it is impossible to believe in such things: only faith suffices.

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If you think you know something that another person needs to know, please understand: there is probably a good reason this person does not yet know.

If you think you have a talent or skill some other organization needs but does not have, please understand: there is probably a good reason this organization does not have this capability.

And if you have discovered a disruptive insight, do not be fooled into believing that people will be grateful for it. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is mere aversion to risk that makes people resist. Do not be fooled by any functionalist explanation: the aversion is instinctive fear of death: dread.

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A bit from the book I am writing, The Ten-Thousand Everythings:

We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.

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Do you know it when you are confronting the dread of a truly new thing?

Do you know your way across the intolerable span?

Can you want to cross it?

3rd-place-mercury

 

Passenger

Philosophy

A person who is self-interested and unconcerned with what anyone thinks about it, will sometimes have a change of heart and become intensely other-interested.

Such a person believes he has experienced a conversion and has arrived at genuine concern for the other, when in fact he has taken only a baby-step.

A painful journey lies ahead.

The first leg of the journey is realizing that his change of heart and sacrifice of “self-interests” is mere preparation for a far greater sacrifice.

The second leg is wrestling with whether he is truly prepared to pay such a price. He had no idea what — and even less, who — was at stake.

In the third leg, he must calculate whether he even can afford to complete his journey once he has paid what turns out to be the fare. As he looks up from his tallying, he sees for the first time the reproachful glances of the other passengers who have paid their way.

In the fourth leg, he digs deep and pays up. Now he begins to move.

 

Rethinking totalities

Hermeneutics

The problem with totalities is not that they are total — it is that totalities are so often reductive or aggressive.

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The worst totalities are excessively inclusionary and exclusionary at the same time: kill and eat it, or get far, far away from it. Fight or flight, and nothing in-between.

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Perhaps if we were to entertain totalities as subtotals, or treat horizons as something that can fall in a range between accidental and insubstantial artifact of standpoint and an impregnable wall we must faithfully tend and defend, we could enjoy some relative stability of identity with minimal aggression. Perhaps it is a matter of material — a permeable membrane or a transparent shell — or shape — a spiral or a circle with a mouth.

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But actually — more and more I resist conceptualizing understanding in terms of horizons. Horizons are seen, and entities are seen against horizons and put in perspective through a vision. This whole family of analogues promotes an ocular notion of knowledge.

Some knowledge is of things known at a distance, but much of knowledge is kinesthetic and/or participatory. As much as eye-awareness dominates hearing-awareness, both positively obliterate touch-awareness, scent- and taste-awareness, and these obliterated awarenesses are primary faculties in philosophy.

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Common sense was originally not “what everybody believes in common” but rather that sense of reality that arises from interpreting and synthesizing all sense data. The conflation of these two very different meanings into a single word is a symptom of deep philosophical naivety.

More symptomatic distortions: “materialism”, “idealism”, “realism”, “pragmatism”, “paradigm shift”, “experience”…

The mundane world has an uncanny appetite for words it cannot digest, a need to grip in its stumpy little fingers what is ungraspable. It can’t understand it, and it won’t understand it — yet, it cannot leave it alone. It’s like a young boy overwhelmed by his first crush…

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to “show off” in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. . . . He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, “showing off,” as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 

Self-seeker

Philosophy

Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is fortified with a confabulated plot which displaces the dream’s truth, but makes the dream memorable.

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Dreams are unintentional, undisciplined, unformed.

Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to proceed by accident — but chaos is as immemorable as a speech in a foreign language.

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We remember words, images, forms. We remember by words, by images, by forms. If we do not form reality as it occurs, and derive forms from reality as it occurs — collaborate with reality to instaurate truth — reality escapes and vanishes and we must imagine truth like fiction authors, or lose ourselves to amnesia.

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A life lived without intent, without discipline, and without articulation is in some ways is truer to life than one lived in the artifice of faith, routine and language. Reality is permitted to remain real: unprocessed experience.

But human nature abhors a vacuum. A self demands a history, an I, a future. It is of past-present-future that a self is made and it is by this that a self endures.

If one does not impose self on reality in the moment, it becomes necessary to do so later after the fact, after reality has receded into oblivion on a stream of babble — after reality has evaporated like a dream and is no longer present to represent itself.

Past is fictionalized. And since the future forms itself from past, future is also fictionalized. And consequentially, self is fictionalized.

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Seeking self as an activity separated from trying to understand this world and the beings who inhabit it, is guaranteed to prolong the quest forever, and to deprive the search not only of any possible resolution, but of all sense.

People who think they must “find themselves” before they can move on to other questions, are guaranteeing that they will find neither, because the self is found by finding the world.

Midas touch v.2

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

“What can be counted is an instance of a category,” thought Midas.

And he reflected on gold, “Is it gold I really love? Or is it the quantity of gold that I have counted that makes my face glow with pleasure?

And he turned to look at his wife and asked, “Is this crazy woman inside my Queen the one I adore? Or do I love this one (1) I can count on to be my good wife, my good queen, the effective mother of my daughters?

“And how do I love her? Let me count the ways! And does not each way have a name and criteria by which it can be classified as that which it essentially is? Let me count the number of instances of each of the ways I love her!” exclaimed Midas.

“And is it my car I love? Or do I love driving? I love acceleration, speed, torque. My love for my car equals its best-of-breed specifications.”

“I used to love insatiably and helplessly, because I did not know how to eat. My mistake was I loving most what I could least digest: the inert permanence of gold.

“One cannot own what is not made one’s own flesh, and my mind’s flesh is idea. My mind makes things mine by knowing them. Counter, counting and counted are One.”

Midas touched his friends and family and made a social network with whom he could stay in touch with a stream of quick updates. Midas touched actions, and the actions became behaviors and the behaviors became patterns, performance and measurable value. Midas touched the school and all the students were scored, ranked, morally evaluated, and routed to appropriate facilities. Midas touched the appliances in his home to tap their informational juices so they could flow into his world of hard fact.

The world was his at last — all at his transfiguring fingertips.

And behind Midas’s glinting eyes, Plato smiled in his archetypal paradise where the mind is a place of its own, knowing heaven, hell, earth, man, woman, values, categories, instances, criteria, data.