Category Archives: Philosophy

Eden retold

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism

Adam-in-Eden reached out and grasped knowledge as something that is grasped. At that moment he became simply: Adam.

He was Adam who lived in a place called Eden. He could live somewhere else, too. He could be Adam in another garden or in a desert or in a jungle or in a city. “Listen, I could live on the motherfucking moon,” said Adam.

He was as a god, mastering this new world full of objects with his new explaining, predicting, controlling knowledge.

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Adam forgot who he wasn’t, and so he forgot who he was.

He wasn’t exactly wrong about anything he thought, but he was never right enough.

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“Dude, I have knowledge of God. Don’t fuck with me. Me n’ God’ll smite thee. Just saying.”

Magic was the first technology. It wasn’t too good, but the rush was addictive.

Against fundamentalism

Ethics

Fundamentalists found their lives on false faith, undergirded by a mistaken conception of what faith is.

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Can you believe in the validity of what an author says to you, apart from the apparent intelligible truth, intelligible falsity or unintelligibility of what you hear? This is what faith is. Faith is an active optimism that what one hears can, with effort, be understood as true.

What faith isn’t is automatically taking what one initially understands to be true, whether it makes sense or not.

And false faith is taking that initial understanding to be the one and only truth.

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Every fundamentalism is xenophobic political ideology expressed in religious language.

The point of the fundamentalism is not the religion but the justification for a xenophobic attitude: an invalidation of others.

The invalidation of others is the invalidation of other conceptions of truth beyond the ideologue’s political-religious ideology.

And invalidation of truth beyond one’s own ideology is invalidation of what transcends oneself. And what transcends oneself…

Milton expressed it best:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.

Home

Ethics

To have a place in the world — to have a home — is to reach agreement with others on one’s own use. For some, this means being assigned roles they can play well, for others it means having their purpose welcomed.

Alienation occurs when roles are assigned without regard for the assignee. A person who doubts his suitability to the role becomes grimly afraid. The one who knows the unsuitability of the role for him becomes contemptuous.

A person can become so acclimated to alienation that he sees all need for social acknowledgment, all acceptance of role-assignment, as essentially contemptible.

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Modernity gave way to postmodernity when western culture forgot its longing for home. The longing for home was forgotten when the expectation of having a home was abandoned. Who even talks about alienation anymore, much less regrets alienation?

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“The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.” – Black Elk

Gadamer on dialogue

Brand, Design, Hermeneutics

Reposting from my professional blog, Synetic Brand…

This passage gets very close to the crux of synetic brand:

When we try to examine the hermeneutical phenomenon through the model of conversation between two persons, the chief thing that these apparently so different situations — understanding a text [NOTE: or a design] and reaching an understanding in a conversation — have in common is that both are concerned with a subject matter that is placed before them. Just as each interlocutor is trying to reach agreement on some subject with his partner, so also the interpreter [ / user] is trying to understand what the text [ / design] is saying. This understanding of the subject matter must take the form of language. It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs — whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person who raises an issue with us — is the coming-into-language of the thing itself. Thus we will first consider the structure of dialogue proper, in order to specify the character of that other form of dialogue that is the understanding of texts. Whereas up to now we have framed the constitutive significance of the question for the hermeneutical phenomenon in terms of conversation, we must now demonstrate the linguisticality of dialogue, which is the basis of the question, as an element of hermeneutics.

Our first point is that the language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation. This is not an external matter of simply adjusting our tools; nor is it even right to say that the partners adapt themselves to one another but, rather, in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.

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Synetic branding is neither organization-centric, nor is it user-centric.

Synetic branding is relationship-centric, which means all parties, through dialogue, come to a mutually transformative  shared understanding.

Synetic branding is the method of generating dialogue between an organization and those who participate in the organization (stakeholders). “To reach [synesis] in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”

Synetic branding sees brand neither as the possession of an organization, nor as the image of the organization in the minds of customers, etc. Neither is exactly wrong, but neither is nearly right enough.

Synetic branding is participatory, which means that brand is a whole that exceeds each of its parts, which both influences and is influenced by its parts. A participant in a synetic brand, whether he participates as an executive, an employee, a shareholder, a partner or a customer, sees by way of the brand’s vision, but to some degree changes the brand’s vision through his participation. The object of this vision is the field with which an organization concerns itself and its offerings within that field, but the vision extends far beyond the object, and influences aesthetic (thus brand identity systems) and how related offerings are perceived (thus brand equity).

Synetic branding means taking responsibility for cultivating mutual understanding among all who participate and recognizing that the essence of a brand is precisely the mutuality of the understanding. Everything, including all the things people commonly mistake for brand itself, such as the image of the company in the minds of whoever), follows from this. Failure to recognize this fact is what has made so many companies into decorated commodity clones. They see everything the same way, manage themselves the same way, follow tweaked and relabeled versions of identical processes, make the same kinds of trade-offs and basically aim for the same ideal as everyone else.

Synetic brand uses large-scale dialogue between an organization’s participants to discover new unifying perspectives on an organization’s offerings that otherwise would remain invisible to everyone.

These perspectives open new questions and new possibilities in the organization’s field of concern. This is the foundation of meaningful innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.

Understanding understandings

Ethics, Hermeneutics

For someone to wish to really understand what you are saying and to work at pursuing that understanding — this is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It is pleasurable even when the understanding remains incomplete. The desire, and desire’s sole proof — action — is the source of pleasure.

To pursue understanding requires sacrifices of different kinds. First, and most obviously, understanding takes real effort, and the effort required increases with the strangeness of the concepts in question.

This sacrifice of effort leads directly to another more interesting sacrifice, one which is harder to explain: the more a person has understood and overcome strangeness in others, the stranger he himself becomes. So, the better he becomes at understanding other people’s crucial truths, the harder it becomes to understand what he means when he attempts to share his own most crucial truths.

Many people will find many uses for him, but his real use is locked away in his own strange understanding.

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There are many ways to love a “subject”. One can love a subject as a topic — as something about which someone is factually knowledgeable. Or a person can love a subject as a discipline — as an area one knows practically. To put it in Wittgenstein’s terms “one knows one’s way about” and loves manifesting it in effective action.

Finally, one can love his subject as a subject. The lover of a subject pursues his subject with his own subjectivity. He will shed bulk — even his treasured objective knowledge and his practical know-how — in order to slim down and lighten up enough to penetrate narrow passages and get ever closer to the unattainable point of his pursuit.

(One can love as an academic, a practitioner or a philosopher (philo “love”- sopher “wisdom”).

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It is unreasonable for someone who has understood too much to expect anyone to undertake understanding what he has understood.

Gadamer: three levels of conceiving the Thou

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas

Here it is, all laid out:

Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language — i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou.

It is clear that the experience of the Thou must be special because the Thou is not an object but is in relationship with us. For this reason the elements we have emphasized in the structure of experience will undergo a change. Since here the object of experience is a person, this kind of experience is a moral phenomenon — as is the knowledge acquired through experience, the understanding of the other person. Let us therefore consider the change that occurs in the structure of experience when it is experience of the Thou and when it is hermeneutical experience.

[FIRST STAGE: Thou as a behaving object; understanding as ability to predict behavior and a means to influence/control it. This view is overwhelmingly the norm in business. The problem of the Thou is centered around “eliciting desired behaviors” from customers and employees that benefit the business.]

There is a kind of experience of the Thou that tries to discover typical behavior in one’s fellowmen and can make predictions about others on the basis of experience. We call this a knowledge of human nature. We understand the other person in the same way that we understand any other typical event in our experiential field — i.e., he is predictable. His behavior is as much a means to our end as any other means. From the moral point of view this orientation toward the Thou is purely self-regarding and contradicts the moral definition of man. As we know, in interpreting the categorical imperative Kant said, inter alia, that the other should never be used as a means but always as an end in himself. [NOTE: This is the heart of morality, in my opinion.]

If we relate this form of the I-Thou relation — the kind of understanding of the Thou that constitutes knowledge of human nature — to the hermeneutical problem, the equivalent is naive faith in method and in the objectivity that can be attained through it. [NOTE: There does seem to be an uncanny correlation between fixation on method and an apparent prediction-and-control view of understanding others.] Someone who understands tradition in this way makes it an object — i.e., he confronts it in a free and uninvolved way — and by methodically excluding everything subjective, he discovers what it contains. We saw that he thereby detaches himself from the continuing effect of the tradition in which he himself has his historical reality. It is the method of the social sciences, following the methodological ideas of the eighteenth century and their programatic formulation by Hume, ideas that are a cliched version of scientific method. But this covers only part of the actual procedure of the human sciences, and even that is schematically reduced, since it recognizes only what is typical and regular in behavior. It flattens out the nature of hermeneutical experience in precisely the same way as we have seen in the teleological interpretation of the concept of induction since Aristotle.

[SECOND STAGE: Thou as a separate, “seen against the sky” subjectivity; understanding as psychological explanation. One believes one understands another if he is able to sketch out an accurate and nuanced persona of that person. It has been very, very difficult to extricate myself from this vision of the Thou.]

A second way in which the Thou is experienced and understood is that the Thou is acknowledged as a person, but despite this acknowledgment the understanding of the Thou is still a form of self-relatedness. Such self-regard derives from the dialectical appearance that the dialectic of the I-Thou relation brings with it. This relation is not immediate but reflective. To every claim there is a counterclaim. This is why it is possible for each of the partners in the relationship reflectively to outdo the other. One claims to know the other’s claim from his point of view and even to understand the other better than the other understands himself. In this way the Thou loses the immediacy with which it makes its claim. It is understood, but this means it is co-opted and pre-empted reflectively from the standpoint of the other person. Because it is a mutual relationship, it helps to constitute the reality of the I-Thou relationship itself. The inner historicity of all the relations in the lives of men consists in the fact that there is a constant struggle for mutual recognition. This can have very varied degrees of tension, to the point of the complete domination of one person by the other. But even the most extreme forms of mastery and slavery are a genuine dialectical relationship of the kind that Hegel has elaborated.

The experience of the Thou attained here is more adequate than what we have called the knowledge of human nature, which merely seeks to calculate how the other person will behave. It is an illusion to see another person as a tool that can be absolutely known and used. Even a slave still has a will to power that turns against his master, as Nietzsche rightly said. But the dialectic of reciprocity that governs all I-Thou relationships is inevitably hidden from the consciousness of the individual. The servant who tyrannizes his master by serving him does not believe that he is serving his own aims by doing so. In fact, his own self-consciousness consists precisely in withdrawing from the dialectic of this reciprocity, in reflecting himself out of his relation to the other and so becoming unreachable by him. By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one robs his claims of their legitimacy. In particular, the dialectic of charitable or welfare work operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance functions to keep the other person’s claim at a distance. We are familiar with this from the teacher-pupil relationship, an authoritative form of welfare work. In these reflective forms the dialectic of the I-Thou relation becomes more clearly defined. [NOTE: This is why I have soured considerably on personality typology. I’ve seen it used to explain away the relevance of other people’s claims: “this claim is only intelligible and applicable to certain temperaments.”]

In the hermeneutical sphere the parallel to this experience of the Thou is what we generally call historical consciousness. Historical consciousness knows about the otherness of the other, about the past in its otherness, just as the understanding of the Thou knows the Thou as a person. In the otherness of the past it seeks not the instantiation of a general law but something historically unique. By claiming to transcend its own conditionedness completely in knowing the other, it is involved in a false dialectical appearance, since it is actually seeking to master the past, as it were. This need not be accompanied by the speculative claim of a philosophy of world history; as an ideal of perfect enlightenment, it sheds light on the process of experience in the historical sciences, as we find, for example, in Dilthey. In my analysis of hermeneutical consciousness I have shown that the dialectical illusion which historical consciousness creates, and which corresponds to the dialectical illusion of experience perfected and replaced by knowledge, is the unattainable ideal of the Enlightenment. A person who believes he is free of prejudices, relying on the objectivity of his procedures and denying that he is himself conditioned by historical circumstances, experiences the power of the prejudices that unconsciously dominate him as a vis a tergo [“force from behind”]. A person who does not admit that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what manifests itself by their light.

[NOTE: This next point is enormously important] It is like the relation between I and Thou. A person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond. A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition in exactly the same way. In seeking to understand tradition historical consciousness must not rely on the critical method with which it approaches its sources, as if this preserved it from mixing in its own judgments and prejudices. It must, in fact, think within its own historicity. To be situated within a tradition does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.

[NOTE: This is why one cannot learn about philosophy (or religion) from survey texts or survey courses. A student immerses himself in the philosophy and tries to see and apply its validity or its meaning is lost. It is not a matter of thoroughness, either. One can know an infinite number of facts about a philosophy or religion or the biographical facts of the people who founded them, without having the slightest essential knowledge of that philosophy or religion. Further, because of one’s erudition on the topic, one may be closed to knowing it any differently.]

[THIRD STAGE: Thou as a partner in a mutual relationship to which I and Thou belong; understanding as synesis, shared vision. Through dialogue, the other is “experienced” and known by way of a change of holistic understanding of the the world, mediated by the content of the dialogue.]

Knowing and recognizing this constitutes the third, and highest, type of hermeneutical experience: the openness to tradition characteristic of historically effected consciousness. It too has a real analogue in the I’s experience of the Thou. In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the Thou truly as a Thou — i.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this openness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one another. When two people understand each other, this does not mean that one person “understands” the other. [NOTE: the false intimacy of psychologism.] Similarly, “to hear and obey someone” does not mean simply that we do blindly what the other desires. We call such a person slavish. Openness to the other, then, involves recognizing that I myself must accept some things that are against me, even though no one else forces me to do so.

This is the parallel to the hermeneutical experience. I must allow tradition’s claim to validity, not in the sense of simply acknowledging the past in its otherness, but in such a way that it has something to say to me. This too calls for a fundamental sort of openness. Someone who is open to tradition in this way sees that historical consciousness is not really open at all, but rather, when it reads its texts “historically,” it has always thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand, so that the criteria of the historian’s own knowledge can never be called into question by tradition. Recall the naive mode of comparison that the historical approach generally engages in. The 25th “Lyceum Fragment” by Friedrich Schlegel reads: “The two basic principles of so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the commonplace and the axiom of familiarity. The postulate of the commonplace is that everything that is really great, good, and beautiful is improbable, for it is extraordinary or at least suspicious. The axiom of familiarity is that things must always have been just as they are for us, for things are naturally like this.” By contrast, historically effected consciousness rises above such naive comparisons and assimilations by letting itself experience tradition and by keeping itself open to the truth claim encountered in it. The hermeneutical consciousness culminates not in methodological sureness of itself, but in the same readiness for experience that distinguishes the experienced man from the man captivated by dogma. As we can now say more exactly in terms of the concept of experience, this readiness is what distinguishes historically effected consciousness.

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We cannot regard the other as an object, nor can we regard the other as an alien subject with a separate but explicable experience of the world.

The other is someone who, through dialogue, might showing you something deeply unexpected and world-transfiguring. The other is one with whom the world can be shared in synesis.

Thou dialectic

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas

Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be  merely or even primarily understood as an object.

To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

However, to attempt to understand another person without the help of objectivity is also to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

The scientific attitude and the romantic attitude misunderstand what understanding another person is.

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The objectifying scientific attitude and the radically subjective attitude that characterizes romanticism together constitute an antithesis which has been steadily attacked and weakened over the last century and which (I am convinced) is breathing its last putrid breaths. (Nothing wrong with dramatizing things, ok?)

The two attitudes fail to see how an unconscious agreement (a shared determinate ignorance, a cognitive process that is unaware of its own operation) has drawn them into to an intractable conscious disagreement.

It is impossible to find agreement within the terms to which the two sides are unconsciously bound, and they are blind to the possibility of an alternative.

The only possible positions either side can conceive fall on a linear continuum of impure compromises between two pure and antithetical principles. Whatever is not the thesis or its antithesis is understood to be an equivocating ambithesis.

When someone trapped in this kind of ignorance wishes to be principled, he is “uncompromisingly” either-or, wholeheartedly throwing his support behind either the thesis or the antithesis. When he wants to appear politic, circumspect and socially wise it starts talking about “shades of gray”. (After all, you’re either an unrealistic purist or someone who understands the necessity of compromise and occasionally taking it up the tooter.)

At all times, however, all conceptions brainlessly obey the limiting terms of the underlying unconscious agreement, both in the schema of the theory and in practice.

The process of illuminating such forms of shared determinate ignorance, and in the process discovering new possibilities of resolving the issue that fall entirely outside the terms of the old disagreement is called dialectic. One discovers a point of view that opposes the old opposition and unites them in their common limitation, and opens up previously inconceivable options, often also outside the point of contention.

Here is how I’ve been drawing the structure of dialectic. White is the thesis, black is the antithesis and the red is the dialectic overcoming of the dichotomy, which is a new thesis:

dialectic

Two problems I’ve had with this diagram. 1) Once the old dichotomy fades from relevance a new one forms as a new antithesis forms against the new thesis, and the process repeats. This diagram accurately represents the delusion of the finality of the overcoming (to which some people believe Hegel succumbed), but the whole purpose of dialectic is to overcome this delusion, so the representation must be regarded not as a feature, but a bug. There is no indication that the process will continue, and this indication is essential. 2) Thesis and antithesis are not equal. A fundamentalist and an atheist argue over the existence of a ludicrously misconceived “God”… both are ignorant of other possible conceptions, but it is far more respectable to disagree with a fundamentalist than to be one. The atheist is philosophically superior to the fundamentalist, but both are philosophically inferior to someone who knows other possibilities of knowing God. And of the two, the atheist is closer to that realization than the fundamentalist who mistakes himself for religious and is therefore more closed to lines of questioning that can overcome his ignorance. (AND! — by the way, the limitation of both is that they have failed to grasp the being of Thou, which closes them off not only to the being of God, but also to the being of other people, which brings us back to my original point.) So, the thesis, though not true enough, does at least bear some resemblance to the larger truth, where the antithesis is simply a negative indication: this resemblance is not enough.

For these reasons, from now on, at least until I know better, I am going to draw the structure of the dialectic differently, on the golden section, and also I’m going to draw the antithesis as gold because I like how that looks:

Golden Dialectic

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But what is the determinate ignorance shared by scientism and romanticism? Neither recognizes the role of tradition in selfhood. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s something to think about:

The only way to know an Other as Other — as Thou — is to enter into dialogue and consequently come to see the world differently.

Dialogue -> Metanoia -> Synesis -> Tradition -> Community


Still stuck! (Gadamer)

Hermeneutics

The density of crucial insights in the passage below is staggering…

Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation — i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation — reflection on effective history — can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. Since Nietzsche and Husserl, the word has been used in philosophy to characterize the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s range of vision is gradually expanded. A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon, whether it is near or far, great or small. Similarly, working out the hermeneutical situation means acquiring the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.

In the sphere of historical understanding, too, we speak of horizons, especially when referring to the claim of historical consciousness to see the past in its own terms, not in terms of our contemporary criteria and prejudices but within its own historical horizon. The task of historical understanding also involves [NOTE: notice, it involves, but is not exhausted by…] acquiring an appropriate historical horizon, so that what we are trying to understand can be seen in its true dimensions. If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us. To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may wonder, however, whether this phrase is adequate to describe the understanding that is required of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him — i.e., to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not a true conversation — that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject — because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. [NOTE: I cannot overstate the importance of this point. Psychologism, all excessive concern for abstract “selves” divorced from concrete practical life, is pseudo-intimacy. Its hidden purpose is in fact to fend off genuine authentic intimacy, which is experienced in change of one’s own world, which is to say deep self-change. Psychologism is an attitude of spiritual self-preservation — not of continuity of life-process, but of static form. It is the mummification or pickling of the soul in self-image.] Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversation between doctor and patient. Historical consciousness is clearly doing something similar when it transposes itself into the situation of the past and thereby claims to have acquired the right historical horizon. In a conversation, when we have discovered the other person’s standpoint and horizon, his ideas become intelligible without our necessarily having to agree with him; so also when someone thinks historically, he comes to understand the meaning of what has been handed down without necessarily agreeing with it or seeing himself in it.

In both cases, the person understanding has, as it were, stopped trying to reach an agreement. He himself cannot be reached. By factoring the other person’s standpoint into what he is claiming to say, we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable. [NOTE: Historical consciousness and psychologism both reduce the I-Thou relationship proper to its subject of inquiry to the terms of I-It, objective, eidetic, “earth yao” terms. This is practical solipsism — imposing one’s own sole I on everything within its purview — whether or not it also formally asserts theoretical solipsism.] In considering the origin of historical thinking, we have seen that in fact it makes this ambiguous transition from means to ends — i.e., it makes an end of what is only a means. The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint — i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves. Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.

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“Interpretation”

If I read me, then I read into me:
I can’t construe myself objectively.
But he who climbs consuming his own might
bears me with him unto the brighter light.

– Nietzsche, from The Gay Science

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It seems time to repost one of my favorite songs, “The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure”.

Gadamer – “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”

Hermeneutics, Ideas

I am having problems getting through this chapter of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”. This is one of those chapters where I’ve underlined and starred the margins of 85% of the text. Every paragraph presents a mind-blowing insight, which means I’m immediately compelled to apply that insight to a million problems outside of the book, which means I stop reading. (This is my personal test of a book’s awesomeness: Does the book fling me out of its pages into life?)

It’s always interesting to reread the same physical book, and to see how my own patterns of underling has shifted. This chapter was practically clean from the last reading, which I guess means I didn’t find it all that exciting. It is tangible proof of progress, or at least change.

The following passage may not make a lot of sense outside the context of the book, but I want to post it anyway.

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That subsequent understanding is superior to the original production and hence can be described as superior understanding does not depend so much on the conscious realization that places the interpreter on the same level as the author (as Schleiermacher said) but instead denotes an insuperable difference between the interpreter and the author that is created by historical distance. Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. … . Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. Perhaps it is not correct to refer to this productive element in understanding as “better understanding.” For this phrase is, as we have shown, a principle of criticism taken from the Enlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. [Note: This is why in active listening, the understander must not repeat back or synonymically paraphrase back what one has heard, but must interpret and apply what one has heard and submit this interpretive application to the judgment of the understood, aka validate it.]

Such a conception of understanding breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics. Since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth. That this is what is meant by “understanding” was once self-evident (we need only recall Chladenius). But this dimension of the hermeneutical problem was discredited by historical consciousness and the psychological turn that Schleiermacher gave to hermeneutics, and could only be regained when the aporias of historicism came to light and led finally to the fundamentally new development to which Heidegger, in my view, gave the decisive impetus. For the hermeneutic productivity of temporal distance could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an “existential” and when he interpreted Dasein’s mode of being in terms of time.

Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events. Everyone is familiar with the curious impotence of our judgment where temporal distance has not given us sure criteria. Thus the judgment of contemporary works of art is desperately uncertain for the scholarly consciousness. Obviously we approach such creations with unverifiable prejudices, presuppositions that have too great an influence over us for us to know about them; these can give contemporary creations an extra resonance that does not correspond to their true content and significance. Only when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal.

In historical studies this experience has led to the idea that objective knowledge can be achieved only if there has been a certain historical distance. It is true that what a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances that gave rise to it. The positive conditions of historical understanding include the relative closure of a historical event, which allows us to view it as a whole, and its distance from contemporary opinions concerning its import. [Note: This reminds me of a Rilke quote I’ve posted a million times before, which I will post again below.] The implicit presupposition of historical method, then, is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context — in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest. Only then does it seem possible to exclude the subjective involvement of the observer. … It is true that certain hermeneutic requirements are automatically fulfilled when a historical context has come to be of only historical interest. Certain sources of error are automatically excluded. But it is questionable whether this is the end of the hermeneutical problem. Temporal distance obviously means something other than the extinction of our interest in the object. It lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension. And along with the negative side of the filtering process brought about by temporal distance there is also the positive side, namely the value it has for understanding. It not only lets local and limited prejudices die away, but allows those that bring about genuine understanding to emerge clearly as such.

Often temporal distance can solve question of critique in hermeneutics, namely how to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand. Hence the hermeneutically trained mind will also include historical consciousness. It will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own. Foregrounding a prejudice clearly requires suspending its validity for us. For as long as our mind is influenced by a prejudice, we do not consider it a judgment. How then can we foreground it? It is impossible to make ourselves aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, provoked. The encounter with a traditionary text can provide this provocation. For what leads to understanding must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity. Understanding begins, as we have already said above, when something addresses us. This is the first condition of hermeneutics. We now know what this requires, namely the fundamental suspension of our own prejudices. But all suspension of judgments and hence, a fortiori, of prejudices, has the logical structure of a question.

The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open. If a prejudice becomes questionable in view of what another person or a text says to us, this does not mean that it is simply set aside and the text or the other person accepted as valid in its place. Rather, historical objectivism shows its naivete in accepting this disregarding of ourselves as what actually happens. In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for him to have full play himself.

The naivete of so-called historicism consists in the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity. We must here appeal from a badly understood historical thinking to one that can better perform the task of understanding. Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research, and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. [Note: The past is a Thou!] A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as “history of effect.” Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.

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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

Circles

Hermeneutics, Ideas

Black Elk:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

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Gadamer:

We recall the hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole. This principle stems from ancient rhetoric, and modern hermeneutics has transferred it to the art of understanding. It is a circular relationship in both cases. The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole.

…

Nineteenth-century hermeneutic theory often discussed the circular structure of understanding, but always within the framework of a formal relation between part and whole — or its subjective reflex, the intuitive anticipation of the whole and its subsequent articulation in the parts. According to this theory, the circular movement of understanding runs backward and forward along the text, and ceases when the text is perfectly understood. This view of understanding came to its logical culmination in Schleiermacher’s theory of the divinatory act, by means of which one places oneself entirely within the writer’s mind and from there resolves all that is strange and alien about the text. In contrast to this approach, Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of foreunderstanding.

The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding but, on the contrary, is most fully realized. The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.

The circle, which is fundamental to all understanding, has a further hermeneutic implication which I call the “fore-conception of completeness.” But this, too, is obviously a formal condition of all understanding. It states that only what really constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible. So when we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken — i.e., the text is not intelligible — do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied. The rules of such textual criticism can be left aside, for the important thing to note is that applying them properly depends on understanding the content.

The fore-conception of completeness that guides all our understanding is, then, always determined by the specific content. Not only does the reader assume an immanent unity of meaning, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning that proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said. Just as the recipient of a letter understands the news that it contains and first sees things with the eyes of the person who wrote the letter — i.e., considers what he writes as true, and is not trying to understand the writer’s peculiar opinions as such — so also do we understand traditionary texts on the basis of expectations of meaning drawn from our own prior relation to the subject matter. And just as we believe the news reported by a correspondent because he was present or is better informed, so too are we fundamentally open to the possibility that the writer of a transmitted text is better informed than we are, with our prior opinion. It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to “understand” the text, psychologically or historically, as another’s opinion. The prejudice of completeness, then, implies not only this formal element — that a text should completely express its meaning — but also that what it says should be the complete truth.

Here again we see that understanding means, primarily, to understand the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and understand another’s meaning as such. Hence the most basic of all hermeneutic preconditions remains one’s own fore-understanding, which comes from being concerned with the same subject. This is what determines what can be realized as unified meaning and thus determines how the foreconception of completeness is applied.

Thus the meaning of “belonging” — i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity — is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices. Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a bond to the subject matter that comes into language through the traditionary text and has, or acquires, a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks. On the other hand, hermeneutical consciousness is aware that its bond to this subject matter does not consist in some self-evident, unquestioned unanimity, as is the case with the unbroken stream of tradition. Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness; but this polarity is not to be regarded psychologically, with Schleiermacher, as the range that covers the mystery of individuality, but truly hermeneutically — i.e., in regard to what has been said: the language in which the text addresses us, the story that it tells us. Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.

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Try this out: What if the formerly-much-jabbered-about (* see note)  “Post-Modern Condition” is essentially the widespread breakdown of any “fore-conception of completeness” possessed at any level by our society. Because of our passive stance toward meaning (that it is to be discovered, not made, as if these two constitute some kind of absolute dichotomy!) since there’s no truth to be discovered, we resign ourselves to utter intellectual and practical fragmentation.

My view: the point of understanding is not to form an adequate picture of the “truth out there.” The purpose of understanding — of synesis, that twofold together — is to, by way of coming to (authentic) agreement on what is “out there” we create meaningful social solidarity: culture.

We seek truth for the sake of truth, in the same way we have sex to have sex. Babies are the side-effect of our intentions and the hidden telos.

Truth is social, and for precisely that reason, we must take truth seriously, which means to be rigorously non-reductive. By that I mean we cannot continue to identify truth with “objectivity”. It’s killing us.

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For your listening enjoyment: “Circles” by the Who and by Camper Van Beethoven.

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* Note: If we’ve stopped talking about postmodern fragmentation and disorientation it’s for the same reason we’ve stopped talking about modernist themes of alienation, nihilism, loss of faith — we no longer have any sense that a non-alienated, non-nihilistic, faithful might be possible, let alone preferable. We’ve never experienced having to contrast with not-having, so not-having is indistinguishable from reality itself.

The hermeneutical-rhetorical circle

Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

As a user experience practitioner, it is interesting to me that the hermeneutical circle (the movement between whole and part that characterizes the process of understanding) originated in ancient rhetoric. The privilege of my profession is that we get to stand on both sides of meaning, as understanders (in the mode of researchers) and as creators of things to be understood (in the mode of designers), and best of all, we get to iteratively connect the two modes. (I’m picturing the infinity symbol: we research understandings, we design things to be understood, we research understandings of our designs, we redesign… etc. )

It seems everything we do in user experience wants to be iterative. (* See note.) I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is because we are in the understanding business, and iterativity is the form of understanding.

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An idea to try on: user experience strategy/design as a species of rhetoric. Pan-sensory, interactive rhetoric. (I’ve been enjoying the perversity of using words revaluated by Gadamer to express benevolent thoughts as villainously as possible. This one falls short of the last example of the pattern, characterizing brand as “prejudice design”. )

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In his wonderful book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis Richard J. Bernstein made a very interesting criticism of Gadamer: that Gadamer did a good job of outlining a theory of hermeneutics, but in regard to practice he left us hanging.

My view is that experience design can be a practical extension of Gadamer’s thought, and in fact is following a semi-conscious trajectory toward this point. It’s always exciting to find new ways to integrate my philosophical mornings and my professional days.

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(* Note: Conversely, much of the friction we experience in the world of business seems to center around the flattening of circularities. Business likes predictability, so it likes nice straight lines. Non-linearity is innately unpredictable.)

A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.

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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.

Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.

A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side,  the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.

Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.

Synetic branding

Brand, Design, Philosophy

A good brand experience makes an organization’s perspective manifest to its stakeholders.

Some stakeholders are outsiders who have an outsider’s relationship to the organization. (e.g. current or prospective customers, the press, the interested public.) Other stakeholders constitute the organization itself. (e.g. employers, employees, partners, shareholders.)

The manifestation of the perspective takes the form of a sharing of understanding. Some of this understanding is explicit. Certain facts are agreed upon. The most important aspects of the understanding, however, are implicit: what is the significance of the facts at hand? What is the relative importance of each fact? How do the facts connect? What aspects of an offering are essential, and what aspects are less important or negligible?

Every act of design is one of balances and trade-offs. The best designs make its trade-offs feel obvious and necessary, to the point of invisibility. What is marginalized or omitted is what was irrelevant. (A classic example of this kind of trade-off is the London Underground “Tube map”.)

So, within the brand perspective is embedded the company’s standards and rankings of value. Those things seen as most important are given the most attention and emphasis. The less important things are ignored or downplayed, sometimes pointedly. The standards and values determine how an organization behaves, how it presents itself and how it develops and delivers its offerings.

(The classic example: What makes a computer more or less desirable? Low price and high performance? Those who see it that way are unlikely to purchase a Macintosh. However, if you view computers the way Apple does and put a premium on how it feels to use and own a computer, you are likely to consider only a Macintosh when purchasing a new computer. Another example: What do you consider important the most important quality in a car? Style? Performance? If so, you probably won’t buy a Toyota. However, if you see reliability as the single most important quality in a car, it is very likely you will consider Toyota. Boring, but compelling. Consequently, there are many Toyota owners, and very few Toyota enthusiasts. Toyota makes cars for people who don’t love cars.)

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If an organization wishes to have an authentic, compelling brand its leadership must 1) actually have a perspective on what it does that is different from its competition, 2) the perspective must be one that can be shared, 3) the leadership must know how to share its perspective, 4) the perspective must be practically consequential (the perspective changes the way one acts), and 5) the organization’s leadership must have the courage to believe its own eyes and to actually live and lead according to how it sees. It cannot constantly second-guess itself, equivocate, compromise or waffle between its perspective and the myriad other ways of seeing.

This does not mean one denies the existence or validity of other ways of seeing. It does not mean that one does not believe in the possibility that other ways of seeing might turn out to be better. (If you have a taste for such things, allow your mind to boggle for a moment at what it means to see a new definition of better as better than the one you currently hold! Better… how?)

It does, however mean one sees for himself. It means that one listens to others in order to see with them what they are seeing, and to share with them what one is seeing. This listening and sharing — dialogue in the proper sense — presupposes an expectation of seeing for oneself and the insight that one could at any moment see differently, and that difference could be deeply and extensively consequential.

Most of all it means that a leader who wished to lead an organization with a real brand must see by a genuine brand vision.

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Leaders who lack vision rarely know it. They believe an ability paint a vivid, desirable and detailed picture of the future and to lay out a plan for actualizing that picture is having vision. The mistake is understandable — some imagination and ability to visualize and describe is involved. It is a valuable skill for a leader to possess. However, this is not vision.

Vision is seeing what their organization is and does in a distinctive, persuasive and consequential way. This way of seeing makes their organization look, feel and behave differently from its peers.

It is a subtle difference, but a substantial and consequential one. The ability to share one’s ambitions and plans persuasively might help an organization perform better, but it won’t help it accomplish anything new. If this were all vision were, nobody would care much about vision. It would just be another skill.

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There are multiple levels of branding needed in user experience projects:

  1. The company has an articulated brand, its offerings are deliberately on-brand. What is required is framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  2. The company lacks an articulated brand, but has developed its offerings through a tacit brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement)  and b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  3. The company lacks an articulated brand, and has developed its offerings through a tacit and unclear or inconsistent brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement), b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience, c) a establishing a program to communicate the brand articulation throughout the organization and, d) and additionally, developing parallel programs to operationalize the brand – that is, to redesign the organizations processes to produce on-brand offerings and uniformly on-brand customer experiences at every touchpoint.
  4. The company lacks brand altogether, and has developed its offerings strictly through imitation of best practices or inconsistently according to fragmentary individual or factional whim. What is required is a) anthropological study of the organizational culture and the stakeholders it serves  to understand the possibilities, given the organization’s traditions, constitution and contexts. From this foundation a brand strategy consisting of a brand articulation and supporting operational changes can be developed to transform the organization into a coherent culture.

Brand is the outward expression of an authentic, coherent culture. This is why, despite the fact that all companies have logos and most have corporate graphic standards, very few have actual brands.

Most brands are like most people. They try to play a part without really being it. It is hollow and unpersuasive.

Quantity and quality

Philosophy

I want to get clearer on the relationship between quality and quantity. My view is this: every quantification is an indicator of a quality, and it is solely from this that the quantification derives its significance. Further, our concern for the quantitative is rooted in and derived from qualitative concerns.

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The quantitative seems more real than the qualitative because on principle it is follows explicit rules of thought. It is easy both to see for oneself and to demonstrate to others correctness or incorrectness of such thinking, and therefore it is easy to establish synesis (shared understanding), around the correctness of the calculations. (The same is true for logic.) Agreement on qualities (and measuring them) on the other hand is much harder to establish.

As a means to establish agreement, the quantifiable and the logical are indispensible tools, and absolutely should not be seen as opposed to the quantitative.

However, these tools are a means to qualitative ends.

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Failure to examine the linkage between the quantitative to the qualitative is where we go wrong (in business, in education, in politics, etc.).

The urgency of finding agreement and stabilizing reality in some kind of expedient synesis causes us to gloss the hard questions in order to have easy answers.

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In the shell game of modernity, experts shuffle quantities before us until we forget what qualities are hidden beneath. Eventually, we forget  about the qualities contained in the quantities. Eventually, dazed by the blur of Whats and Hows and Whos we forget Why.

Medusa’s comb

Philosophy

Akrasia – ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek, from a- ‘without’ + kratos ‘power, strength.’ The term is used esp. with reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Incontinent – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin incontinent-, from in– ‘not’ + continent– ‘holding together.’

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Akrasia — often translated as “moral incontinence” — is the incapacity to maintain continuity in one’s being. The discontinuity can be experienced in the moment in the form of indecision, disorientation or confusion, but it can also be experienced as a moments of great clarity, but a clarity that contradicts the preceding moments of clarity and sees no reason to reconcile moments.

The latter form of akrasia appears to the one experiencing it to be an irruption of insight. One sees the light, is saved, reborn. The old self’s perspective is invalidated and replaced with the new. The new wisdom attacks the old perspective’s claim to wisdom and sees no reason for reconciliation.

Akrasia can be seen as sporadic hubris, or hubris can be seen as low-frequency akrasia.

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The serpent is a traditional symbol of wisdom.

Medusa’s head was a ball of wild, biting serpents.

Nothing in excess

Philosophy

The why by which one approaches life determines one’s how, which in turn articulates the what.

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Qualities articulate categories. Categories provide the abstraction necessary to quantify. This is the principle of individuation.

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Some mythical hearsay:

In the Greek pantheon, Apollo was (among other things) the god of surfaces and of individuation.

Myth tells us that Apollo fell in love with the Nymph Daphne. Daphne did not return his love. He chased her and tried to rape her. Daphne prayed to Mother Earth for help. She was transformed into the laurel tree.

This is when Apollo adopted his philosophy of moderation. The laurel was made sacred to his followers, and among the inscriptions on his temple in Delphi appear two sayings:

Know Thyself.

Nothing in Excess.

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There are no two of anything, not strictly speaking. Only instances of a category can be counted.

Some categories are unavoidably perceived. Some are far more artificial than we realize. If society as a whole stopped seeing them, they’d no longer have reality.

But make no mistake, categories originate in us.

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The notion that the quantifiable is more real than that which resists quantification — even in areas where qualities are vastly more important than quantities — is a why firmly reinforced by prodedural hows resulting in a pretty hideous what.

This does not mean we don’t attempt to quantify wherever we can. It means that we start from the fullness of reality and humbly quantify as much of it as we can and respect the remaining unquantifiable reality as both real and as the wellspring of value.

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The protest “but how do we measure that?” … that “but” signifies illegitimacy of the yet-unmeasurable and the ultimately unmeasurable.

Measure it and then it can be considered part of reality. Until then it is imaginary, arbitrary, merely subjective.

Can we measure this claim that only the measurable can be considered valid? If not, can we consider this standard valid?

Gadamer on adventures and episodes

Philosophy

I read this passage in Gadamer’s Truth and Method during my family’s adventure in New York:

The representation of the whole in the momentary Erlebnis obviously goes far beyond the fact of its being determined by its object. Every experience is, in Schleiermacher’s words, “an element of infinite life.” Georg Simmel, who was largely responsible for the word Erlebnis becoming so fashionable, considers the important thing about the concept of experience as this: “the objective not only becomes an image and idea, as in knowing, but an element in the life process itself.” He even says that every experience has something of an adventure about it. But what is an adventure? An adventure is by no means just an episode. Episodes are a succession of details which have no inner coherence and for that very reason have no permanent significance. An adventure, however, interrupts the customary course of events, but is positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts. Thus an adventure lets life be felt as a whole, in its breadth and in its strength. Here lies the fascination of an adventure. It removes the conditions and obligations of everyday life. It ventures out into the uncertain.

But at the same time it knows that, as an adventure, it is exceptional and thus remains related to the return of the everyday, into which the adventure cannot be taken. Thus the adventure is “undergone,” like a test or trial from which one emerges enriched and more mature.

There is an element of this, in fact, in every Erlebnis. Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one’s life. It is not simply that an experience remains vital only as long as it has not been fully integrated into the context of one’s life consciousness, but the very way it is “preserved and dissolved” (aufgehoben) by being worked into the whole of life consciousness goes far beyond any “significance” it might be thought to have. Because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.

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Popular fiction is episode. Literature is adventure.

Fact is episode. Insight is adventure.

Most vacations are episodes, and that’s why I’ve always despised them.

No place to lay your head

Philosophy

Foxes have the holes, birds have their nests, and workers have their work stations. Everything established, everything with an accepted precedent, has its place in the world.

If, however, you are a new product-producer participant in humankind’s perpetual self-reinvention of humankind you will have no place until you make yourself a place.

Our choice is not either-or. We are not forced to either deny ourselves or to deny the world.