Category Archives: Philosophy

Impractical idealism vs practical realism

Fructivism, Ideas

Impractical idealism and practical realism: another of those mutually supportive antitheses united against an inconceivable possibility of a practical ideal that creates a new reality.

Impractical idealism plays the Alan Colmes to practical realism’s Sean Hannity, proving the suspicion that new ideals are essentially impractical and unrealistic because those who conceive them are unconcerned with what is possible and what is currently the case.

Practical realism sets itself up as the only possible alternative to such silliness, becoming the tough-minded champions of preservation of what has been established, or of expertly playing an absurd game one is powerless to change, or of making the humblest progress possible, and rejoicing in the very humbleness of the world’s possibilities.

And practical realism presents such a depressing image of smug complacence that anyone with a soul is repulsed. Faced with a choice between the practical realist’s mediocrity and sheer fantasy will choose fantasy and be tempted to make a display of principled quixotism or of making the most ludicrous truth-claims or obvious evasions.

Anyone intent on doing something new must not ally with either of these camps. We cannot be stupidly emotional and lose our concern for where we are, how we can move beyond it and what we can expect from our destination. But if we fail, we should not become champions of mediocrity invested in the belief that real change is impossible. Such stances are adopted by those fear that the impossibility of change lies not in the world but in their own impotence, and so they dedicate themselves to creating a world where nobody can succeed. And that is a shame because it is exactly those who are tempted to crush hopes who could help others bring hopes to fruition if they were willing to play their proper part, which is execution.

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A word about execution.

Notice, every organization is run by people known as executives.

By definition, the executive role executes. “1. a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business organization; 2. the person or branch of a government responsible for putting policies or laws into effect.”

But execute what? That is where everything falls apart.

It is not enough for executives to know how to execute. They are also expected to come up with the plan. And just having a plan is not enough. It has to be an inspiring plan.

Executives are expected to have vision.

But is this a realistic expectation? — In fact it is a prime example of an impractical reality that most people stubbornly cling to.

Executives nearly never have vision – at least not one of their own. Executives are much less concerned with changing reality, after all, this reality already put them in a sunny corner office on the top floor of a skyscraper. What’s not to like?

What executives really want is something to execute. Any plan that will enable them to show off their powers of execution will do. A sprinkle of innovation is enough, if it produces the quantitative evidence of  executive awesomeness.

But no executive will admit this. Why? Because execution is only glamorous if what is executed is a vision.

But nobody wants to execute someone else’s idea. That feels like being a servant.

So executives present themselves as visionaries who happen to be able to get things done.

But what an executive calls “vision” is rarely vision. Sometimes it’s a goal. Sometimes it is ambition that galvanizes the whole company. Or electrifying enthusiasm. Usually, it’s just a plan. Whatever it is, it is draped with vague superlatives, buzzwords and snazzy graphics and presented as the vision. Look closer, though, and you will see practical realism candy-coated with impractical idealism.

If you want to know why corporations are so abysmally dull this is why: executives would rather do without meaning than to accept meaning from anyone besides themselves.

 

Consolations of gnosis

ANT, Ethics, Ideas

I finished “Irreductions” from The Pasteurization of France.

To me, Latour looks like the most rigorous and radical fusion of Nietzschean and Pragmatist I’ve read.

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Superficially, Actor-Network Theory looks almost amoral, but Latour always inserts a moral at the end of his fables.

ANT neutralizes the twin delusions of omnipotence in knowledge and helplessness in practice that prevents visionaries from taking an honest shot at actualizing their ideals. The consolation of knowledge has seduced the most imaginative intellects of the world to build paltry private kingdoms in their minds — each a place of its own — leaving uncontested the domination of the public world to whoever will dominate it.

ANT closes off all antipolitical paths. Those who wish to gain power have exactly one option: build alliances.

Latour’s novel insight is that those alliances occur not only between people but between people and things, and strength is nothing more or less than the cooperation lent by each participant in the alliance.

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Some quotes from Heraclitus seem compatible with this line of thought:

“The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. ”

“Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.”

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own. ”

 

Where politics has no rights

ANT, Ethics

A hint at Latour’s ethic:

We would like to be able to escape from politics. We would like there to be, somewhere, a way of knowing and convincing which differs from compromise and tinkering: a way of knowing that does not depend upon a gathering of chance, impulse, and habit. We would like to be able to get away from the trials of strength and the chains of weakness. We would like to be able to read the original texts rather than translations, to see more clearly, and to listen to words less ambiguous than those of the Sibyl.

In the old days we imagined a world of gods where the harsh rules of compromise were not obeyed. But now this very world is seen as obscurantist and confused, contrasted with the exact and efficient world of the experts. “We are,” we say, “immersed in the habits of the past by our parents, our priests, and our politicians. Yet there is a way of knowing and acting which escapes from this confusion, absolutely by its principles and progressively by its results: this is a method, a single method, that of ‘science.’ ”

This is the way we have talked since Descartes, and there are few educated people on earth today who have not become Cartesian through having learned geometry, economics, accountancy, or thermodynamics. Everywhere we direct our best brains toward the extension of “science.” It is with them that we lodge our greatest, indeed often our only, hopes. Nowhere more than in the evocation of this kingdom of knowledge do we create the impression that there is another transcendental world. It is only here that there is sanctuary. Politics has no rights here, and the laws that rule the other worlds are suspended. This extraterritorial status, available only to the “sciences,” makes it possible for believers to dream, like the monks of Cluny, about reconquering the barbarians. “Why not rebuild this chaotic, badly organized world of compromise in accordance with the laws of our world?”

So what is this difference which, like Romulus and his plough, makes it possible to draw the limes that divide the scientific from other ways of knowing and convincing? A furrow, to be sure, an act of appropriation, an enclosure in the middle of nowhere, which follows up no “natural” frontier, an act of violence. Yes, it is another trial of strength which divides the forces putting might on one side and right on the other.

But surely this difference must represent something real since it is so radical, so total, and so absolute? Admittedly the credo of this religion is poor. All that it offers is a tautology. “To know” scientifically is to know “scientifically.” Epistemology is nothing but the untiring affirmation of this tautology. Abandon everything; believe in nothing except this: there is a scientific way of knowing, and other ways, such as the “natural,” the “social,” or the “magical.” All the failings of epistemology — its scorn of history, its rejection of empirical analysis, its pharisaic fear of impurity — are its only qualities, the qualities that are sought for in a frontier guard. Yes, in epistemology belief is reduced to its simplest expression, but this very simplicity brings success because it can spread easily, aided by neither priest nor seminary.

Of course, I am exaggerating. The faith has some kind of content. Technically, it is the negation of the paragraph with which I started this precis . Since the gods were destroyed, this faith has become the main obstacle that stands in the way of understanding the principle of irreduction. Its only function is passionately to deny that there are only trials of strength. “Be instant in season, out of season,” to say that “there is something in addition, there is also reason.” This cry of the faithful conceals the violence that it perpetrates, the violence of forcing this division.

All of which is to say that this precis, which prepares the way for the analysis of science and technology, is not epistemology, not at all.

Irreductions

ANT

From the introduction to Latour’s Irreductions:

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

This text follows one path, however bizarre the consequences and contrary to custom. What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge of what a force is? What happens when we do not know how their way of relating to one another is changing? What happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to reduce everything?

Supposing truth converses…?

ANT

More attempts to internalize the ANTsy moves:

Today, physicists never discuss a matter without allowing the matter to participate in the discussion.

Physicist’s experiments always ask leading questions. The questions have a clear, coaxing thrust, and the matter in question cooperates or frustrates the hopes implicit in the line of questioning.

Much of physics is hammered out through competition between conflicting leading questions. Physicists approach a matter a make conflicting propositions. They compete for the right to speak for the matter. The matter rewards the one who understands the best with a fickle faithfulness.

Interview with a quark

ANT, Ideas

If a physicist could talk directly with a quark to get hints from it that would help the physicist invent new productive theories and experiments, most physicists would get to work scheduling interviews with any quark willing to talk with them.

Unfortunately, this is impossible, so physicists must rely solely on quantitative methods.

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So far physicists have found the material world to be composed of entities that can be taken as identical, so that what is learned from one example of a type can be applied to all other entities of the same type. Entities recognized by physics do not harbor dissenters. Or maybe dissenters exist, but are rare, uninfluential and reducible to noise.

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When we say the entities of physics are identical, do we know what it means? In respect to the interactions we have with these entities — experiments — they behave predictably.

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The periodic table is a segmentation of substances.

A book describing each element is a sort of catalog of personas.

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(This has been an attempt to dance the ANT.)

Walk

Fructivism, Ideas

We cannot directly control our perceptions. We can partly control our attention.

Perceiving is passive; attending is active.

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Relevance does not actually belong to perception. It belongs to attention.

We do not perceive irrelevance in another person’s argument, but, rather, refuse to attend to the argument in a way that reveals its relevance.

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A permanent couch potato, who sits in one spot as if chained in place, cannot tell the difference between the arrangement of his room, and the view from where he sits. To him, they’re the same thing. If he wants a different view, the room must be rearranged.

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“Sitting still is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only peripatetic thoughts have any value.” — Twilight of the Idols

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There’s a distinct feeling associated with dropping intellectual resistance and opening. It is an event that exists independently of agreement, though agreement depends on it entirely. Until agreement begins to form, however, this opening is entirely formless.

It feels exactly like forgiveness.

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Martin Buber, from Between Man and Man:

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by that unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and more than merely stimulating share in the building of a steadfast world of peace only in its own community and not in scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way, to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you” — so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone, ” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.

Meditations on the rough game

Ideas, Judaism, Philosophy

“Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…”

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The difference between simple animal pain and human suffering is the element of perplexity. Pain is mere sensation. If we let pain just be bare pain as the Buddhists advise and refuse to compound that pain with interpretation and conceptualization, we can withstand extreme pain with the dignity of a house pet.

Suffering is pain interpreted as an insight into the human condition, a certain foresight that is actually fore-blindness, an intellectual analogue to the discovery of the ever-present/ever-absent scotoma in our field of vision.

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Philosophers are perverse people who, upon detecting perplexity, instead of evading it like a normal person, go straight into it, and through it, in order to come out on the other side of it with something deeper and more comprehensive.

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There is nothing more natural than to detest philosophy. Without this natural impulse there would be no culture because there would be no stability.

But when stability is not advantageous, and deep disruption desired, nobody is better for the job than a philosopher. A philosopher will rip down a system of thought and replace it with another that was inconceivable while the old system reigned.

That’s why once a satisfactory system is put in place, the philosopher who established it should be given the post-war Churchill treatment.

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The best simple insight I’ve heard in the last year is that chaos is not the vacuum of order, but the simultaneous existence of far too many orders.

In respect to the genesis of a world, there is no ex nihilo.

The particular is articulated from infinite mess, speaking metaphysical perspective is chaos, and experientially, perplexity. To be philosophical is to willingly return to that mess and to allow it to re-articulate differently (for the sake of who knows what).

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Innovation is rough. That is why it rarely really happens.

People who want to invent without destroying have no choice than to be trivial.

 

“I don’t know my way about.”

Ideas, Philosophy

We will re-engineer something a thousand times before we will re-think it.

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We never have time to think, because we have so much to do. We have so much to do, because we never take time to think.

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We refuse to think about what we find difficult to think about.

Q: What makes something difficult to think about?

A: When rethought is required before a problem can be thought at all.

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When something is easy to think about, we will think it with boundless energy. We will happily overthink when overthinking is easy.

We will continue to overthink it especially when this thinking stops working.

The less effective our line of thought becomes the more rigorously we think it.

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In an attempt to make ourselves understood to someone who does not know English, we will sometimes speak English more and more loudly.

Likewise, in an attempt to solve a problem with an unsuitable approach, we will often apply that approach with greater and greater rigor.

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But isn’t thought just following the consequences of observed reality to its logical conclusion?

This belief is known as “naive realism” by those who know better, and “objectivity” by those savvy characters who know better than to listen to those who know better.

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Between thought and rethought is a gap of perplexity, where we become so disoriented we can’t even produce questions, much less answers.

This gap is painful to everyone, and intolerable to all but a few perverse, marginalized souls who live to cross it.

The way across perplexity is the practice of philosophy.

Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'”

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Part of me hates to say any of this out loud: As soon as people intuit philosophy’s true value they will have to recast themselves as philosophers. Everyone will compete to be the most philosophical philosopher, and due to the peculiar nature of philosophy, everyone will achieve this status. (Few will realize victory is guaranteed, since every profound insight is the final and greatest insight, and everything that is not subsumed by it is irrelevant.) The world will overflow with philosophers, and all anyone will talk about is philosophy. Then the fad will end, and philosophy will be shown to have made little difference.

On Justification

ANT, Ideas

Two reasons I am glad to have read Luc Boltanski’s On Justification:

  1. I have been looking for something like Boltanski’s Framework for Analyzing the Common Worlds for two years: basically a structure for describing a lifeworld/worldview.
  2. Boltanski’s descriptions of the different political worlds in pure and hybrid form have provided me with a much finer schema for understanding political affinities and differences.

My immediate use for it is in business, in understanding political conflicts and in establishing cohesive hybrid solutions that can serve as a foundation for inside-out brand differentiation.

To me, this system is very similar to Jung’s personality theory of functions and types.

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars –:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

Pain of innovation

Brand, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

The primary obstacle to innovation of every kind is the pain of philosophy, which begins as angst before blooming into perplexity.

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We don’t hate new ideas because they’re new.

We don’t even hate new ideas because they displace beloved old ideas.

We hate new ideas because they require the creation of conceptual vacuum before we can understand them.

A conceptual vacuum is not like empty space. It is empty of articulated order, which means it overflows with everything-at-once. It is chaos.

*

The depth of an idea means: “how much forgetting does it require in order to be understood?”

More depth = more forgetting = more pain.

*

Real innovation is the product of deep thought. That is, it involves forgetting the conventional wisdom of some realm of activity, re-conceiving it, and thinking out the consequences. This alone generates new ideas capable of inspiring people.

But most people have no taste for thinking, much less thinking in depth. They see thinking and doing — and especially creative doing — as opposed. To this sensibility, disciplined thought and research — anything that seems to question or negate can only encumber the creative process, which is understood to be purely positive. So the method is brainstorm the maximum number of ideas possible — very deliberately excluding thought.

What comes from this process is usually large heaps of uninspiring cleverness, which gets translated into forgettable products, services and marketing.

Doing something really different requires a hell of a lot more than ingenuity. It requires the courage to take the preliminary step of “thinking different”, and then the faith to relentlessly execute upon the new thinking. We reject what comes before and after, and pay attention only to the easy middle part.

  • Before: Philosophy
  • Middle: Ideation
  • After: Operationalization

*

The very deepest ideas draw us into the underworld of mind. To grasp them we must cross the river of forgetfulness, and then grope through limbo, without boundary stones, maps, compasses or stars to guide us. If we look back, all is lost. We are trapped in the old life, rooted to the institutional view, pillars of respectability.

*

When we rethink how we think, we gain freedom of movement, first in mind, then in body.

On precision inspiration

Fructivism, Ideas

Design researchers are look for two things: 1) precision inspiration (ideas capable of stimulate great quantities of viable concepts), and 2) criteria for assessing the viability of concepts.

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What is inspiration? Inspiration is what happens when a person’s perspective is shifted and suddenly — miraculously — inconceivable ideas become conceivable, freeing insoluble problems to solve themselves.

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The most reliable source of inspiration is other people.

When one person allows another person to inspire him, he becomes far more capable of inspiring the other.

The exchange of inspiration is the finest, most welcome bond.

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Imagine a brand based on the exchange of inspiration carried out through the medium of design.

What’s it for?

Philosophy

The unification of existence through the establishment of explicit relationships among observed phenomena is the discipline of science.

The unification of existence through the establishment of shared purpose among beings capable of sharing purpose is the discipline of religion.

The unification of existence through participation in one’s community is the discipline of practicality.

The unification of the entirety of existence as one experiences it is the discipline of philosophy.

Some people will “have a philosophy” that is only science, only religion or only practicality, and that is fine.

When arguing with someone, it is helpful to note where they miss, ignore, deny, observe, invent or imagine distinctions.

OPP

ANT, Pragmatism

Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) is going to be a useful concept. From Wikipedia:

Obligatory passage points are a feature of actor-networks, usually associated with the initial (problematization) phase of a translation process. An OPP can be thought of as the narrow end of a funnel, that forces the actors to converge on a certain topic, purpose or question. The OPP thereby becomes a necessary element for the formation of a network and an action program. The OPP thereby mediates all interactions between actors in a network and defines the action program. Obligatory passage points allow for local networks to set up negotiation spaces that allow them a degree of autonomy from the global network of involved actors.

To put it in Jamesian language, the “cash value” of all ideas involved in a social situation transacts at the OPP — for a social scientist, at least, who is interested in accounting for the transpiring of events. Is there any perspective deeper than that? (I’ll leave that question open.)

From, for and within

ANT, Pragmatism

Just as science is not really a body of knowledge on what is true about things, but rather the record of disciplined interactions human beings have with things, with a focus on the patterns that predictably occur when certain conditions are in place… philosophy is not really the truth of how human beings necessarily relate to existence (“the human condition”), but rather the record of individuals (who belong to societies) trying to make coherent and comprehensive sense of their own experience, as defined by what they take to be relevant, which is intimately connected with what that individual wishes to do in the world. Existence might be conceptualized in thingly objective terms, or psychological, intellectual, logical, political, experiential, moral, etc. terms.

And because what people take to be relevant varies from person to person — (and perhaps varies most dramatically between the type who decides to conceptualize his experience versus a type who simply interacts with whatever he encounters) — different people will have different philosophies, which will enable them to interact with the world in some very particular way, perhaps as a scientist or a philosopher, but maybe as a salesperson or a respiratory therapist or a concierge or a politician.

So, both science and philosophy attempt to relate to the whole of reality, but always from, for and within some purpose, outside of which there is nothing but the mystery of the possibility of learning and changing. In any intellectual activity an actor is always someone relating something, whether the emphasis is on the someone or on the something and even if that something is taken to be fellow someone/something actors.

I think my use of this approach to relating myself to existence, which includes as a consideration other people approaching existence differently from myself makes me a pragmatist. Never forget: American Pragmatism was a response to the experience of the Civil War.

Crediting James

ANT, Pragmatism

Graham Harman, from Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics:

We are now amused to think that there used to be two kinds of physics, one for the earth and one for the sky. But it is equally absurd that we still recognize two different kinds of reality: one for hard scientific fact and another for arbitrary social power. What exists is only actants: cars, subways, canoe-varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists, all on the same metaphysical footing.

I’ll say it again: as far as I can tell Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is nothing more than the most radical form of Pragmatism, which has advanced from its humble clean, abstract, conceptual infancy to a truly radical maturity, which for Pragmatism means a dirty, concrete mess of real life observations and real life applications of the understandings so derived. The most radical form of Pragmatism is practical Pragmatism.

The concept of “actant” is an ontology of Jamesian “cash value”, with all (other?) metaphysics (as such) bracketed — not negatively, but positively as something with force of some kind. When Latour uses accounting language — “I am perfectly happy with the resonance of the word [accounting] not only with Garfinkel’s accountability but also with ‘accounting books’, since the weak but essential link of accounting with economics has been one of the most productive, and unlikely, domains of science studies.” — it seems to me that it is precisely this pragmatic cash value inhabits the cells of the ANT spreadsheet. And really, money is a very human thing, and is embedded in the etymology of some of our most exalted words. It seems that extreme love or hatred of wealth seems symptomatic of of an individual’s rejection of being human.

 

Some advice from the past

Ethics

Worth some reflection:

A [crazy person’s] feelings are nearly always essentially right, but her
interpretations of her feelings are nearly always substantially wrong.
She knows what she feels, but not why she feels.

The single worst thing a [sane person] can do is to dismiss an intelligent
[crazy person’s] feelings because her theories on her feelings are ludicrous.
When an intelligent [crazy person] seems stupid or crazy, desperation is the
cause — the magnitude of the need to do something about her feelings is
overwhelming her intellectual integrity.

The more fantastic the explanation, the more serious the situation.

This means that a [sane person] ought to respect a [crazy person’s] feelings as
legitimate, and as something for which he is responsible — but he must
reserve the right to reject the [crazy person’s] explanation of her feelings.
(To openly reject her explanations, however, is rarely a good idea. It
is best to quietly take them with a grain of salt.)

Correlatively, the [crazy person] is far better off not demanding that the [sane person]
accept her explanations of herself. Rather, she should veto his
interpretations — with punishments proportionate to his apparent
wrongness.

If the [crazy person] does continue to demand acceptance of her explanations
and suffers painful consequences for doing so, the [sane person] should expect
even crueler punishments for not putting a stop to her demands. And if
the [sane person] believes her explanations… it’s over.

I’m laughing, but I am not joking.