Category Archives: Philosophy

No use for useless

Philosophy

“Having no use” for something has less to do with that thing’s uselessness than the quality of one’s own understanding and hopes. To the extent one understands, everything may be relevant, and to the degree one hopes everything may be problematic.

As we realize that everything, every thing and everyone is potentially relevant and problematic we lose the capacity for violence — and for this reason understanding and hope should be tempered by humility. We are all living things, after all, and we must eat, defend ourselves, and fight for what matters to us. To deny this fact completely is hubris, but to surrender to this fact is base.

To aspire to humanity is to live suspended.

Innovation

Philosophy

One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ” I love it for two reasons. First, it shows how philosophy is not an archaic style of theoretical speculation that has been supplanted by science. Philosophy is a perpetual discovery of new scientific turf. Philosophy pioneers what science settles and builds up.

But the other thing I love about the quote is it shows where philosophy can fit into the practical activities of everyday life. If you can’t intellectually move about in a problem space, you can’t work consciously and methodically. But what is innovation than looking for these areas? To extend my pioneering metaphor, in any exploration of innovative possibilities, philosophers ought to be brought along as guides to help navigate and map the territory.

Why-logic

Philosophy

“Why” is not logical; every “why” is a logic.

Until a person’s why-logic is understood that person’s beliefs, behaviors and feelings will seem illogical.

The grasping of a why-logic and the consequent grokking of a world via that why-logic is insight, in the most precise sense of the word.

It is an unfortunate habit of speech that has us say “insight into” another person. We should say we have “insight out from” a person.

Curious and curiouser

Philosophy

No marginal status of any kind automatically bestows deeper knowledge. Only an urgent need to understand, followed by active pursuit of understanding yields such knowledge.

What is different about my opinions? Why the difference? How does the difference arise and manifest? How do I bridge the difference with others? How do others suppress my difference, and how do I resist or overcome this? How do I know when I am suppressing the difference of another? How does this dynamic work in general? What are the ethical implications? Why would any person who does not have to ever want to embrace an ethic of respect of the marginal? Can I count on my own loyalty to this ethic if I it carries me to a position of dominance? Should I remain loyal to it…?

Any person who stops trying to understand others and otherness through reflective practice, not as a solitary meditation is going to dwindle in insight, and as the blessed anxiety subsides comforting clarity floods the knowing subject with the blessings of faith: confidence, determination and uncanny charisma.

I lack capacity to how I am not right, therefore I am right.

I have good reason to disregard what my enemies say to me.

Everyone agrees with me on this — everyone who matters.

The crucial skillset

Philosophy

Know how to form grounded innovative hypotheses.

Know how to craft the cheapest, fastest and most informative experiments.

Know how to find and use perplexities.

Know how to think through and design out new logics from new perspectives.

Know how to observe, learn and respond across a range of developmental stages: from the broadest and fuzziest to the minutest and most precise.

Engineering and design

Design, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.

Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.

*

When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.

*

Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.

Cat-agoraphobic political statement

Ethics, Politics

I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and  I condemn all involuntary identifications.

Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.

If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.

I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.

Scientific Method vs Lean Startup

Design, Design Instrumentalism

In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management.  Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.

However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:

  1. Hypothesis formation. Hypotheses are not just guesses which can be tested experimentally. Hypotheses are informed guesses, and it is on-the-ground-discovery that informs mere guesses and transforms them into hypotheses. Starting with a hypothesis rather than some dude’s random notion can reduce development cycles. Also, some ideas are so weak that no amount of pivoting will tweak it to awesomeness.
  2. Theory. Theory in science is what directs experimentation and lends knowledge a progressive thrust. Without an appropriate theory, experiment devolves into aimless and fragmentary trial-and-error. This kind of aimlessness and fragmentation in a business context translates to confusing and disjointed products. It is not that Lean Startup does not accumulate knowledge, but that its “validated learning” is too product-centric and not nearly user-centric enough. Lean Startups know everything there is to know about their own product and the possible permutations of their product and the customer behaviors and reported opinions about the product, but insights into the user’s inner life and outer context — the things that inspire the best design ideas — will not readily surface using Lean Startup methods.
  3. Crisis. Without the rigor of theory and the discipline of reflection, the kinds of problems that produce revolutionary solutions cannot come into view. Teams will hack their ways right past the crises that and miss the chance to find simple radical product insights. This is the precise point where philosophy can become a competitive secret weapon. According to Wittgenstein “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.  Isn’t innovation  all about finding, posing and solving such problems?

I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.

 

I and I

Philosophy

When spoken, I is the most constant of constants.

When heard, I is the most variable of variables.

I is the extreme of particulars. (I, the subject of a sentence.)

I is the extreme of universals. (I, the one who utters this sentence.)

*

At the heart of ambinity, where the dance of opposites is a frenetic blur, I says I to one who is not oneself.

 

Otherwisdom code

Ethics

To be know and live on terms with what could be otherwise means:

  • To be alert to the permanent possibility of surprise.
  • To embrace the anxiety of listening to stark otherness.
  • To show hospitality to truths that await invitation to enter.
  • To be faithful to mute realities that speak only in experiment.
  • To respect every thing as the heart of an everything.
  • To remember that every single time “this time is different.”

This practical knowledge of actualizing what might be otherwise can be called otherwisdom.

 

Faith

Philosophy

Faith is the strategic deployment of ignorance.

*

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.

*

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.