Category Archives: Philosophy

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’.

Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic

Brand, Hermeneutics, Synesis

Though Nietzsche rarely spoke of Hegel, and when he did he treated him more as a cultural force than a source of valid ideas, it is clear to me, based on my own experience of reading him, that Nietzsche thought dialectically, in the Hegelian sense.

It is undeniable that the Birth of Tragedy has an explicitly dialectical structure, and Nietzsche’s later disavowals of the work centered more on their treatment of Wagner than in the Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic dialectic at the center of the book. Actually, that structure is the key to understanding the apparent self-contradictions that pervade the rest of his work.

Continue reading Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic →

Design thinking

Design, Ethics, Ideas

Design thinking, though slightly more expansive than typical management thinking, still remains within the horizons of utilitarianism. To put it in Hannah Arendt’s language, the designer type still falls within the category homo faber.

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There’s doing what’s always done. Execution.

There’s thinking about doing what’s always done. Management.

There’s rethinking what’s always done in order to find a better way of doing. Design thinking.

There’s rethinking our thinking: how we think about what we do…

There’s rethinking ought: why we do what we do…

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“There are so many days that have not yet broken”

Intimacy

Ethics

Discussing one’s life story, beliefs, hopes and loves over a candle-light dinner is far less intimate than collaborating on a shared practical life problem — which is why most people prefer the former to the latter, and it is also why soul-mates get divorces.

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Without active involvement in the world with others, subjectivity is limited to the self. This is why those who need to cultivate their faith withdraw from practical life.

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The collaborations that most demand intimacy are the ones that cause the most anxiety, and arouse the strongest aggressive impulses. In such cases, whoever is in a position of power will be faced with the temptation to impose his own vision on the situation and force others involved in it to accept it whether they like it or not.

 

Back to ethics

Ethics

Understanding of alterity — the understanding of that which is “not I”, whether it takes the form of intersubjectivity or of objectivity (which is, in my opinion, simply a form of mediated intersubjectivity) — is a crucial matter. However, it is just as crucial not to allow concern for “the Other” to drag a thinker back into the old antithesis of self-vs-other. That line of thought inevitably leads to the modern disease of spasmodically oscillating between the antithetical extremes of autism and borderline.

What each of us must do is relate our own experience as we really experience it (trickier than it sounds!) to that which points beyond it, without slipping from methodological “bracketing” into practical denial, and without sliding outward into self-alienation in the name of service.

This relating/integrating activity, the attempt to conceive what it is that makes knowing and living worthwhile, and considering how to actualize it practically and concretely, not shortsightedly, but in the longest terms possible, which means involving others in that actualization — (this is where alterity enters the scene) — is the practice of ethics.

Below is a series of passages offered as support for ethical remojofication…

Continue reading Back to ethics →

Thoughts on ethics

Ethics, Metaphysics

An ethic supports a particular ethos. Behavior is judged ethically according to the ethos promoted or undermined. Ethics is relative.

Morality transcends ethics, and judges ethos and ethics.

According to this view, it is possible in principle to be ethically immoral by participating in bad ethos.

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Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.

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Some kind of analogue exists here:

ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon

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My three most fundamental ethical principles:

  1. Listen to appeals.
  2. Keep your promises.
  3. Repent when you err.

Best and worst

Ethics

I often find myself recalling Yeats’ famous lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

It seems it is precisely the ones least entitled to it who have the firmest faith in their convictions and the strongest self-confidence? It seems that beyond a certain point of gross ineptitude the Dunning-Kruger effect is actually a competitive advantage.

It seems people are more concerned with whether a leader believes he is right and behaves accordingly than whether it turns out that he was actually right.

Maybe truth serves the same purpose as the trappings of a wedding. What  is decisive is how the bride feels about the wedding — and that is why the dress, and the flowers and the location all have to be just right.

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So what about those who have a strong intellectual conscience and find belief difficult and sometimes impossible? How do we give full justice to reality while maintaining firm enough horizons to act decisively and resolutely — especially when the suspicions of skeptics turn out to be true, again and again? Perhaps having the truth is less important than living according to what truth seems to be. But then we observe the victims of Dunning-Kruger, and we know we cannot choose that path.

Vision and voice

Hermeneutics, History, Judaism

People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.

I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.

Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.

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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.

To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.

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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:

…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.

This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.

We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.

In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.

 

Thoughts on double meanings

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

I’m thinking out loud here, so please forgive the tedium and unclarity. I’m also traveling, and that always messes me up pretty seriously. Just to get these thoughts out, I’m saying what comes to mind and not worrying excessively over how much sense I’m making much less how persuasive I’m being. So there’s even less reason to read this post than there usually is, so I encourage my nonexistent readership to ignore this post with redoubled nonawareness of its existence.

I just finished Ricoeur’s essay “The Problem of Double Meaning” from Conflict of Interpretations and this is my attempt to digest the material. Here is (in slightly streamlined form) the conclusion of the essay:

It seems to me that the conquest of this deliberately and radically analytic level allows us to better understand the relations between the three strategic levels which we have successively occupied. We worked first as exegetes with vast units of discourse, with texts, then as lexical semanticians with the meaning of words, i.e., with names, and then as structural semanticians with semic constellations. Our change of level has not been in vain; it marks an increase in rigor and, if I may say so, in scientific method. … It would be false to say that we have eliminated symbolism; rather, it has ceased to be an enigma, a fascinating and possibly mystifying reality, to the extent that it invites a twofold explanation. It is first of all situated in relation to multiple meaning, which is a question of lexemes and thus of language. In this respect, symbolism in itself possesses nothing remarkable; all words used in ordinary language have more than one meaning. … Thus the illusion that the symbol must be an enigma at the level of words vanishes; instead, the possibility of symbolism is rooted in a function common to all words, in a universal function of language, namely, the ability of lexemes to develop contextual variations. But symbolism is related to discourse in another way as well: it is in discourse and nowhere else that equivocalness exists. Discourse thus constitutes a particular meaning effect: planned ambiguity is the work of certain contexts and, we can now say, of texts, which construct a certain isotopy in order to suggest another isotopy. The transfer of meaning, the metaphor (in the etymological sense of the word), appears again, but this time as a change of isotopy, as the play of multiple, concurrent, superimposed isotopies. [See comment 1 below] The notion of isotopy has thus allowed us to assign the place of metaphor in language with greater precision than (lid the notion of the axis of substitutions…

But then, I ask you, does the philosopher not find his stake in the question at the end of this journey? Can he not legitimately ask why in certain cases discourse cultivates ambiguity? The philosopher’s question can be made more precise: ambiguity, to do what? Or rather, to say what? [See comment 2 below] We are brought back to the essential point here: the closed state of the linguistic universe. To the extent that we delved into the density of language, moved away from its level of manifestation, and progressed toward sublexical units of meaning — to this very extent we realized the closed state of language. [See comment 3 below] The units of meaning elicited by structural analysis signify nothing; they are only combinatory possibilities. They say nothing; they conjoin and disjoin.

There are, then, two ways of accounting for symbolism: by means of what constitutes it and by means of what it attempts to say. What constitutes it demands a structural analysis, and this structural analysis dissipates the “marvel” of symbolism. That is its function and, I would venture to say, its mission; symbolism works with the resources of all language, which in themselves have no mystery.

As for what symbolism attempts to say, this cannot be taught by a structural linguistics; in the coming and going between analysis and synthesis, the going is not the same as the coming. On the return path a problematic emerges which analysis has progressively eliminated. Ruyer has termed it “expressivity,” not in the sense of expressing emotion, that is, in the sense in which the speaker expresses himself, but in the sense in which language expresses something, says something. The emergence of expressivity is conveyed by the heterogeneity between the level of discourse, or level of manifestation, and the level of language, or level of immanence, which alone is accessible to analysis. Lexemes do not exist only for the analysis of semic constellations but also for the synthesis of units of meaning which are understood immediately. [See comment 4 below]

It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes the marvel of language. Greimas puts it very well: “There is perhaps a mystery of language, and this is a question for philosophy; there is no mystery in language.” [See comment 5 below.] I think we too can say that there is no mystery in language; the most poetic, the most “sacred,” symbolism works with the same semic variables as the most banal word in the dictionary. But there is a mystery of language, namely, that language speaks, says something, says something about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly on the level of manifestation, where the equivocalness of being is spoken in the equivocalness of discourse.

Is not philosophy’s task then to ceaselessly reopen, toward the being which is expressed, this discourse which linguistics, due to its method, never ceases to confine within the closed universe of signs and within the purely internal play of their mutual relations?

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COMMENTS:

  1. This accounts for why many Nietzsche scholars miss Nietzsche’s most interesting philosophizing. They discover a single isotopy, which works at the sea-level level of explicit assertions, and they fail to notice the layers of isotopy beneath the argumentation, despite numerous explicit assertions that these levels do exist and ought to be sought.
  2. This is a fascinating question, and it connects directly with why I began to study hermeneutics. I didn’t know how to think about the kind of truth experienced through understanding of symbols.

    The understanding of symbolic works depends entirely on a reader’s ability to recognize in a symbolic form an analogous form which is indicated obliquely. The reasons for oblique indication are numerous, but the most compelling reason is sheer impossibility of direct expression, which means they refer to what we call radically subjective experience. The subjective experiences I’ve encountered are sometimes unprecedented emotional states, a sense of concealed possibility, novel intellectual “moves” (dance imagery is frequently used), and metaphysical noumena of various kinds (which I am reducing to “experiences of”, or what a friend of mine calls “exophany”, but in the spirit of phenomenological method, which means to defy reductionism: I find disbelief and comprehension of metaphysical reality equally impossible.).

    The effectiveness of radically subjective symbols presupposes the existence of subjective experiences the symbols indicate. A peculiarity of many of these experiences is their utter ephemerality. It appears they are remembered very differently from objective facts, over which we have a higher degree of command, and therefore can prefer to such a degree that we wish to deny the existence of anything but objectivity. A fact or image can be summoned from memory at will like a servant who is normally obedient. But a mood or insight or spirit has a mind of its own, and must be recalled in an almost petitionary attitude: we recollect images and facts and try to create conditions upon which the experience can (to use Octavo Paz’s word) condense, almost as if they are offerings or a home made hospitable for a guest. I think this is actually the importance of prayer. We recall a forgotten spirit, in the hope we will be inhabited once again, and that once present, we will not be abandoned.

    Other double meanings (which I prefer not to call symbols) indicate things that could be very easily expressed in objective language, but which are socially prohibited. The reason “that’s what she said” works so well is because of the legacy of sexual taboo, where all the objects and activities associated with sex were veiled in innuendo. Puns are similar; it is the exercise of the facilities involved in symbolization, but connecting banalities. This is the core problem of very clever people: their activities fail to deliver insights, and are performed only to demonstrate skill.

  3. More and more, this is the difference I see between science and philosophy. Science works within a fixed horizon, analyzing and synthesizing within a framework that is presupposed and not treated as problematic, because it is simply taken as reality itself. This does not only apply to scientific paradigms, but to the metaphysic of science itself which appears in most cases to be entirely innocent. Philosophy, however, concerns itself with the horizons, and attempts to transcend their limits, a process which takes place within the very limits to be transcended.

    It is also ethically significant that philosophy attempts to move outside the closed circle of language. More and more, my own conception of evil is bound up with the refusal to acknowledge being beyond one’s own conceptions of reality. One limits reality to that which one is capable of intellectually mastering, which is objective knowledge as framed by one’s own subjective perspective and which excludes the possibility of subjectivities, particularly super-individual forms of subjectivity that threaten to expose individual intellect as an organ of greater scales of intellect, which include at minimum family, culture and language. Evil is rooted in the attempt to make the mind a place of its own, far from that which challenges its absolute sovereignty over its private universe.

  4. This reminds me a lot of a diagram I used to draw to show the relationship between synthesis and concept. Synthesis means “put together”, and I classify systematization of wholes constituted of atomic elements as a type of synthesis. However, the synthesis reflects another order of reality which is concept, which means “take together”. I think this corresponds to a mememe — an indivisible unit of meaning which is spontaneously grasped as a whole, or gestalt (or to say it in nerd, the whole is “grokked”). It might make sense to see the activity of trying to understand as systematizing and resystematizing parts until they are arranged into a form that is recognized by the intuition as a concept, at which point the understanding occurs. I may need to return to this thought, because it really is relevant to design.
  5. I suspect the desire to locate mystery in the words themselves rather than in what the words indicate is one more manifestation of preference for objectivity. The words are fetishized as the locus of the mystery, which is a form of idolatry. Idol, after all is derived from the Greek word eidos ‘form, shape.’ The formula: the ground of reality of which we are made entirely, in which we always participate, but which surpasses us and moves us is impossible to think about in objective terms, and for this reason we reduce it to objective terms. To put it in the language of Martin Buber, the ground of reality is related to in terms of I-Thou, but we reduce it to terms of I-It. And other people, with whom we exist in relationship, as part of the ground — we prefer to relate to them also in terms of I-It — for exactly the same reason. We want to elevate ourselves above participatory relationship which involves and changes us, and instead to look at others across an insulating distance that promises to preserve us inert.

Ricoeur

Hermeneutics, Holarchy

I am beginning to really like Ricoeur:

Let us look once more at the functioning of ordered polysemy, which we considered earlier with field theory at the level of language. Then it was a question of limited polysemy; ordered polysemy is properly a meaning effect produced in discourse. When I speak, I realize only a part of the potential signified; the rest is erased by the total signification of the sentence, which operates as the unit of speaking. But the rest of the semantic possibilities are not canceled; they float around the words as possibilities not completely eliminated. The context thus plays the role of filter; when a single dimension of meaning passes through by means of the play of affinities and reinforcements of all analogous dimensions of other lexical terms, a meaning effect is created which can attain perfect univocity, as in technical languages. It is in this way that we make univocal statements with multivocal words by means of this sorting or screening action of the context. It happens, however, that a sentence is constructed so that it does not succeed in reducing the potential meaning to a monosemic usage but maintains or even creates a rivalry among several ranges of meaning. Discourse can, by various means, realize ambiguity, which thus appears as the combination of a lexical fact — polysemy — and a contextual fact — the possibility allowed to several distinct or even opposed values of a single name to be realized in the same sequence.

I’m picturing this thought as a venn diagram. The first word in a sentence is a vast circle of possible meanings, but as more words are spoken, more huge circles are added to the diagram, and the overlap shrinks. With each word, the overlap is eaten into until the overlap is no more than a point. Or… even better one finds no overlap at all, or multiple convergence points, and the listener/reader is forced to revisit each of the word-circles to see if one has neglected a dimension of meaning which is the key to understanding. This is why, when reading I always read with a dictionary at hand. I do not gloss over unfamiliar words or attempt to grasp the gist of their meaning contextually. It is precisely the unfamiliar words (and the familiar words used in an unfamiliar way) that challenge the assumed context by which one understands.

Coming to understanding something someone says means changing the very context one by which one understands. And, just to make it personal, understanding what someone says is the same as understanding that person. The ability to merely describe repeating behavioral patterns (even if those patterns make a person’s behavior predictable), or even to explain behavior in psychological terms (even if those explanations make people’s behavior in general explicable or even predictable) is not to understand them, but to bypass understanding them as people and instead to understand patterns or explanations. Most people find the latter much much more comfortable, because it fits neatly within an existing understanding, and therefore is a science and not a philosophy.

Seven capacities

Ethics, Ideas, Synesis, Systems thinking

The capacity to describe a situation in all its factual, practical and meaningful dimensions, doing justice to the full experience of the situation is one thing.

The capacity to explain the situation by modeling it as a dynamic with particular causes and effects, inputs and outputs is a second thing.

The capacity to assert an ethic, an meaningful (or emotional) stance toward the situation, which permits evaluation of the situation and its constituent elements, and which orients oneself to the situation is a third thing.

The capacity to envisage an ethic that is not merely a response to a situation, but an independent ideal capable of serving as a positive goal for overcoming an undesirable situation is a fourth thing.

The capacity to discern an ethical vision from an idealized, emotionally-satisfying situational image is a fifth thing.

The capacity to apply an ethical ideal in concrete situations in a way that can, in concrete reality, actually change the facts, dynamics and meanings of the situation from an undesired state to a desired one is a sixth thing.

Finally, the capacity to keep the faith — to cultivate and adhere to a positive ethic — while navigating undesirable situations which compel negative ethical responses which conflict with and threaten to distort or obscure one’s positive ideal is a seventh thing.

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Unfortunately, people do not distinguish these abilities, and the consequences are often disastrous.

Exercise of the first capacity, the ability to empathize, makes people feel understood, and gives them a sense of solidarity with those who share their experience. Exercise of the second capacity, the ability to produce an explanation, makes people feel clear. Exercise of the third capacity, the ability to give someone a feeling of moral orientation toward a problem, makes people feel resolve.

By this point, people stop paying attention to consequences, and begin to simply act for the pleasure of acting with a feeling of solidarity, clarity, and resolve they lacked before. And the action produces all the ideals and images — and eventually, fabricated facts and derivative explanations — to justify, perpetuate and intensify its action.

Every ideology proceeds along this path, winning generic credibility, lower capacities one to create an impression of higher capacities. It all works because all who believe, are invested with the qualities they believe in, and in the belief that these capacities are not only sufficient, but comprehensive.

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This line of thought is similar to the one behind my criticism of the Peter Principle.

To put it simply: We tend to flatten qualitative difference into quantitative degree.

This tendency reduces greatness into double-plus goodness, genius into double-plus smartness, leadership into double-plus administrative competence, etc.

Real difference means we actually need each other’s strengths in order to develop our own and to apply them to greatest effect.

Explaining away

Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Worldviews include within them accounts of alien worldviews held by others. These accounts sometimes also include reasons for why these alien worldviews are invalid and do not require consideration and understanding.

Such invalidating accounts protect one’s worldview from the consequences of understanding rival worldviews and experiencing their validity. It is as if worldviews have life of their own that they preserve as biological organisms do, protecting their outer skin, taking in only that which it can digest and incorporate and repelling everything else.

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Monism, the belief that there is a singular and ultimate truth to be found, inclines people to assume that if something appears self-evidently true, that whatever appears to conflict with it is necessarily false. It is the casual and mostly unconscious tendency of people who have never experienced a shift in worldviews. But those who have experienced a single shift are the fiercest adherents of monism, because they’ve experienced this shift as a conversion from a world of illusion to one of overwhelming truth, which is taken as a discovery of the true world. This discovery is not experienced as the acquisition of new facts about the world, but as a transfiguration of the world itself. The experience is so deep and so dramatic (and pleasant) that is often fails to occur to the convert that the process could occur again, re-transfiguring the transfigured, so the convert fails to look for clues that this is the case. If it does, another conversion is likely to occur: from monism to pluralism.

Pluralism lives on practical terms with the properties of worldviews — the fact that they have “horizons” of intelligibility (which can be characterized as the set of questions the worldview knows how to ask), that they project specific patterns of relevance and irrelevance onto phenomena and fact, that the perspective by which the worldview sees always appears absolute and self-evidently right, and most importantly that worldviews naturally and perhaps inevitably generate misunderstandings which can only be detected with effort.

Consequently, a pluralist always harbors a certain amount of suspicion even toward pluralism, which inclines a pluralist to respect even monistic views, and to attempt to learn from them. But again, pluralism is practical, which means it lives on terms with reality as it experiences it, with the understanding that the surprise of transcendence is a permanent possibility, and that there is no way to predict when such events will occur and what will result from them. Pluralism, unlike skepticism, doesn’t throw up its hands, saying “what can I know?” It doesn’t think of learning as a means to the end of final knowledge. (Arendt identified orientation toward means-and-ends as belonging to the middle stratum of active life, which she called “work”, whose primary activity is the fabrication of artifacts. The stratum above work is “action”, the realm of politics which both presupposes and preserves pluralistic conditions. See Arendt quote below.) What matters, rather, is the desire for particular kinds of knowledge, which signals the next intellectual development, both for individuals and groups of people.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life. … Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.