Category Archives: Philosophy

Finished The Human Condition

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

  • That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
  • Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
  • That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
  • That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
  • That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

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Embracing blame

Ethics

An active, blameworthy life is worth more than a life dominated by the avoidance of blame.

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Anaximander’s Maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

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Arendt, from The Human Condition:

… Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relation- ships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

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Humanity is a choice. Dignity acknowledges this choice; respect actualizes it.

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To be human is to resist automatism. Automatism comes from two sides, 1) the artificial (the demands of life in society) and 2) from the natural (the impulses of our own animal nature). Humanity lives between.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was both artificial and natural. The social context was artificial, but it all played out naturally.

Infinity

Ethics

The infinite is not definable, for the very reason that once something is defined it has been bestowed edges and separated out from infinity.

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One way to indicate infinity is to create a set that includes every possible discrete — defined — entity. This indication, however, misleads, because it falsely implies that zero precedes infinity and that infinity is somehow built upon it. But zero implies the absence of something. A something must be defined in order to exist as something other than a stretch of infinity — and in order for there to be a quantity of something, that something must understood as an instance of a category of which there can be instances. Only after Zero is a third-order entity derived from abstractions and subdivisions of infinity, not a metaphysical starting-point.

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To relate to that which is finite as if it is infinite, or to relate to that which is infinite as if it is finite may very well be the root of evil. Two points to consider: 1) The human mind can only possess and master that which is finite. 2) Every human being contains something of one’s own, possessed by no other human being, and therefore, in respect to another, contains a speck of infinity.

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Other human beings are unacceptable to us to the degree they are alien to us. The infinite contains everything that is us and everything that is alien and it holds them together in an inescapable but deniable unity.

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Levinas: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Proud not to be right

Ethics, Pragmatism

It is easy to see how we are right. It is much more challenging — morally and intellectually — to see how we are not right, or less right than we wish to be.

To see ourselves as right, all we have to do is point our eyes at things, take them in passively in our usual way, and see what we always see.

To see where we are not fully right (or where others who disagree with us are right), we have to attempt to see in new, less familiar ways. To be sure, it requires a certain degree of ingenuity and inventiveness to discover new possibilities of understanding. And of course, it requires humility — preferring being right to merely feeling right. But most of all it requires courage. One must endure temporary but intensely uncomfortable strangeness, resist the constant urge to turn back and retreat to the familiar, and persevere until understanding has been reached. Only through this kind of struggle can a person make considered comparisons based on real insight that addresses an audience wider than those who already see as we see and ditto our opinions.

But it is worth it. The reward is growth and humanity.

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People who already know everything are unable to learn. To them, that of which they ignorant is nonexistent. Why would we learn about things that are nonexistent and unreal?

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Few of us believe we know every fact in the world. We can sense the gaps in our knowledge, and are open to filling those gaps with new information, if that information is understood to be relevant.

The same is true for skills. Most of us can see where are practical lives can be improved by learning new skills. We are open to learning new methods or techniques for solving problems we face, if these methods are understood to be important to our success.

What is much rarer is seeing the need for improving one’s own worldview. The reason? Because one’s worldview determines what is perceived as relevant and important. From the perspective of an isolated individual (whether of an individual or a like-minded collective), one’s worldview is the world itself. It requires belief in intelligence beyond one’s own sphere of intelligibility to see any reason to even consider worldview.

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Most people equate education with the acquiring of facts and skills. Through this process we prepare students for the realities of life. The need for this is well-established, and what else is there to learn?

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If you think about the worst problems facing humankind, what is their nature? Are they a matter of lacking facts? Or lacking people with the technical skills to resolve them? Or are they the result of people who have no idea how to come to a mutual understanding?

Analytic dialectic and synthetic dialectic

Ideas, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Two forms of dialectic can be distinguished. They have different characters and different trajectories.

Synthetic dialectic moves toward monism.

  • Synthetic dialectic is reductionistic.
  • Its method  is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which preserve irrelevant, complicating and inhibiting distinctions.
  • Synthetic dialectic has a passionate and destructive character. It tends to destroy complex structure and release energy.
  • Synthetic dialectic tends to decrease the total number of categories as well as the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting these categories, while increasing the scope of the remaining categories.
  • Synthetic dialectic is experienced as liberation from de-centering illusions — oppressive notions that alienate a person from himself, prevent him from living according to his own experience and judgment, and which oblige him to live according to the experiences and judgments of others.
  • The thrust of synthetic dialectic is to detect the irrelevance and invalidity of alien claims and to reject them on that basis.
  • Whether idealistic or materialistic, synthetic dialectic attempts to finally subsume all being under a single, universal ontological category, or a monad. This category is understood to be basis of truth. Thinking from other bases is at best provisional and at worst, false.
  • Synthetic dialectic can appear absolutist, and often succumbs to absolutism.
  • Synthetic dialectic strengthens the will, but weakens the intellect.
  • Synthetic dialectic synthesizes — “puts together” — broader, more universal categories. Fewer and fewer particularities are perceived in their particularity, but are taken as generalities, types or manifested principles and are treated according to their abstract intelligible character. Anomalous particularities are disregarded as irrelevant.

Analytic dialectic moves toward pluralism.

  • Analytic dialectic is antireductionistic.
  • Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which project unnecessary, simplistic and unproductive equivalencies.
  • Analytic dialectic has a moderating and constructive character. It tends to consume energy generating structures of increasing complexity.
  • Analytic dialectic tends to increase the total number of categories and the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting them, while decreasing the scope of each categories.
  • Analytic dialectic discovers diversity within apparent equivalency. It looks for failures to detect relevant distinctions made by other people, due to the crudeness of one’s own schema. It discovers both new distinctions and new, valid, obligating claims from others.
  • The thrust of analytic dialectic is to detect the relevance and validity of alien claims and to affirm them.
  • Analytic dialectic attempts to understand multiple, overlapping ontological existences in all being, which permits the understanding of diverse, valid and finite perspectives. The ground of being is understood as an engulfing infinity, to which human beings relate in finite terms.
  • Analytic dialectic can appear relativist, and often succumbs to relativism.
  • Analytic dialectic strengthens the intellect, but weakens the will.
  • Analytic dialectic scrutinizes broad, universal categories and analyzes — “loosens them up” — into finer categorizations more capable of doing justice to “particularities in their particularity”. Particularities are still treated according to their intelligible character, but intelligibility is obligated to answer to the truth of particulars and to accommodate them.

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Both forms of dialectic are necessary to human life. Neither is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. The question is one of context and dynamic balance.

Vision management

Design, Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

To be assigned responsibility for something is almost synonymous with taking care of all the details of some work activity or work product. But rarely is anyone assigned responsibility for maintaining the vision of the whole in the execution of the parts.

A management truism applies: “If nobody is responsible for getting a job done, it won’t get done.”

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If you suggest that vision needs to be managed apart from the details many people will dismiss the thought on the grounds that once you’ve conceived an idea (in the form of a strategy or a concept), and developed a plan to execute it, the whole is contained in the details.

This is untrue.

It only seems that way because the majority of businesspeople are intellectually blind to wholeness. It isn’t that they can’t feel the difference between a whole and a fragmented mess — it’s just that they don’t know how to think about the problem and prefer to ignore it. We let wholes slide, because it’s hard to bust someone for neglecting a whole. It feels very… subjective. Parts are objective, so that’s where we focus.

But ignoring wholes is what makes so many companies competent but mediocre.

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Philosophies have practical consequences, even when we are not aware we hold any philosophy at all. As Bob Dylan said: “It might be the devil / or it might be the Lord / but you’ve gotta serve somebody.” Actually, it is especially when we are unaware it that a philosophy’s influence is strongest, determining our thoughts, perceptions and action.

One philosophy 95% of people in the modern world believe without knowing it, which they have unconsciously absorbed through cultural osmosis and accepted unquestioningly, is atomism.

According to atomism, wholes are made entirely out of parts. Once all the parts are accounted for, the whole is accounted for as well. In other words, wholes are reducible to parts.

Holism asserts that wholes have an existence independent of their particular constitution (of parts). Some holists say that wholes are what give meaning to parts, and that parts deprived of the context of a whole are inconceivable. Reductionistic holists go as far as to claim that all we have is wholes which have been artificially or arbitrarily divided up into parts.

I’m against reductionism on principle. I think wholes have one kind of being, and parts have another kind of being, and that human beings find life most satisfying when wholes and parts are made to converge.

And my philosophy has practical consequences: wholes need management as much as parts do. And when you do not explicitly manage a wholes the parts will overpower, degrade and smother the whole.

This happens to products, to initiatives, and to organizations.

We forget wholes, mostly because we don’t understand what they are and how they work.

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Inevitably and automatically, if allowed to develop by their own logic, parts diverge from the whole.

Parts tend to work themselves out according to the most local conditions, governed more by expedience, habit and myopia than by the guidance of vision. This type of localized logic is made of very crude forces and very tangible considerations.

Envisaged wholes are more fragile, at least at the beginning, before they are firmly established. They must be protected from the roughness of localized logic, like as we fence off sprouts and saplings until they’ve established themselves and no longer need protection.

Envisaged wholes (especially unprecedented wholes) are vulnerable in three specific ways. They are essentially inchoate, elusive, ephemeral .

  1. Envisaged wholes are essentially inchoate. — We tend to think of vision as being the envisioning of a whole, a detailed picturing of some possible reality. That is not how it happens. Vision is sensing a possibility. Some of the possibility is given in broad outline, and some of it is given in arbitrary detail, but most of it is simply latent in a situation, there but inaccessible to the imagination. As the situation develops under guidance of the vision, the development is recognized as conforming or deviating from the vision. But what is strange is that the vision itself is affected by the recognition. The vision understands itself, reflected in the concrete attempts to actualize it, in a dialogical process of revelation. This is why visions are not directly translatable into plans. The plan must accommodate and support the development of the vision, or it is only a recipe for sterility.
  2. Envisaged wholes are elusive. — While virtually all people are capable of recognizing and categorizing objects, and virtually every professional is capable of grasping processes and plans, relatively few are able to understand or conceive concepts, even after they have been clarified and articulated. An envisaged whole gains concreteness, clarity and general accessibility in the course of its development, and as it does it comes into view of more and more people. In its early stages, though, the fact of its existence, much less its nature will be far from obvious, and completely beyond the grasp of most people. Those with firsthand experience with vision know this process. Those who don’t either operate by faith and support the process or they undermine it, or they create conditions where vision doesn’t even happen. (In many organization, the wholes are determined solely by leadership; but leadership is earned through success in managing details. The result: the only people able to earn the right to set vision are precisely the ones with absolutely no awareness of vision. They try to provide their organizations with “vision”, but all they know how to come up with are ambitions, metrics, and plans to accomplish what’s been done before.)
  3. Envisaged wholes are ephemeral. — Because of how they are known, envisaged wholes are very easily corrupted and forgotten. They are revealed in dialogue with concrete actualization. The vision tries to respond to the actualization. If the actualization is not responsive to the vision and moves away from it far enough, the vision will lose not only its hold on the process, it will get caught up in the localized logic of the development and lose itself altogether. This is what is meant by getting “too close to the situation”. The vision holder must maintain the right balance of contact with the situation — close enough to guide it, but far enough from it to see when the development has begun to go off-track. When nobody is permitted the distance, and everyone is required to roll up their sleeves and get mired in the details, the vision’s chances of survival are nil. The problem is not with the vision, nor with the visionary, but with the absence of conditions necessary for maintaining vision.

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The captain of a ship, after charting the ship’s course and pointing it in the right direction, went below deck and grabbed an oar.

Generative thoughts

Biography, Hermeneutics

My favorite books are nearly impossible to read, because they cause me to have so many of my own thoughts.

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An insight is a generative thought: an idea that produces ideas.

An insight is impossible to speak about directly. It can only be observed, but not empirically in the usual sense. What is observed is intellectual behavior. This kind of observation takes the form of following a thought. It is an intellectual participatory observation.

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A very strange reading experience:

  1. At the beginning of the book the author sets a painful and apparently irresolvable problem.
  2. Then the author shifts his attention to a second, different problem. He approaches it from several angles, and resolves it several ways. Each angle sets off an explosion of original thoughts. It is hard for the reader to get through the book. (And some of the explosions reverberate into the reader’s own past and future, and change the meanings of things in unexpectable ways.)
  3. Then toward the end of the book the author shifts back to the original problem. The reader is shocked to find himself reading the very thoughts he’d conceived earlier, sometimes worded almost identically. It is as if the author made the reader think his thoughts (and in profound cases, even feel his feelings).

What is going on here? My explanation:

The author has presented a problem the reader does not know how to think out. His mind lacks the movements necessary to resolve it, and it leaves him with a sort of knot in the mind.

Through the explorations of the second problem, his mind learns to produce the necessary movements. (“The dance.”) Once the reader has acquired the means to resolve the first problem himself, the resolvability somehow causes the mind to recall and solve the problems almost effortlessly. This causes the eruption of thoughts.

Then the author “winks” and indicates what has happened by showing his own resolutions by the same method. This phenomenon is itself theoretically, practically and ethically problematic, and it has been the obsession of many fine minds.

Worldviews

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.

What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.

“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”

The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)

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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)

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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.

The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.

In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.

Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.

  • Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
  • Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
  • Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.

Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.

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  • Note to nerds:

What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.

Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of  one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.

Inconceivable dimension

Fructivism, Ideas

Last week I had an unusual number of conversations with artists about the nature of art. I want to try to summarize what I understand about the being of a (romantic) artist, based on what I took from these conversations.

For a variety of reason, artists today are necessarily romantic artists. Romantic artists attempt to create outside of what already is, as opposed to affirming or revitalizing the culture to which they belong as members. There is no vital high culture left to preserve in our time. Even so-called conservatives invent by reanimating formal corpses with newish notions through the black magic of revisionism.There is just flat, sea-level philistinism: discrete, mutually exclusive working hard and playing hard. Nobody’s going to exert for anything that won’t earn him a dollar.

Romantic artists are cultural mutants. They have mutated individuality; they developed differently as individuals and have a different conception of what individuality is. They do individualism differently. Certainly this mutated individuality/individualism can give them a conspicuously different appearance (which is all most people perceive) but the more essential difference is imperceptible: Artists inhabit mutated worlds. And they inhabit these worlds partially or entirely alone.

So far, what I’ve described includes romantic artists, but it also includes visionaries of all kinds. A romantic artist is a visionary who responds to his vision by creating cultural artifacts that affirm and reinforce his vision. This occurs both through the practice of creative activity (by which he lives differently), and through the artifact (by which he establishes a more meaningfully-orienting environment). What is lacking at the start, — with genuine romantic artists, invariably — which philistines are incapable of imagining, is what it is like to be the solitary member of a culture. Cultures are shared. An unshared culture is a psychic vacuum, and that vacuum is the profoundest loneliness, which crushes proportionally to its difference, and threatens the survival of the mutant. Very, very few cultural mutants survive, much less reproduce their vision, much less change the nature of human-being.

Regarding mere survival: everything that threatens the continuous activity of the artist (that is imposes displacing, depressing and exhausting alien tasks) or imposes environmental disorientation on the artist threatens his particular cultural existence, if not his biological existence. And since an artist identifies more with his particular cultural existence than even with his biological being, this threat reaches beyond individual death to the extinction of one’s own species.

I am assuming what I mean by “inhabiting a world” (as opposed to perceiving the world) is pretty obvious to anyone for whom this line of thought is relevant. In case it isn’t, here is a mythical evolutionary analogy. Imagine the first appearance of eyes in an eyeless species. That first eyed mutant probably looked pretty strange, not that anything else was around to see it. But what was much stranger was what happened to its existence as a result of the acquisition of the faculty of sight. This organism lived a visual existence in a visible world unlike that of anything that preceded it. Its world deepened in an extra inconceivable dimension.

* Adolescent rant…

Continue reading Inconceivable dimension →

Business philosophy

Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

Philosophy asks: What purely intellectual factors constricting our options?

What assumptions possess our minds and make matters that could be otherwise and better seem absolute and eternal?

Where is our customary perspective hiding relevant clues from us that would be revealed as relevant if we looked at our situation from a different vantage point?

Where are we justifying our actions with explanations that do not actually do justice to those forces that really impel us?

How are we imposing habitual modes of thought on problems that call for different modes, which we would use if we “knew the moves”?

Where are our life practices depriving us of the inner resources or outer conditions necessary to concretely experience alternatives to how-things-are?

Where are our hasty answers concealing questions that need asking?

Where are our hasty formulations of questions concealing more fruitful question to ask?

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At this point in history it is embarrassing (quaint, pompous, ludicrous, and many other unpleasant things) to call yourself a philosopher in a business setting. Nonetheless, I still aspire one day to have a business card with the title “philosopher” printed on it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. Think about it: If philosophy helps ask and answer the questions I listed above, wouldn’t a business with at least one philosopher on staff have a pretty serious competitive advantage? The answer I’d anticipate is: “by having philosophical people on staff.” But what about that popular management principle that “if you don’t assign it to a person it doesn’t get done”? In my experience, that is exactly the case. Businesses tend to run around like chickens in chalk-line circles, for no reason other than failure to ask if the lines can be redrawn… or erased.. or even just stepped over. Why? They take the chalk-lines as the moral or practical limits of valid activity, and see the problem in terms of how the business is running.

To be seen and not heard

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Politics, Synesis

“You are to be seen and not heard.” This means: you are to be an object, not a subject.

Whatever needs knowing about an object can be known through observation. An object belongs to a world, but a world does not belong to it.

A subject, however, while belonging to the world also has a world that belongs to him. A subject looks back.

Consider the etymology of the word “respect”.

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There is no way to understand a particular subjectivity as such objectively.

One only understands subjectivity by engaging subjectively. One attempts to share the other’s world as the other views it, which means one involves oneself. One learns from the other. In the process, one’s own view of the world changes, and that means one’s own subjectivity changes. The other’s view of the world changes, too.

In an interview two separated views converge and merge into an inter-view.

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Behavior is an objective consequence of subjectivity. The odd thing about behavior: in the end it is phenomenal, and it can be taken as a mode of speech and heard along with the other’s voice, or it can be stripped away from the other and subsumed entirely by one’s own world and simply observed. Even speech can be viewed as behavior, or as mere sound. One can explain an other away or one can illuminate an other’s own self-explanation and understand.

Hermeneutics is hearing. The-hermeneutic-of-such-and-such is resistance to hearing: aggressive mishearing.

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The most immediate and convincing evidence of otherness is dialectic.

Iridescent irritants

Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics, Phenomenology

Some random notes on the inner topology of oysters…

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A pearl is an inside-out oyster shell.

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An oyster coats the ocean with mother-of-pearl.

Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean.

Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is slimy oyster-flesh, ceaselessly coating everything it isn’t with mother-of-pearl.

It is as if the flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — “father-of-pearl”.

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Every pearl is an iridescent tomb with an irritant sealed inside. We love the luster of the outer coat, but inside is what was once known as filth.

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We could also think of the oyster shell as the fortress walls and the pearl as a prison cell.

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We make pearls of what is Other, then love what we’ve made of the Other, which is ourselves.

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We love our misunderstandings. We never cut into what we love with critique. Inside is just a grain or a fragment, of interest only to other grains and fragments.

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Sometimes an alien bit of beyond gets inside one’s horizon, but it can always be explained.

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Imagine Pandora’s box as a pearl turned outside-side in upon its being opened, and Eden as an oyster’s interior turned inside-out into a pearl with Adam’s eviction.

Diagram du jour

Ideas, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Taoism

This is pretty much a paraphrasing of what I’m always saying, one way or another, but I think it’s a relatively clear one. What I’m trying to do is to classify the different modes of understanding available to us to help us relate and unify our experience. In this diagram the darker, outer circles of why, how and what are the space in which we can feel the relevance of a problem and pursue understanding; the brighter inner circles of the venn diagram are the successful resolution of a problem through the exercise of various modes of understanding. At the center is totality as (as I believe) Levinas uses it, though without the moral overtones.

My view is that most us overemphasize episteme (the type of knowledge by which we comprehend objects), if we recognize the other forms of understanding at all. Even when we do, we tend to reduce them to the terms of episteme. In my view, sophia and phronesis are felt and responded, to aptly or not, according to the degree of one’s understanding. One’s ability to articulate the understanding has much less to do than with one’s ability to relate and respond (verbally or not) by the terms of and to the ends set by the understanding. Sophia and phronesis are essentially tacit forms of knowledge, which can find articulations, but precedes and exceeds the articulation of language.

These diagrams are the attempts of my own episteme to relate to the other faculties within my soul. And when I find myself caring about the form and content of these diagrams and then later catch myself working naturally according to the principles I’m attempting to show, I experience wholeness of purpose and coherence in the world. And if others experience my diagrams this way — or show me how I can improve them, or convince me that I ought to destroy them — I feel the potential of the world to be a home.

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I’m always looking for structures, but not because I think the structure is already there to be discovered. It’s because I think sanity requires these kinds of structures. I am perfectly willing to project a structure onto reality as if it is already in it, and see it there afterward. These structures are not tools I employ to help me see; they’re understanding itself, by which I see.

I’m enough of a skeptic that I do not care if a model is a discovery or an invention. What matters is that it is experienced as a discovery, and that the structure clings to my vision as if it is part of what I see, not a feature of my sight.

Subject-object

Metaphysics, Phenomenology

Our minds grasp only that which is objective in form. What concerns us most, though, is subjective in form. This fundamental agony of being is the root of the best and worst religion.

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An object is that which exists side-by-side among other entities.

A subject is one who participates in a whole that wholly includes and exceeds himself.

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A person: a subject and object, who relates as an object or subject to objects and subjects.

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Both the objective and the subjective are violently reducible to the the terms of the other. One can inhabit a radically subjective world of extensionless phenomena. One can also inhabit a radically objective world as a being with emergent consciousness. Why, though?

Chains

Ideas, Pragmatism

“Dancing in chains. — With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that which we call ‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter. ‘Dancing in chains’, making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance: and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.” – Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

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Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.

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Most of us expect to build up to something compelling (usually some negatively conceived happiness — the absence of what we think is preventing happiness) through faithful observance of constraints. Or we think that if happiness hasn’t occurred, it’s because of some oversight. We start from the ground and aggregate upward. Standing at the top of the heap we think we’ll grab happiness out of the sky.

Philosophy starts from what is compelling and works downward, one reality at a time until it touches earth and closes the circuit.

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The chains of science, like all theoretical chains, are light and fine. They just draw limits around your movements.

The chains of practice, however, actually weigh your limbs down and threaten to immobilize you. Business, socializing, parenting, governing — pursuits traditionally avoided by philosophers — are not outside the domain of philosophy, they’re just such heavy fetters that few thinkers will wear them. It’s not that they are hard to think about. It is that they are hard to think within. They encumber the entirety of one’s being, thought and all.