Category Archives: Philosophy

Pluralist blip

Ethics, Politics

Pluralists maintain principled awareness that there are multiple perspectives from which every event and every issue may be understood.

It seems that now, with the recent brutal pogrom in Israel that at least some of our elite institutions have recovered some momentary slight degree of pluralism. They can see multiple sides of this particular issue — where, in recent years many events seemed to have only one possible morally legitimate interpretation.

Police brutality had only one side. Compelled “Antiracist” indoctrination had only one side. Sexual harassment had only one side. Overturning Roe v Wade had only one side.

All organizations were required to take a stand! Silence is violence!

But apparently this slaughter in Israel — this has two sides — and now, suddenly, organizations must maintain moral neutrality and avoid stirring up unnecessary controversy.

As a Pluralist, I am faintly heartened to see organizations behave as they should have all along. *

As a Jew, I find it appalling that Progressivists are suddenly able to see both sides of this particular issue — an issue where, on one side Jewish babies were literally murdered and Jewish women literally, physically raped.

Note: I do not believe this abrupt embrace of institutional neutrality is a principled pluralist stand. I believe it is a purely pragmatic response to the fact that on this one issue, Progressivist opinion is divided. When Progressivists all agree on an issue, and only Liberals, Centrists and Conservatives dissent (civilly, quietly, politely), Progressivists are more than happy to take a univocal stand on issues. It is only when Progressivists are divided (and will dissent vocally, disruptively, coercively) that organizations exercise diplomatic neutrality.

It’s just an existential crisis

Philosophy

An existential crisis occurs when a person faces a truth that can neither be ignored nor considered.

The truth cannot be ignored because it has been noticed. Now that it has been noticed, it is re-noticed wherever it applies, and it is impossible to un-notice when this new truth obtrudes. It has become part of one’s spontaneous understanding of reality.

It cannot be considered because its implications threaten the integrity of one’s entire way of understanding the world. If one allows this truth to be true, all other truths will break down into… who knows what? This who-knows-what is literally inconceivable, as inconceivable as death. It is a kind of death — the death of our sense of everything as we know it, and the death of who we think we are.

That we can survive these crises, and not only remain ourself, but become our self — that self who is suffocating beneath the crushing weight of what we believe we must be …this is as inconceivable to the existentially threatened soul as the rest of the who-knows-what.

Those in the existential crisis feel unknowability as  dread. Like humidity, the dread pervades, soaks into and saturates everything. Dread condenses upon whatever threatens to bring the unwanted truth forth. Most of all it condenses upon those people who refuse to cooperate with the old sense of truth.

Wherever people feel compelled to suppress other people’s speech or even to control other people’s thoughts, you can be certain that they are attempting to suppress their own existential crisis.

They find compassionate, pious words for this suppression and its justification, but behind the piety is terror and willingness to impose terror.

An oppressive overclass who sees oppression everywhere but where it really is will require not only silence but perfect compliance to preserve its collective delusion and feeling of safety.

“I just can’t see why anyone would object to what I’m trying to do.”

It is true: you cannot see. You cannot allow yourself to see.

You would not survive it.

Soon enough, people will see. This can’t continue forever.

It will happen. It might require a catastrophe, but it will happen.

Then we will have something else to deal with: mass conversion.

A vulgar hoard of first-time metanoiacs will explode into the world and flood it with idiotic, presumptuous, omniscient joy.

Religious hysteria is next.

It will be terrible, and violent, but at least it will be joyous for a change.

Transcendental subject versus psychological subject

Philosophy

From Dan Zahavi’s Husserl’s Phenomenology, paydirt:

The relation between the transcendental subject and the empirical subject is not a relation between two different subjects, but between two different self-apprehensions, a primary and a secondary. The transcendental subject is the subject in its primary constitutive function. The empirical subject is the same subject, but now apprehended and interpreted as an object in the world, that is, as a constituted and mundanized entity.

It is in this context that Husserl calls attention to the fact that subjectivity can be thematized in two radically different ways, namely in a natural or psychological reflection on the one hand, and in a pure or transcendental reflection on the other. When I perform a psychological reflection, I am interpreting the act reflected upon as a psychical process, that is, a process occurring in a psycho-physical entity that exists in the world. This type of self-consciousness — which Husserl occasionally calls a mundane self-consciousness — is just as worldly an experience as, say, the experience of physical objects, and if one asks whether it can provide us with an adequate understanding of subjectivity, the answer is no. Natural reflection presents us with a constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject, but it does not provide us with an access to the constituting, transcendental dimension of subjectivity.

It is here that the pure or transcendental reflection is introduced, since its specific task is to thematize a subjectivity stripped from all contingent and transcendent relations and interpretations.

Husserl makes it clear, however, that this type of reflection is not immediately available, so the question remains: What method or procedure can make it available?

The obvious answer: Through the epoché. For, as Husserl emphasizes again and again (with an obvious jab at introspectionism), unless the way has first been cleared by the epoché, we will be dealing with an objectified and mundanized experience regardless of how intensively or how carefully and attentively one reflects. In contrast to the positive sciences, which can proceed directly to their different fields of research, the region that phenomenology is supposed to investigate is not immediately accessible. Prior to any concrete investigation it is necessary to employ a certain methodological reflection to escape the natural attitude. Only through a methodical suspension of all transcendent preconceptions, only through a radical turn toward that which in a strict sense is given from a first-person perspective, can transcendental analysis commence.

No amount of introspection of the objectified psychological subject will give us insight into the transcendental subject. Efforts to make changes to the objectified psychological subject leave the world-constituting transcendental subject unchanged.

People will happily work on their psychological subject, as long as their transcendental subject is left undetected and sovereign. Any line of thought that makes the transcendental subject conspicuous or challenges its absolute authority will induce profound angst.

Metasophic incompetence

Philosophy

Everyone knows everything — at least everything relevant — especially those who have given things very little thought.

If you happen to be one of the few who puts serious time and effort into earnest, deep and self-critical reflection, please keep in mind that those who focus on practical matters do not see this effort as yielding much value. They see how you waste your time splitting hairs on irrelevant and esoteric topics. You call that wise? It only proves that you lack their talent for discerning what matters most. Is it really so strange that they believe they know better than you?

Every horizon is the edge of the world.

Three modes of principledness

Ethics

Being principled means that you prioritize certain moral values over your own immediate personal interests.

There are at least three motivational modes of principledness.

Let’s call the first altruistic, the second virtuous and the third magnanimous.

The altruistically motivated person treats principles as something beyond self, apart from one’s own being. He sets aside his selfish needs, in order to dedicate himself to something higher than himself.

The virtuously motivated person treats principles as qualifications of excellence. He follows principles to cultivate his best self.

The magnanimously motivated person treats principle as a condition for membership in higher-order selves. By committing to principles and being faithful to them, one enters into relationships with others who honor the same principles, and participates in transcendent selves, for example, a marriage or a friendship or a community of faith.

Identity comes from higher-order selves, within which we participate, to whom we belong.

What identitarians call “identity” is just social category. It is no wonder that identity is an issue for them. They do not know what identity is or how a sense of identity is developed. Everything they do to solve the problem exacerbates it.

Uniqueness, universality and the social region

Anthropology, Philosophy, Religion

What is unique to each of us is intimately connected with what is universal to all of us.

The connection is intimate but it runs a long and intricate circuit through everyday, practical life.

Let us call this intimate, intricate circuit the social region.

In good times, the social region mediates between uniqueness and universality and provides us roles and identities that do justice both to our uniqueness and to universality. Because it mediates uniqueness and universality, we find social existence tolerable and sometimes worthwhile.

In bad times, the social region imposes upon us roles and identities which suppress our uniqueness and eclipse our relation to universality. Social existence alienates us from ourselves, and from universality beyond socially given commonalities.

Cut off from our uniqueness, individuals are reducible to identity. Cut off from universality, reality is socially constructed.

Cut off from everything apart from social existence, tormented by their alienation, social activists work tirelessly deconstruct and reconstruct society, in order to win the recognition, power and resources to which those of their identity are entitled. They win and win and win. But with each victory they feel less and less victorious. And the social region, as it tries to do more and more of what it cannot do, becomes more and more alienated and alienating.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The supreme example of such a technology is religion.

And ironically, another example is… magic.

We do not even know what either of these technologies exist to do.

But we go on knowing, anyway, with “the sublime confidence of the ignorant.”*

This addled age is a cargo cult of history.

Credit to Freddy DeBoer for the hilarious expression: “the sublime confidence of the ignorant.”

This article, by the way, is about the unfounded belief that a normal, intact personality lurks beneath the outward personalities of the severely autistic.

This exhibits the same disastrous mental move I have observed in vulgar understandings of the subconscious. Somehow, fully-formed but unspoken beliefs lurk beneath the surface of consciousness, forever trying to bob up, despite our frantic efforts to push them back under, away from our awareness.

Both are the result of an incapacity to think subjectivity-first.

Supersubjectivity

Philosophy, Religion

Something incomprehensible is happening to us.

It is happening to all of us, all at once, and each of us, personally.

It is happening so rapidly, so pervasively and so totally that the change is, as yet, incomprehensible.

It is happening immanently, in every minute detail of our individual and collective lives, but it is obviously also happening transcendently: something portentous is going on elsewhere, beyond, and manifesting here, now, personally.

The whole itself is disturbed, and life is saturated with signs of the disturbance.

Some read the signs as the creaks and groans of decaying institutions, preceding total collapse. Some read them as clues of secret scheming of a malevolent totalitarian cabal, while others diagnose this reading as precisely the kind of paranoid theories concocted and propagated by totalitarian populists. Some read the signs as Gaia making final preparations to heal herself of the destructive parasite we have become. Some interpret these signs as an approaching futureshock of exponential proportion. A post-singularity artificial god will purge us from the planet. Some read the signs as the harvest of evil seeds planted centuries ago — a long overdue reckoning — a humanist ultio dei. Others see it all as prophesied trials and tribulations finally coming to pass.

Different faiths, different metaphysics, different elsewheres, different beyonds — different accounts, different explanations. But for all their differences, they all point to a common phenomenon: our shared sense that the fabric of reality is unraveling.

It manifests as uncanniness. We are all collectively and individually anxious about everything-all-at-once. Most of us fixate on one or several particular foci. But the themes and things upon which we focus our angst are just condensations of something in the air. That something defies focus. It demands something else.

The something-in-the-air that everything-all-at-once is not calling us to action.

It is calling us to a reorientation to subjectivity.

We can no longer be naively objective. Mere objectivity will no longer deliver us.

We must learn to comprehend our own subjectivity, and the supersubjectivities in which we participate.

Who are your supersubjects? Or rather, to which supersubjects do you belong?

And do your supersubjects answer to anyone higher than themselves?

Some do, some don’t.

Most don’t.

Remedial phenomenology

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

For the last couple of months I have been re-grounding myself in Husserl’s phenomenology. The work I am interested in doing is phenomenological, but it is not, itself, phenomenology. By returning to Husserl, I hope to arrive at the point of departure for my project. I am interested in approaching philosophy as a design discipline, both in the form of the philosophy (writing, visuals, practices designed to impart a particular faith) and in its substance (the life afforded by adoption of the faith). To make matters weirder, the faith itself is designerly. Obviously, it is a synthesis of philosophy, design and religion that profoundly scrambles the current meanings of philosophy, design and religion.

New working vocabulary

Phenomenology, Philosophy

(This is another unpublished post from September 2023, written while I was studying Husserl. I think I just lost steam and forgot to finish it. It is still unfinished, but I think it is good enough and complete enough to publish as a work in progress. It has only been a few months but the vocabulary proposed here has been working.)

Short version:

Below is an attempt to differentiate and name some modes of intellection important to the field of design. My goal is to balance etymological groundedness, established use, and simplicity to design a system of labeled concepts useful for speaking precisely and clearly about intellection and intelligibility:

  • Intellection is a general term for any act of intelligence, regardless of mode.
  • Intelligibility is conduciveness to intellection.
  • Conception is a mode of intellection: a spontaneous taking-together of a gestalt given.
  • Construction is a mode of intellection: a putting-together of givens into a composite.
  • Synthesis is a mode of intellection: a simultaneous conception and construal, where a given is conceived and construed together spontaneously as an articulate whole.
  • Comprehension is a mode of intellection: a synthesis situated within and integrated with an all-embracing totality.
  • Deconstruction is anti-synthesis. It is a type of construal used to dissolve conceived wholes and render them mere constructs. If successful, deconstruction clears ground for alternate conceptions and syntheses.

Long version:

For the last fifteen years or so, when talking about modes of understanding, I have treated conception and synthesis as antithetical complements. Conception was the spontaneous taking of a given as a gestalt. Synthesis was a part-by-part putting together of a composite from multiple givens. Conception was holistic taking-together; synthesis was atomistic putting-together.

Lately, though, I have been considering reshuffling this language, and using “construction” in place of “synthesis”, and using “synthesis” more conventionally, to designate something conceived structurally, a simultaneous holistic and atomistic understanding.

Construction has an apt etymology, as well as mainstream currency and experience-nearness, which is to say, many people conceive its meaning.

We construct assertions, arguments, justifications, theories, taxonomies, systems. We call these constructed structures constructs.

Constructs, once constructed, are understood through construal. We trace the steps of the construction backwards and forward, and we examine the relationships between parts, in order to construe how the construct was constructed.

Understanding, however, is rooted in conception. The basic elements must be conceived, and the relationships linking the elements must also be conceived. Where conceptions are lacking, construals are unrooted, empty, “abstract”.

Sometimes a process of construal causes a construct to “click” as a gestalt conception. Suddenly, the whole and parts are conceived together as a structured whole.

This simultaneous understanding of whole and part together is synthesis. Conception and construal are “put together” as a single articulate understanding of a structure. Articulated means “jointed”. The whole is conceived as a gestalt of jointed parts, each also a gestalt.

Analysis is a process of breaking down something that is not (or not yet) understood synthetically into conceivable elements (spontaneously recognized parts) linked in conceivable ways (such as logic or causality). The process of analysis can sometimes force a rearticulation of reconceived parts within the whole. Sometimes these rearticulated parts can effect a reconception of the whole. (Analysis open to reconception of both part and whole within a synthesis is hermeneutics.)

The denser the conceptions within a structure, the more clearly it is understood. The denser the construals within a structure, the more thoroughly it is understood.

But often a construal doesn’t produce a synthesis. We understand that the construct can be construed if we go through the process of construing it, but the construal still must be performed each time the construct is to be understood. The structure is still experienced as a construct, understandable solely through construal. It is experience-distant — artificial — understood as a construct. The understanding might be thorough, but it is not clear.

Sometimes repetition of construals can gradually, through habit, develop conceptions. We learn to conceive familiar patterns, among parts and wholes, as gestalts. Through familiarization, we gradually synthesize new understandings, and new clarity. This, however, does not mean that familiarization will always produce synthesis. More often it does not, but instead produces burdensome artificiality and alienation from what is conceived as given.

(But the fantasy of familiarization is intoxicating to prometheans with dreams of reinventing humankind, and it seems that no number of catastrophic social experiments is sufficient to sober them up. The lessons learned from such bloody failures last as long as the generations who learned them the hard way.)

Comprehension is the impossible but worthy aspiration to synthesize all of reality as given to our experience. Everything we encounter is conceived as belonging to a whole and the relation between any two parts can be fluently construed within the whole. The effort to comprehend all inevitably shipwrecks on the limitations of one’s conceptions, as beautifully described by Thomas Kuhn.

Natural as opposed to what?

Enworldment, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Religion

I’ve used the word “natural” to four very different ways, and each is defined against a different opposite. These are each

The first two are the boring obvious ones.

  • Natural versus manmade. Is it from the wilderness, or is it from our own hands?
  • Natural versus supernatural. Does it obey the laws of nature, or does it follow the laws of something or someone beyond nature? Note: I understand there are less vulgar notions of supernatural, but for the present purposes, let’s use the vulgar sense.

The second two (to me, anyway) are more interesting.

  • Natural versus unnatural. Does something subjectively feel as though it spontaneously participates in nature or does it seem alienated from it and at odds with it? This could be subdivided into any number of categories, depending on the perceived location of the unnaturalness. For example, it could be one’s own self (“this action feels unnatural”) or in a perceived or conceived object (“that light looks unnatural”).
  • Natural versus phenomenological. Am I regarding some phenomenon in solely terms of the object given to my perception or conception, or am I understanding the phenomenon also as a subjective act of perceiving or conceiving some given object? And I will always add: and if conceived differently, will reveal a different given object.

These latter two are at the heart of my philosophical design work.

Can phenomenological freedom be used skillfully to suspend one natural way of perceiving in order to reconceive reality (or nature, if you prefer) in another way — a way that is shockingly unfamiliar, yet just as natural as the old one. A new comprehensive praxic gestalt clicks into place, replacing the old “everything” gestalt.

This is a non-supernatural account of metanoia, and it suggests that philosophies rooted in phenomenological reflective practice can be a kind of genuine religious practice. If one is willing to pay the necessary exorbitant price, one can radically reconfigure one’s own subjectivity, objectivity and subject-object relations.

For a long time I was planning to call my perpetually unwritten book on this subject Second-Natural. I was also playing with another title The Ten Thousand Everythings.

Now I am leaning toward calling it Enworldment.

Phenomenological prayer

Phenomenology, Religion

Reality is an articulate whole we inhabit.

Reality is myriad interacting things among us.

Reality is participation with our fellow inhabitants.

We participate in realities beyond our comprehension.

Interacting things unite and divide.

The whole can rearticulate in shocking ways.

Reality is not what we think it is.

Things can be otherwise.

We are not who we think we are.

Metanoia and the triad

Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

A problem is coming into view for me.

For the last two decades, it has seemed true to me that we have three fundamental factors that shape our being:

The first factor is intuition, and intuition’s “object”, everyday, immediate givens — those real entities we encounter and interact with in the course of our practical lives. Do we have a clear conception of these givens, that allows us to relate this particular given to other givens? Or is our intuition purely tacit recognition that lies dormant in oblivion until it spontaneously recognizes and responds to some given, and then recedes back into oblivion? All encounters with entities around us, whether conceived or merely recognized, are given to experience. Intuition is the faculty of immediate givenness.

The second factor is will — our own motivated response or nonresponse to what we experience. Do we ignore or attend? If we attend, do we merely observe or do we respond? If we respond, do we respond subjectively by adjusting our understanding or attitude, or do we try to respond objectively by changing that which we experience? Or do we do both at once, and interact — alternating fluidly between acting upon and being acted upon? All response, whether ignorant or attentive, whether observational or active, whether inward, outward, or both is will.

The third factor is metaphysical attitude — our sense of reality and our own place in it and our relationship with it, to it, within it. In fact, it might be the essence of our metaphysic what preposition we prepose when relating self to beyond-self. This metaphysical attitude is an implicit faith, which might or might not be articulated as a metaphysical doctrine, and that articulation might be a faithful expression of the implicit faith or it might be in conflict with one’s implicit faith, which means it is held in bad faith.

This is my best understanding of the great triad. The source of intuitive givens is Earth, who is Prakriti, who is Shekhinah, who is the Virgin. The source of reality within whom we exist is Heaven, who is Purusha, who is Keter, who is YHWH. Between is Man, who is the Ideal Person, the polycentered heart of the world, and the schlub who is each of us.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught: “Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: ‘I am a speck of dust,’ and on the other : ‘The world was created for me.’”

If we manage to change our metaphysical attitude, it changes also our intuition and our will. I am talking here about metanoia.

This is not the same thing as coming to authentic articulation of a faith that was misrepresented in bad faith.

Nor is it that more common, much worse reverse case, where we adopt a bad faith that allows us to make coherent articulates sense of things, and share it with others around us — but at the cost of fidelity to our implicit faith and our intuitions. We gain the world(view) but lose our soul (our intuitive and metaphysical connection with reality). This bad faith dooms us to clearly and compellingly positing things rooted neither in our experience nor in our sense of reality.

I am talking about shift in how we tacitly situate ourselves in reality, due to a shifted tacit understanding of reality, a shifted tacit understanding of self and a shifted tacit understanding of relationship between this new self and new reality.

My problem is: In the metanoia experience of rebirth as a new person in a new reality, is it better to think of it as new conceptions — new receptive faculties affording new realities to which, before we were oblivious due to lack of receptive faculties? Or rather, is it registering novel ordered stabilities emerging from the chaos and instability of unordered experience, which we did receive but could not order?

Is metanoia more like being blind but now seeing? Or is it more like becoming able to make out murky forms we see in the shadowy fog? I’ve been inclined to see it as the former.

Wisdom trouble

Philosophy

(This post is notes to myself. If you read it — and you are welcome to — you are reading as an eavesdropper. Something is troubling me badly. It is the best kind of trouble, which is why I have been chasing it around it with my philosopher’s stone. Just this year I’ve chased it through at least six gnarly books and through at least six dozen excruciating conversations.)

Wisdom is practical understanding of first-person being.

Wisdom is practical understanding. The understanding manifests in practice. To convey it, it must be demonstrated. It cannot be given by explicit propositional language.

An understanding that manifests in practice is an ability to act in some intentional way. It is not knowledge content. Practical understanding, though, might use knowledge as a means or support in its practice. We sometimes call such knowledge “wisdom”, but this badly confuses matters. A wise person’s knowledge (or a wise tradition’s knowledge) is an instrument, not the wisdom ability itself. Just as possessing a guitar does not make one a guitarist, possessing a wise person’s knowledge does not make one wise. One must have an ability to do the practice — play a guitar if a guitar is available or act wisely if an occasion for wisdom arises.

The practice in question is a participatory practice — participation in first-person being.

First-person being is not nearly as simple as our everyday working notions of I and we suggest. Practical understanding of this complexity — manifested as participation in first-person in its full complexity — is essential to wisdom.

Wise participation is first-person is participation in a subjective manifold comprising one’s own first-person singular being (I), other persons’ first person singular beings (fellow-I, a.k.a. thou), within transcendent first person being plural (We).

(We is a complex and elusive kind of being about whom we know little, but about which we unwisely believe we know perfectly well. We don’t even know how to know it, because when we try to know we approach it as objective immanence, when the everse approach is required. We is essentially participatory and transcendent, not objective and immanent. This is the most radical category mistake, and it forces any believer in its grip into the unwise either-or of a relatively decent atheism or an indecent fundamentalism.)

The understanding exists as a capacity for this kind of participation, which emerges if the occasion for such participation presents itself.

Let’s return to the role of knowledge in wisdom. We have established that wisdom is not knowledge. We have also established, however that some knowledge can be instrumental to wisdom.

It is also true that we can state true propositions about wisdom. As wisdom is not knowledge, a true proposition about wisdom is not itself wisdom. But knowledge about wisdom can be instrumentally useful to wisdom. And an act of using instrumentally useful knowledge about wisdom can be wise. In this case, wisdom is manifested in the speech act, not in the content.

Philosophy, at its best, is the attempt to demonstrate wisdom by stating true propositions about wisdom that are instrumentally useful to wisdom, and its wisdom is demonstrated in its attitude toward wisdom as something inexhaustibly transcendent. We don’t possess wisdom, we love wisdom, and we love it by desiring its beyondness, wisely pursing wisdom beyond our current ability.

This is the structure of love: Love is transcendently oriented, loving past what is objectively given, toward a subject who forever eludes our possessing, comprehending grasp, a semi-mysterious person we know essentially through our shared participation in We.

To covet what is objectively given, or to value only the experience of what is given, is mere lust.

What do we call a person who acquires, collects or distributes wisdom facts and wisdom tools, while neglecting the development of wise practice?

A lot of wisdom happens without the use of knowledge.

Many wise people cannot tell you many facts about their wisdom.

They just act wisely when the occasion calls for it.

Others gravitate to forms of wisdom that involve knowledge. It is easy to automatically conflate them with knowledge fact and knowledge tool hoarders, but it is unwise to do so.

The test is the same: can these knowledge users act wisely with their knowledge when the occasion calls for it?

Some people learn some wisdom, but unwisely conclude from this that they now possess wisdom. They were ignorant in thinking they knew — but now they know that they really know. Others who resist their new knowing resist ignorantly. They too only think they know.

It would be wise to ask if perhaps one still only thinks one really knows. Or better, that knowing must be something other than we have conceived it.

But instead one becomes foolishly, arrogantly and presumptuously wise like a new religious convert, or like a university student who has learned just enough to be dangerous, or like a new initiate in a compelling new conspiracy theory, or like a fanatic drunk on a comprehensive political ideology that finally makes sense of everything.

A fool possessed by a conceit of wisdom is called sophomoric (sophos– “wisdom” + -moros “foolish”).

A fool with a head full of wise content is somehow even more foolish than an empty-headed fool.

Wisdom and Golden Rule Prime

Ethics, Religion

I am clearly in a serious perplexity. It is very painful, but the pain feels promising. It is manifesting as increasing impatience at being condescended to. Some are people who seem to me manifestly unqualified to condescend. They know something important, but they seem unaware of how much remains beyond their understanding, and how crucially important that beyond is. Others are possibly qualified. They might have important knowledge beyond mine, but I’m frustrated with our relationship — but perhaps because they are perplexing me with something as-yet inconceivable to me. The interference between the two possibilities is jamming me up. Plus I have some scary medical stuff going on, and that’s intensifying my already excessive intensity.

Here is my current attempt at resolving this perplexity…

A while back I began reflecting on the Golden Rule, and came up with the idea of Golden Rule Prime.

At its surface, the Golden Rule is a pretty terrible rule. Do to others as you would have others do to you. So you would have others serve you the disgusting food they themselves would like to eat, or have you listen to the terrible music they prefer? Who would want that?

But if we note that very fact, and run it back through the Golden Rule again, we get something much better. What would we like better? We would like others to serve us the food we ourselves like, or play the music we ourselves prefer. This iteration of the rule is Golden Rule Prime.

But even Golden Rule Prime is not quite right. Maybe we are not hungry, even for our favorite food, or maybe we are not in the mood for any music however much we normally love it. What would we like better? If we run this back through the Golden Rule again, we get something even better. We would like someone to check with us on what we want and then respond to what we tell them, or something along the lines of asking and responding to the person, instead of speculating or guessing. That would be Golden Rule Double Prime.

With each iteration the Golden Rule yields a deeper principle, approaching a moral asymptote, which I believe is absolute and not attainable. And with each iteration we presume less that we know better (or ever can know better), and put ourselves more on equal footing with others — who we must involve in our decisions if they are to be good ones

I am inclined to see wisdom as a function of this approach. How many Primes can you actively intuit in your dealings with others, how aware are you of the remaining unclosable distance between your own understanding and the intersubjective reality of the situation, and how ready are you to involve others in your effort to reduce that distance?

Sophists

Philosophy

I’ve been reflecting on the word “philosopher” recently, and wondering why Socrates might have felt a need to coin a new word instead of just being a new variety of sophist. Why “lover of wisdom”?

This seems connected with the myth of the Oracle at Delphi identifying Socrates as the wisest man in Athens for knowing how little he really knew.

Is loving wisdom connected with awareness of the limits of one’s own thought?

I link this with the understanding that when love a person, we must not confuse that with loving our idea of who a person is.

We must love her semi-mysterious being who is forever beyond the limits of cognition, who will never stop surprising us. Yet we do know her more than our mere our cognition knows, in a directly intuitive way. And that intuitive knowing has something to do with participating in a shared being with her.

In love, our own subject subsists within another greater subject, and our being participates in this greater being.

Wisdom seems connected with this capacity to participate in reality without needing to reduce to reality to thought — to think toward a reality known to transcend thought.

Unwisdom — sophistry — is to confuse our thoughts of reality for reality itself.

We think we love a person but instead love our own idea of a person.

We think we worship God but instead we love our own mental image of God.

We think we know who we are, but we don’t know how to know the kind of being we have in order to know it. We grasp some identity — a category of object — instead of participating in our own way as our selves.

Participatory being is subjectivity, and objectivity is its product, not its substance.

As long as we must cognize everything objectively before we will know it as real, we will remain unable to know ourselves, other people, or God. We will be cursed with the Midas touch of objectivity, and be unable to nourish ourselves. We will be nihilists.

I entertain the possibility that Socrates saw that the consequence of sophistry was nihilism.

And now I am wondering if the purpose of Socratic interrogation is to get people to realize how much they are able to do perfectly well despite lacking the? ability to account for it with explicit thought?

First principles last

Philosophy

I am finally getting around to reading Husserl’s Ideas. I should have read this long, long ago. He already developed the language I’ve needed to say what I most need to say.

One important capability of phenomenology — in my opinion, the most important capability — is this: a phenomenological attitude permits us to port an enworldment across multiple differing metaphysical platforms.

The need (which is more often than not nothing less than a compulsion) to maintain compatibility with one metaphysical platform will narrow the range of ideas we are willing to entertain and develop, as well as the range of intuitions and perceptions we take seriously. Consequently we risk neglecting or rejecting regions of being crucial to our humanity.

Not every truth will play nice with an ultimate reality built with the materials of physics, or with a universe spun from divine love, or with a realm of manifested archetypal forms — but we might need those truths anyway, say, if we want to make an electronic device, or to cure a disease, or to feel healthy empathy for our neighbor, or to know viscerally that our life has purpose, or to account for mathematic’s miraculous ability to find order in the most chaotic of chaos, or to be bound to others within binding truths — all at once, all within the same life.

Maybe the first principles of metaphysics should come last in our understanding of our human — all-too-human — condition.

Anamnetic learning

Love, Philosophy

What the world needs more of is teachers of what everyone already intuitively knows.

From the perspective of a learner — the most important perspective to both learner and teacher — learning what you already intuitively know is the most inspiring kind of learning. — “I always knew this but could never say it, before!” —

We feel relieved, dignified, liberated, restored, empowered when we learn this way. We feel grateful without feeling humiliated or indebted, because nobody gave us anything that was not already ours.

Everyone loves this kind of learning.

Plato called it anamnesis: unforgetting.

From the perspective of our social existence, anamnetic learning liberates private intuitions from solitary confinement within the skulls of individual persons, and brings it out into the light of shared understanding.

It socializes private knowing and allows it to participate in public knowledge.

I mean social and public in a positive sense. For many of us, the words “social” and “public” taste sour in our mouths. They imply imposition of unwanted burdens, constraints, exposure, artificiality, impersonality, de-personalization — alienation. But it has not always been this way. The ancients experienced public life very differently, and maybe in a different way that is partially recoverable.

The difference is preserved in the lonely etymology of the word “private”. Privare meant “to bereave, deprive, rob, strip”. Private means deprived of public existence.

Looking at the word “social” offers us clues into how Roman citizens may have experienced society. Socialis — “of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,” from socius “companion, ally.”

Is it possible that anamnetic teaching could help restore a non-alienating society, where living and working together in public affirms what we know and love most immediately?

Could we ever abide in a self-affirming, other-affirming, world-affirming common truth — a truth rooted in the soil of our souls, but growing upward as public knowledge, branching out as specialized practical expertise, efflorescing as culture, fructifying as teaching?

This is the stuff of utopian dreams, but I think it is a truth-bearing fantasy.

I imagine my younger daughter would laugh at me for being such an extreme Aquarius. But I am actually feeling it right now, and even as I see the wrecking ball of the day ahead swinging right for my  skull…

Learning to teach is helping me shed the burden of intellectual avarice. What seems deeply true to me is not mine. It’s not me. Truest truth should be everyone’s. The value of truth is actualized in the sharing of it with others.

One of the world’s most cloying day camp songs:

Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
You end up
Having
More

I’m making myself throw up, now. Have a good day.