Category Archives: Philosophy

Split loyalties

Ethics

A persistent thought from the last several months: The best loyalties are dual, with a  foreground that is individual, particular and positive, and a background that is transcendent, universal and negative. The foreground is inspirational, but the background requires faith. A person who has only the former will be so full of passionate intensity he will be unable to constrain his violent impulses, and person who has only the latter will lack the convictions to uphold justice.

Somehow we must link the foreground of our loves, inspirations and concrete commitments, to the cool and unlovable universals that sustain our lives together.

Plan for a talk

Philosophy

Philosophy as noun (“a philosophy”) and philosophy as verb (“doing philosophy”) are not the same.

The activity of philosophy should not be sequestered pondering. Philosophy should be part of other activities — especially activities whose aim is innovation, where established effective methods of thinking do not yet exist.

I accept Wittgenstein’s characterization of philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”

Philosophy does three things:

  • Philosophy discovers as-yet-unposed problems.
  • Philosophy develops ways to think as-yet-unthinkable thoughts.
  • Philosophy integrates fragmentary knowledge into unified understandings.

A philosophy is a kind of design. A philosophy is an interface between a thinking being and reality.

Just like any design, a philosophy has a user (or “designand”), a purpose, a design context — and most of all, it requires trade-offs. And if it functions as it should it feels like a reality, not as an interpreted system of metaphors and images. Like any good design, a philosophy should disappear.

My belief is that philosophy is still in its pre-Macintosh phase. The user is other professional philosophers, the context tends to be professional forums — journals, conferences, etc. — and the trade-offs are usability and desirability, in favor of argumentative usefulness.

So, what I would like to present is my first attempt at a Macintosh GUI-style philosophy, abstracted from a life of user-centered design, (a.k.a. “design), to help me make sense of my designer’s life as a whole and to function better as a designer — and designed for usefulness, usability and most of all desirability.

This philosophy is built on a Pragmatist platform, and part of what that entails is that the ideas presented are not meant to represent a reality beyond us, but rather to help us behave toward reality in a way that is effective and beneficial, however we define it. So instead of telling you about what is real, I will present to you a set of mind-tools that I have found valuable for living the kind of life I have lived.

Again, I see this as an interface between me as a reflective designer and the reality I inhabit. I prefer graphical interfaces, so much of this philosophy will be graphical.

(At this point I will explain 3 or 4 of my diagrams in terms of what they do, when to use them, what the experience should be…)

(Time permitting, I will also present a few maxims, designed, again for use in specific contexts. We need pithy quotes to condense and drive home points we need to make. Why not make some specifically to forcefully express thoughts we need others to understand?)

Candidate maxims (I’ll probably choose 4 or 5):

  • Any engineer will tell you, to make a system that functions, you must thoroughly understand your materials. The systems designers make include materials who perceive, conceive, feel, decide and speak. “Know your user” means “know your materials.”
  • Realists must be connoisseurs of anxiety.
  • If you want complacent comfort follow your bliss, but if you want growth, follow your dread.
  • Inconceivable does not mean impossible or improbable. It means your mind is blind to something.
  • Blindness is not dark. It shimmers in uncanny perfection: nothing there, nothing missing.
  • When we look into darkness, nothing is there. When we are blind, nothing is missing.
  • Vision itself is not visible. It is “seen” only through reflection on the act of seeing things.
  • The man in the bar who wants to fight you wants to know you better. The bartender who listens to your life story does not.
  • An indication of genuine love: Taking another’s nonsense seriously, attentively, patiently, but, ultimately, critically.
  • Necessity is the mother of invention, but emergency is the father of regression.
  • A compassionate listener is stingier than a student greedily consuming what is said.
  • 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.
  • Sleeping, the mind is permitted to repose in native chaos and to move by accident, but chaos is as immemorable as foreign speech.
  • Over breakfast, an evaporating dream is supplemented with a plot which displaces much of the dream’s truth — but which makes the dream memorable.
  • A new concept becomes retroactively obvious to all who come to understand it. Even the concept of retroactive obviousness is itself retroactively obvious. At one point, I myself forgot that I did not invent the expression “retroactive obviousness” because it was so much my own.
  • Concepts are the fingers of a comprehending mind. Con-cept, together-take. Com-prehend, together-grasp.
  • During the day, heaven’s clear black depths are obliterated by a bright expanse of blue.
  • Yogi Berra should have, but did not actually say: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.”
  • On the stage, the most important actors have speaking parts, but in everyday life the opposite is true.

Added March 26, 2016

  • Logic is not reason. Logic without empathy and empathy without logic are both unreasonable. Reason is the coordination of logic and empathy. A reasonable person listens both empathically and logically to understand what is being said by the one saying it.
  • A concept is not a thing to be understood. A concept is that by which things are understood.
  • Once we use a concept for understanding things, it is inconceivable to understand things any other way.
  • We don’t love our old ideas, and we don’t hate new ones. What we hate is the intellectual vacuum separating old ideas from new ones: perplexity.
  • To understand in any new way we must first approach, then enter, then navigate and then exit perplexity

 

Design of etiquette

Philosophy

Every human system is designed (whether intentionally or not).

Every design makes tradeoffs (whether intended or not). A design makes some things effortless, other things difficult and other things nearly impossible.

The best designs help us forget those things the design does not do.

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Etiquette is designed. It supports some kinds of human interactions and suppresses others.

If we want different kinds of interactions we must design them to make them possible. But if we do not wish to be rude we should not disregard etiquette. It is necessary to design new etiquette. And we should follow the rules of good design and respect our designands (a.k.a. “users”), at minimum by explaining the purpose of the etiquette, how it works and what to expect while participating in it — but ideally, beginning with the deepest possible understanding of the designands and their lifeworlds.

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Everything is design.

An original insight

Philosophy

Without my endlessly frustrating friends, family and neighbors (who sometimes feel more like enemies) I would complacently confuse life as I’ve known it for reality itself, and fail to engage it fully with my heart, mind, soul and strength in that way that keeps it perpetually new, distressing, valuable and interesting. 

Pragmatically speaking, the otherness of other people and the otherness of unknown reality might as well be the same thing. 

A requirement to know/respect/love one entails a requirement to know/respect/love the other. They are alike. 

Agree

Philosophy

Issues of belief and non-belief are less common than we think.

A simple difference of opinion presupposes shared conceptualization (which at one point in my life I would have called “perspective”), that each differing opinion has been clarified in meaning and implications mapped, and, finally, that each opinion is actually about the same object (that is that it attempts to account for the same phenomena).

Perhaps a taxonomy of differences in thought might be helpful:

  1. Conclusional: have we arrived at the same belief? (Do we agree?)
  2. Logical: are our beliefs fully clarified, with all implications and doubts duly mapped out? (Are we clear?)
  3. Conceptual: are we conceptualizing the problem the same way and have we tried out alternative conceptualizations in order to compare them? (Are we aligned?)
  4. Phenomenal: are we working on the same problem, and are we responding to the same data? (Are we focused?)

The intrinsic conservatism of language

Hermeneutics

I starred the hell out of this footnote from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Such unconscious sleight-of-hand, when practiced by men of Descartes’s boldness of imagination, is an occasion for gratitude rather than censure. No great philosopher has avoided it, and no intellectual revolution could succeed without it. In “Kuhnian” terminology, no revolution can succeed which employs a vocabulary commensurable with the old, and thus none can succeed by employing arguments which make unequivocal use of terms shared with the traditional wisdom. So bad arguments for brilliant hunches must necessarily precede the normalization of a new vocabulary which incorporates the hunch. Given that new vocabulary, better arguments become possible, although these will always be found question-begging by the revolution’s victims.

Let us not pretend

Ethics

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”

This applies at least as much to ethics as it does epistemology.

Can we really doubt the immorality of the worst atrocities, even if we are unable to explain or account for morality?

This is a real living question, a doubt in my heart about the dubitability of morality.

 

Damaged tissues

Ethics

Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Presumably those who say that the phenomenal is nonphysical are not complaining that being told how the atoms of the bat’s brain are laid out will not help one feel like a bat. Understanding about the physiology of pain does not help us feel pain either, but why should we expect it to, any more than understanding aerodynamics will help us fly? How can we get from the undoubted fact that knowing how to use a physiological term (e.g., “stimulation of C-fibers”) will not necessarily help us use a phenomenological term (e.g., “pain”) to an ontological gap between the referents of the two terms? How can we get from the fact that knowing Martian physiology does not help us translate what the Martian says when we damage his tissues to the claim that he has got something immaterial we haven’t got?

Damaged tissues. I started worrying at this point about what kinds of tissues might constitute a person’s being, and what kinds of pain they produce when damaged. I kept thinking about an episode of On Being, featuring Jonathan Haidt where he discusses the more extensive sense of morality among conservative personalities. Are the tissues of a conservative’s being enmeshed in the customs of their community and the definitions of  words?

 

 

Alterior expressions

Philosophy, Pragmatism

A quick noting of a thought I had several weeks ago. It seems that the more an author writes in terms of present familiarities, alluding to fresh events of the moment that everyone understands and feels, the sooner the immediacy of the writing will expire. It is a tradeoff: the strategy of connecting ideas to the realities of present readers comes at a cost to connecting them to the realities of future readers, who will experience what was immediate as obscure allusions requiring footnotes and further study, or even as distracting errors if the allusions refer to beliefs requiring revisions (for instance, to discredited scientific notions or moral convictions). The most obscure writings of the present might become the most accessible writing to the future.

The reason this came to mind this morning is that it occurred to me that every form of immediacy might suffer from every kind of distance — temporal, temperamental, spacial, practical, etc..

Even our own immediate feelings can become incomprehensible over time as the fade into biography. This is a new way to see a thought I have been having now for over a decade. But it gives the idea a fresh new immediacy — today, anyway.

But also, our word-defying moods or insights — our sense of the poetic and religious — those might be the hardest immediacies to hold onto and remember, thus poems and prayers. We say them again, hear them again, beg them to return to us in their immediacy.

But thinking beyond the problems of our own private or communal recollections of past  immediacies, and factoring in the problems of communication with other people, these immediate experiences are difficult to convey and share with our most alterious alter-egos. Compounding the problem is the fact that the dread of beyondness clings to such alterior expressions adds daunting barriers to bridgeless gaps.

It might be that the most immediate realities cannot be spoken of in their own terms, but, if they are to be shared, must be refracted through and reflected off the myriad things of our sharable world. To be known at all, our subjectivities must run a circuit through the world we all intuit as one world, and present themselves as alternative objectivities belonging to a pluralistic world. But of course, the immediate reality of the world is that it is simply reality, and to view reality in a pluralistic light is to deny the most basic reality of this experience, so pluralism is not the innocent neutrality it seems to be to itself in its own immediacy.

 

Emergencies and thought

Philosophy

People averse to deliberation and reflection love emergencies. They find emergencies everywhere — and if an emergency is nowhere to be seen, they see it anyway. Failing that, they will create an emergency where there was none.

These are not unintelligent people — they are often very clever within their domain of expertise — and this might be the problem. Conveniently, emergencies require just the kind of cleverness they have mastered, and preclude everything else.

They say “There is no time to think!” Why? Because there is always clear and present danger? Because they have so many responsibilities? Because  they are action-oriented and have no patience for people who just want to talk? No, I’ve watched what happens when things do calm down. They make an emergency of their entertainment. They schedule events to drive every peaceful minute out of their lives.

Fact is, they just don’t like thinking very much, especially when it involves the reconciliation of different perspectives. That is understandable. We have known for thousands of years that transcendence is dreadful and that the annoying babble of our neighbors is the primary vehicles of this dread. It is hard to acquire a taste for this sort of thing. They have not acquired this taste.

This does not make them bad people, but it is also not the sign of superior character they’d like it to be.

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My belief is that the uncontrolled acceleration our lives, the universal intensification of anxiety, the state of perpetual emergency in every domain of life is caused by our collective distaste for serious thought.

Pragmatism for business

Philosophy

The Jamesian “cash value” of an idea in business is how it will be operationalized. How will adoption of this idea concretely change behaviors of people, within and without the organization? This approach is most useful in brand strategy (which is, translated to pragmatist language, strategic pluralism) and is best condensed in Michael Porter’s beautiful admonition to compete, not to be best, but to be different.

Intellectual conscience

Ethics, Philosophy

To be reasonable means one must take evidence seriously, especially evidence that contradicts our convictions. We must answer, but we can and often should answer with questions. But these questions must be real: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Our intellectual conscience tells us what we believe and do not believe in our hearts. It prevents us from clinging to dead beliefs, and it forbids us from abandoning our live beliefs, and it demands suffering without resolution when suffering is due.

Conviction and fanaticism

Philosophy

I’m feeling a little pessimistic today. If my sources are right, the world is setting itself up for solipsistic fanaticism from every side.

My impression: the best may be gradually gaining conviction, but not as fast as the worst are filling themselves with passionate intensity.

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Renewed commitment to scientific method, re-conceived more expansively, follows civil war.

See Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Metaphysical Club.

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Scientific method alone is transcendent. Religious “enthusiasm” is entirely about egoistic reductionism. I’ve been there. It is fun. It is bad.