Category Archives: Philosophy

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).

*

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.

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

More depth = more forgetting = more pain.

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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

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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.

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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.

Theory-choice

Fructivism, Ideas

Kuhn’s criteria for theory-choice:

Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation.

Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories.

Broad Scope – a theory’s consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain.

Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam’s Razor.

Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena.

But as Mitch Hedberg said, “There’s more to it than that!” Here are some additions, and I believe there are even more:

Meaningful – the theory’s compatibility with the theorist’s grounding orientation to life.

Contiguous – the theory’s capacity to integrate with an existing body of theory.

Intelligible – the theory situates the theorist in a world whose relevant features are intelligible.

Congenial – a theory should employ the theorist’s cognitive natural/acquired intellectual strengths.

Social – a theory’s reinforcing affirmation by a community with whom the theorist identifies, or, antithetically, it’s reinforcing rejection by a community against whom the theorist has defined himself.

Applicable – the existence of opportunities to use the theory practically and to develop the tacit intellectual practices (know-how) inherent in all practical application of theory

Concrete – the number of concrete examples available to 1) explicit demonstrate how the theory is practically applied and 2) to demonstrate its applicability

Spontaneous – a theory’s ability to shed conscious interpretation and to disappear into the phenomena themselves.

Do you consider yourself ‘broken’?

Biography, Ethics

From the Asphodel blog:

Question: “Do you consider yourself ‘broken’? What does broken mean to you?”

Response:

Until March of this year, I did. I was.

Until May, in fact, I was still in deep torpor of pain from it, but, looking back I can see where the cries became something more like “this hurts so much” than “I just want to die fuck me fuck you fuck life kill it all drown it in the boiling shit it loves so much”……

My will was broken – I was ready to accept antidepressants and keeping my head down as a new way of life – I wanted nothing more than to disappear into bed and sigh away the rest of my life thinking about how unfair and wretched people are, what liars they are, what a waste human flesh is. My capacity to love was broken, had been for a year or so.

I can’t really be certain what changed, precisely, but I healed. I’m scarred. It’s stronger and my emotions, though still extreme and dynamic, are smarter for it.

In my lexicon, a broken person is traumatized past the point of being productive (pleasing and useful to one’s self; CF below) and has given up on being pleased by living. Failure does it – the failure of love, personal failure, professional / artistic failure of the essential mode of existence that gives purpose to human existence can break us. Some recover, some do not.

Someone who has not ventured a great attempt is not broken, though.

Strength is a bizarre thing; it can’t be assessed from a distant vantage. Human strength, spiritual / emotional / personal strength, is subtly different from ‘fortitude’ (endurance of suffering or loss) and ‘power’ (the ability to effect change) yet it incorporates those qualities – and strength can certainly come from having been broken. In any case, no one can be certain of their strength until the threat of being broken has been faced. It’s far worse than anything I’ve experienced otherwise. My back broke in 2005; that causes me sometimes excruciating pain and it certainly takes a great deal of my strength to cope with it every day, but I do, and the awareness that I can makes me aware of what I’m capable of, and shows me why I was successful at this&that endeavor as a younger person: it wasn’t just drive, or charisma, or natural ability that made things happen; it was centrally and most importantly the willingness to risk being broken that made good things occur in my life.

Far worse than my back breaking was the surprise divorce sprung on me by a woman I trusted, cherished, and adored. It would be an even longer response to go into much detail there, but I was so devastated that I – a moody and occasionally very dark person to begin with – reached a new low of personal strength. My spine breaking was truly nothing compared to the horror and pain that gave me.

That, too, scarred me deeply. The scars are stronger than the unbroken heart was, and there’s no question that I lost something bright and vital then – but maybe it’s something I needed to lose. My heart is smarter now. My core is not nearly as likely to be threatened, and so my usefulness and my ability to please others (thus myself) is not as weak, not as ephemeral as it was before.

So much I want to relate. I’ll have to think about it. For days, most likely.

I thank you deeply for the question, because answering it makes me consciously aware of it and more comfortable with it. I feel more able to take on the rest of the risks I’m facing, now, in the understanding that if I become broken again I won’t be as likely to just crumble and moan over it, wasting precious life on misery spent obsessed with ugliness and loss. I’ll remind myself to keep aware of this response and to live up to it.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism

ANT, Pragmatism, Synesis

Extending my post from a couple of days ago, “ANT = Practical pragmatism”:

When you are temperamentally theoretical, it is tempting to stop at theorizing about practice, and never to practice anything but theorizing.

When pragmatism begins to apply its insights to practice — that is, to a study specific situation with an aim to understand it in pragmatic terms (which will always turn up unexpected theoretical problems which must be resolved) — pragmatism becomes Actor-network theory.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism.

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As an experience researcher and strategist, this passage from Latour is galvanizing, because it articulates what I do, and what I’ve had great difficulty communicating to clients and colleagues who still live in an essentially objective world inhabited by opinionated, emotional and behaving subjects:

Even once reality has fully set in, the question of its unity is still pending. The common world has still to be collected and composed. As we shall see at the end of this book, this is where the social sciences may regain the political relevance that they seem to have lost by abandoning the ether of the social and the automated use of the critical repertoire that it allowed.

That idea of “collecting and composing” a shared understanding of the world is what I’ve called synesis. I believe this involves a mode of thinking which goes beyond the algorithmic ideal of business thought into the specifically philosophical mode of intuitive thinking, dialectic.

Then things can be taken even further by modifying the network through the act of design. Maybe this is the best definition of design: intentional modification of actor-networks?

 

 

Anthropology = empirical metaphysics

Anthropology, Hermeneutics, Synesis

From Reassembling the Social:

What ANT does is that it keeps asking the following question: Since every sociologist loads things into social ties to give them enough weight to account for their durability and extension, why not do this explicitly instead of doing it on the sly? Its slogan, ‘Follow the actors’, becomes, ‘Follow the actors in their weaving through things they have added to social skills so as to render more durable the constantly shifting interactions.’

It’s at this point that the real contrast between sociology of associations and sociology of the social will be most clearly visible. So far, I might have exaggerated the differences between the two viewpoints. After all, many schools of social science might accept the two first uncertainties as their departure point (especially anthropology, which is another name for empirical metaphysics)…

Fighting words from Latour

Phenomenology

From Reassembling the Social:

…Sociology has been embarrassed … by the prejudice that there exists a privileged locus in the social domain where action is ‘concrete’: ‘parole’ more than ‘langue’, ‘event’ more than ‘structure’, ‘micro’ more than ‘macro’, ‘individual’ more than ‘masses’, ‘interaction’ more than ‘society’, or, on the contrary, ‘classes’ more than ‘individual’, ‘meaning’ more than ‘force’, ‘practice’ more than ‘theory’, ‘corporate bodies’ more than ‘persons’, and so on. But if action is dislocal, it does not pertain to any specific site; it is distributed, variegated, multiple, dislocated and remains a puzzle for the analysts as well as for the actors.

This point will help to not confuse ANT with one of the many polemical movements that have appealed to the ‘concreteness’ of the human individual with its meaningful, interacting, and intentional action against the cold, anonymous, and abstract effects of the ‘determination by social structures’, or that has ignored the meaningful lived world of individual humans for a ‘cold anonymous technical manipulation’ by matter. Most often inspired by phenomenology, these reform movements have inherited all its defects: they are unable to imagine a metaphysics in which there would be other real agencies than those with intentional humans, or worse, they oppose human action with the mere ‘material effect’ of natural objects which, as they say, have ‘no agency’ but only ‘behavior’. But an ‘interpretative’ sociology is just as much a sociology of the social than any of the ‘objectivist’ or ‘positivist’ versions it wishes to replace. It believes that certain types of agencies — persons, intention, feeling, work, face-to-face interaction — will automatically bring life, richness, and ‘humanity’.