Reading, I just came across a new, excellent word: anadyomenous. It is the characteristic of “coming up or emerging (especially of Aphrodite from the sea).”
A google search turned up exactly one example of the word in use, in the very book I am reading.
Why do I love design research?
First, I love new ideas. Performing design research early in a project generates fresher ideas. Yes, the ideas are better informed, but more importantly, they are better inspired. When we know something we are selectively filtering what seems irrelevant. But what is deemed relevant to any industry gets overcropped by experts and it loses its vitality.
Yet, it is to this expert-blessed depleted ground we go when we want to generate new ideas.
The real opportunities to innovate are hidden in plain sight as irrelevant stuff nobody thinks is important enough to talk about.
Just as importantly, new ideas are impossible to argue in the conventional way, relying on success of precedents. Newness always loses that kind of argument. But prototype arms (good) new ideas with evidence of viability and gives them a fighting chance.
Second, I love reason. We often think of intuition as a purely benevolent force. Think of all the names it goes by: inspiration, imagination, insight, idea. All great things begin with an intuition — and a heroic will to champion it and actualize it. But this neglects to notice that the most horrible things have resulted from malformed intuitions and tyrannical wills acting in the name of heroism — and these vastly outnumber the successes that have given intuition its good name.
And really, isn’t the essence of tyranny to have an intuition — an imagined thing, an alien inspiration, a spurious insight — imposed as a reality you must accept whether you believe it or not?
Reason is what allows intuitions to be accessed, assented to, internalized and shared. Reason is the ethic that feels an obligation to show, demonstrate, persuade and share ideas to anyone expected to treat them as real.
Reason is not just logic. Any horrible idea can be argued logically, and the logical structure is rarely what makes a horrible idea horrible.
Reason is not just adherence to what seems correct. All intuitions seem correct. What make ideas horrible is that they take their own self-evident correctness at face value and sees this as sufficient to require all others to treat the idea as fact, whether it is self-evident to them or not.
Reason means to establish truth socially through experiment. Where people will not submit to experiment — (because there’s an emergency, or there’s no time, or there’s no money, or there’s no point, etc., etc. etc.) — unreason is at work. Unreason is another name for tyrannical intuition.
Third, I love transcendent truth. That is, I love the kinds of truth that cannot even be imagined until the moment they appear. You cannot go out looking for any particular transcendent truth, because, by its very essence you cannot know what to look for. All you can do is create conditions where it can appear and to expect specifically the unexpected. When things feel constricted, played out, used up or settled, and you cannot imagine how anything new could possibly happen in your industry, your field or your organization — you are failing to factor in the innately surprising nature of transcendent truth. Again, what we know secondhand cannot produce transcendent truth: only de-filtered reality with some of its chaos permitted to shine through.
Fourth, I love dialogue. Dialogue is a very specific kind of conversation: one that allows groups (usually small ones of two or three) to gather in the name of reason, in contact with a reality, and in the urgent struggle to find-create-instaurate something new together, to experience transcendent truth, not only of the situation and its possibilities, but also of one another.
Last, and very much least, design research produces better products. I really like great products. There’s a lot of them, though. We are drowning in great products. What is rare — if we are honest with ourselves — is great work. So, the principle cultural value of good products is that they increase the urgency to make even better products, and the urgency can grow so enormous and so unavoidable that organizations will sometimes resort to doing design research to create them.
I’ve done work with research, and I’ve done work without it, and the difference is total. But you have to want that difference. Powerful people and complacent people rarely want it. But the world needs it.
Intersubjectivity is conducted through the medium of things.
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I and You runs a circuit through It.
Are things otherwise?: I is short-circuiting, again.
An indicator of a closed circuit: intense heat.
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Circuit – ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from Latin circuitus, from circuire, variant of circumire ‘go around,’ from circum ‘around’ + ire ‘go.’
(It is interesting to think of the circuit as primarily the movement, not the substance that enables the movement.)
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Laurie Anderson’s “Closed Circuit”
There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.
Serres: “Whether royal or imperial, whoever wields power, in fact, never encounters in space anything other than obedience to his power, thus his law: power does not move. When it does, it strides on a red carpet. Thus reason never discovers, beneath its feet, anything but its own rule.”
I’ve tried to make this point several times when observing the phenomenon of the elevator pitch.
Today’s power is busy, and it expresses itself as intense impatience: “Say it so I get it instantly and effortlessly, or don’t say it.” This constraint constrains all communication to repetition of the already-known; a reference to a thought already had; a ditto; flattery.
(Ditto. Irony detected and left intact.)
For expertise the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out the answer to this problem.” Expertise lacks the answer, but what the question is and how it will produce an answer is not in question.
For philosophy the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out how to think about this problem.” Philosophy lacks not only an answer, but the way to ask and answer a possible question. How to ask and answer and what the answer is are found together.
Wittgenstein’s formulation is elegant: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”
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Any explorer in a new land will not know his way about. His skill is not in already knowing the landscape. His skill is navigating unmapped territory and finding his way about. He will emerge with a map. He will not try to draw it before he has explored it.
We should be suspicious of any explorer who claims to already have a map and to know his way around unexplored territory. Either he’s taking you somewhere that has already been settled, or he doesn’t know his way about “I don’t know my way about” and is likely to get you lost in the wilderness.
Innovation needs philosophy.
Reason is willingness to submit to trial by experiment.
Unreason believes reason is logical derivation of truth from principles.
Hermes casts a scotoma instead of a shadow, and wherever the scotoma falls, the ground looks exactly like it should: a human-shaped pool of blindness shimmering with perfection.
Let’s not have a face-to-face conversation this time. That’s what kids do. They gaze at one another, each a potential mating object for the other, seeing, being seen and being seen seeing.
Instead let’s have a face-face-to-object conversation. Let’s do science together. That’s the only way to get to know one another intimately, as subjects.
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Each individual I runs a circuit through the world of things on its way to becoming a We.
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Grammatical alchemy: First person singular becomes first person plural by way of third person, and in the process second person singular is transmuted from third person to first.
I was talking with a good friend of mine last night about “organized” atheism and why we both distance ourselves from it.
For me, the problem with atheism does not lie in the incorrectness of the belief it professes. If you were to make a list of the average atheist’s professed disbeliefs, my list of disbeliefs would match it, check for check. I am especially in agreement with atheists in their disgust with the Fundamentalist “God”. On my list that box is checked twice and starred.
Where I find atheists lacking is in their philosophical complacency. The atheist’s checklist of disbeliefs is too short, and it doesn’t grow. That’s fine if the question of God’s existence bores you and you have other things to think about. That is just a non-theism: non-concern for the question. I also respect anti-Fundamentalism, though I question the choice of philosophy as weapon in that battle.
But what about these “militant” atheists who furiously check and re-check the same three boxes? I believe they actually help Fundamentalists by treating the Fundamentalist theology as the last word on faith, when it is not even the first. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to an extreme, it is failure of religion to begin.
Here is what I’d like to convey to the tiny handful of urgent truly philosophical atheists: There is no single belief in God, and so there cannot be a single disbelief in God.
Being an atheist is necessarily harder than being a theist, because you must understand a belief before you can refute it. To do the job right, an atheist must not only able to enter the belief (or at least its conceptual space) in order to understand it. This “entry” is the nature of authentic theisms, and if you do not know what I am talking about, you have some basic learning to do before you can get going. Then the atheist must find the way back out this belief. Finally, he must be able to draw a map of that path from entrance to exit. This atheism is difficult and respectable.
Here is an outline of an atheism I could respect: this atheism would industriously hunt down every existing conception of God in order to understand and destroy it. Once it destroyed every existing conception it would then turn its attention to anticipating every future conception, in order to prevent its birth if not its conception.
Let’s give this atheistic discipline a name: Saulinism.
But do remember: it is easier to get in than to get out — especially once you know the difference between in and out.
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P.S. Or make it pretty.
Creative briefs come in every shape and size. Some are brief statements on a single sheet of paper, while others fill a briefcase.
They also reflect drastically different philosophies of creativity and the politics of creation.
If I were going to classify them — and you know that is exactly what I’m going to do — I’d put them in two categories:
I won’t pretend I don’t have a very strong personal preference, but I admit that both approaches when applied well with the right team can produce great results.
I very nearly re-wrote a post I already wrote in 2010, drawing out a chord from two passages from Nietzsche and Buber, both distinguishing between dialogue that takes place between individuals and discussion that takes place among members of a group — what Buber called interhuman versus social phenomena.
The reason I was going to write it was to jot down my intention to express these ideas as venn diagrams. A sketch:
Each individual has a certain set of personal things they can/will discuss. Two individuals are likely to have some amount of overlap. But with each additional individual the overlap diminishes.
But each individual also has a larger set of things they can be expected to be able to discuss — a more public or social mode of discussion. This set is a combination of very accessible topics, which approach pure sensory fact (the weather, for instance) and convention: the manners we have all been taught, the attitudes to which we are expected to adhere, the shared values we all are expected to uphold. The more people present, the more the conversation will have to follow the public mode.
I think introversion and extraversion has less to do with numbers of people than with what kind of interaction is more or less likely to happen as people are added or subtracted. So, as Buber noted, two individuals can be alone but still interact in a public or extraverted mode. And three or four introverts with similar interests can still interact in an introverted mode.
When introverts get finicky over chemistry of groups, I suspect it an attempt to preserve a possibility of introversion. Likewise, extraverts will often invite a wide range of people into a situation in order to make boring introverted conversation less possible. And some introverts will do the same thing, to get relief from themselves, temporarily or permanently. Conversely, extraverts will sometimes enlist introverts to help them excavate their privacy.
Now that I’ve written this out, it is very unlikely I will draw the idea.
When we lay on our backs and look up into the night sky, vast distances and time are laid out flat on a firmament. Flat here, flat now: like everything.
Between the extremes of black and white are shades of gray. Beyond the monochromatic gradient are colors.
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Between the continuum that spans individualism and collectivism are degrees of egoism and selflessness.
Rebellion seems to be losing its good conscience. It is palpably less socially acceptable to be socially unacceptable than it was a decade or two decades ago. With each passing year breaking taboos becomes more taboo. No wonder we require so much tolerance and permissiveness.
Many people believe humankind once possessed truth and then lost it, and so they now look for it in ancient sources. When that truth is found it will be this: the truth made by each future for its future.
There is nothing more idiosyncratic than an individual burning with the need to develop a comprehensive and universal understanding of existence. But these freakish craftsmen are the manufacturers of common sense and it is by their products that you and your people make sense of the world.
The less completely we understand it, the more completely we want to control it.
Next time you are tempted to question the reality of some being with the question “does it exist?” or “is it real?” instead ask: “How might this entity in question exist? — and given this possible way existing how do we test its actuality?”
This is the kernel of the ontological work ethic.
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Disbelief is just as hard as belief if one has an ontological work ethic. There are so many possible modes of existence one must eliminate before one can declare nonexistence of some thing. And to declare something nonsensical is in some ways even harder.
It is so much easier to begin with limited ontological repertoire — a set of templates — and to check any reality candidate’s qualification against the most approximate template: “If it is not real, it is, by definition, imaginary.”
It is so easier to start with simple criteria for what might be considered true, and refuse to even consider any truth that fails to satisfy these criteria: “If it is not true, it is, by definition, false.”
And of course, it is so much easier to question a person’s character than to question the things a person says. When facing a stranger’s strange claim, we prefer to examine the stranger’s head or history than examine his strange claim.
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Real and actual are not synonyms.
Actuality is immanent. Reality is a metaphysical speculation derived from actuality: actuality’s transcendent cause.
I am tempted to try to find terms to correspond with each of my metaphysical axes.
Cosmos, time, awareness :: Real, actual… authentic? genuine? true? faithful?