Category Archives: Philosophy

Two wolves and a lamb

Philosophy

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” – Benjamin Franklin

Weirdos are perpetually outvoted – especially in emergency situations, both necessary and manufactured, where there’s no time to make a case. In wartime soundbites win debates.

Susan and I have been watching the John Adams HBO miniseries, and Franklin was obviously one of history’s great weirdos. That series and this quote make me want to read him. I got Franklin’s collected writings during my last case of 24-hour patriotism.

Doubting doubt

Philosophy

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – Charles Sanders Peirce

This is one of those thoughts that will never leave you alone.

Anomalogues

Philosophy

History : Historicity

= Techne (technique, method) : Phronesis (practical wisdom)

= Euclidean : Fractal

See the pattern?

Objectivity, distance, linearity, predictability : Involvement, iterative feedback, non-linearity, unpredictability.

Both are ordered and rational. The sticking point: objectivity and rationality are fused, undifferentiated concepts. The pain of our time is the mitosis of reason. Reason is essentially subjective. Objectivity is one form our intentionality can take. Subject is another, and it requires a fundamentally different approach to reason – but it is not arbitrary.

Synesis

Philosophy, Synesis

Synesis is a word I have needed for a long time. I’ve groped toward this concept with an unusual use of sympathy (contrasted with empathy, a related form of truth, but one that is constructed, objective and removed) and an invented word seeing-with. Synesis represents another dimension of reality, the recognition that behind the face of every person in the world is another world inter-lapping our own, which, through dialogue, can open our own world in strange ways.

Bernstein, again.

What Gadamer tells us about freedom is complemented by what he says about solidarity. His understanding of solidarity also goes back to his interpretation of Greek philosophy and the primacy of the principle of friendship in Greek ethics and politics. We recall that when Gadamer examines Aristotle’s analysis of the distinction between phronesis and techne, he notes that the variant of phronesis which is called synesis requires friendship and solidarity.

Once again we discover that the person with understanding [synesis] does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unafected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

This theme, too, which Gadamer appropriates from Greek philosophy, is universalized. “Genuine solidarity, authentic community, should be realized.” In summarizing his answer to the question “What is practice?” he writes:

Practice is conducting oneself and acting in solidarity. Solidarity, however, is the decisive condition and basis of all social reason. There is a saying of Heraclitus, the “weeping” philosopher: The logos is common to all, but people behave as if each had a private reason. Does this have to remain this way?

One of the reasons why many modern thinkers have been so suspicious of phronesis, and more generally of the tradition of practical philosophy that was shaped by Aristotle, is because of the elitist connotations of this “intellectual virtue.” Aristotle himself did not think of it as a virtue that could be ascribed to every human being but only to those gifted individuals who had been properly educated. And it cannot be denied that many of those who have been drawn to this tradition in the modern age, especially insofar as they have opposed what they take to be the excesses and abstractness of the Enlightenment conception of reason, have not only been critical of political reform and revolution but have been attracted to the elitist quality of phronesis. But Gadamer softens this elitist aura by blending his discussion of phronesis with his analysis of a type of dialogue and conversation that presupposes mutual respect, recognition, and understanding. When all of this is integrated with the Hegelian “truth” — “the principle that all are free never again can be shaken” — then the radicalization of phronesis and praxis becomes manifest. There is an implicit telos here, not in the sense of what will work itself out in the course of history, but rather in the sense of what ought to be concretely realized.

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It is a privilege to be a designer. We regularly participate in the mundane transcendence of collaboration.

“Whose idea was that?” is a question that has broken up many of the best bands, because the best bands are not aggregates of individuals, but is an intelligent being within whom the musicians synetically participate. This question never dogs an all-star aggregate: everyone has clearly labeled his own contribution.

To play a crucial part in something greater than individuality does not diminish one’s individuality, but actualizes it. Adulthood is learning the participant’s responsibility.)

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No amount of competence can add up to greatness.

Primacy of dialogue

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

Bernstein:

… the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.”

 

When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement, and in the end plays them into each other.

A conversation or a dialogue is

a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on the subject.

In a genuine dialogue or conversation, what is to be understood guides the movement of the dialogue. The concept of dialogue is fundamental for grasping what is distinctive about hermeneutical understanding.

… Gadamer, in his analysis of dialogue and conversation, stresses not only the common bond and the genuine novelty that a turn in a conversation may take but the mutuality, the respect required, the genuine seeking to listen to and understand what the other is saying, the openness to risk and test our own opinions through such an encounter. In Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of practical philosophy, he blends this concept of dialogue, which he finds illustrated in the Platonic Dialogues, with his understanding of phronesis. But here, too, there are strong practical and political implications that Gadamer fails to pursue. For Gadamer’s entire corpus can be read as showing us that what we truly are, what is most characteristic of our humanity is that we are dialogical or conversational beings in whom “language is a reality.” According to Gadamer’s reading of the history of philosophy, this idea can be found at the very beginning of Western philosophy and is the most important lesson to be learned from this philosophic tradition in our own time.

But if we are really to appropriate this central idea to our historical situation, it will point us toward important practical and political tasks. It would be a gross distortion to imagine that we might conceive of the entire political realm organized on the principle of dialogue or conversation, considering the fragile conditions that are required for genuine dialogue and conversation. Nevertheless, if we think out what is required for such a dialogue based on mutual understanding, respect, a willingness to listen and risk one’s opinions and prejudices, a mutual seeking of the correctness of what is said, we will have defined a powerful regulative ideal that can orient our practical and political lives. If the quintessence of what we are is to be dialogical — and if this is not just the privilege of the few — then whatever the limitations of the practical realization of this ideal, it nevertheless can and should give practical orientation to our lives. We must ask what it is that blocks and prevents such dialogue, and what is to be done, “what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now” to make such genuine dialogue a concrete reality.

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Buber:

The chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. I become aware of him, aware that he is different, essentially different from myself, in the definite, unique way which is peculiar to him, and I accept whom I thus see, so that in full earnestness I can direct what I say to him as the person he is. Perhaps from time to time I must offer strict opposition to his view about the subject of our conversation. But I accept this person, the personal bearer of a conviction, in his definite being out of which his conviction has grown — even though I must try to show, bit by bit, the wrongness of this very conviction. I affirm the person I struggle with: I struggle with him as his partner, I confirm him as creature and as creation, I confirm him who is opposed to me as him who is over against me. It is true that it now depends on the other whether genuine dialogue, mutuality in speech arises between us. But if I thus give to the other who confronts me his legitimate standing as a man with whom I am ready to enter into dialogue, then I may trust him and suppose him to be also ready to deal with me as his partner.

But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.

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Intentionality, in the language of Husserl, is the fact that every sense has its object and exists in having an object. If you don’t see something, you aren’t seeing. If you are not thinking a thought, you are not thinking. The intentionality of a human being is world. The intentionality of a friendship is not one friend within the world of the other, but rather the shared world of the friends. The world is shared (by way of co-intentionality) developed through dialogue about the world – in coming to agreements about the contents of the world. This is “seeing-with”. This is the meaning of not treating another person as an object. We want and need to be treated by our fellow-subjects as fellow-subjects.

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It in the union of the ancient Greek and Jewish traditions is the  recognition of the ultimacy of the word, from which the “material” world is articulated from the chaos of the phenomenal flux. That flux, whatever it really is, is much stranger than we know, and not in some hidden way, but right there in plain sight if we choose to see it.

I’ve thought many times that people add fantastic mystery to life, not because life is not mysterious enough for them, but to drape over life’s own mystery, which is not under our control, and is infinite in the very real sense that we can make no finite sense of it. Each of us is comfortable with what is his, less comfortable with what is ours, and filled with dread at what is nobody’s. Through dialogue, we can learn the pattern of angst and overcoming and learn deep trust in the face of dread.

Techne, phronesis, design and innovation

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

A passage from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, illuminates a problem I have encountered innumerable times working as a user experience consultant: the need for predictability in innately unpredictable situations.

Before I quote the passage, I should provide some background, which involves the role of process in the practice of design, and how the need for predictability and preconceptions about process play into it.

What clients want is an established, proven process which can be applied to their business problems in order to lead them step-by-predictable-step to a predictable outcome. The ideal is maximum predictability throughout the process.

Predictability, though, can apply to many different aspects of a process. For instance, predictability can be applied to the specific form a solution will take, or it can apply to the general effectiveness of a solution to solve defined business problems. It can apply to the specific functions a solution must perform or it can aim at achieving more general goals (and leave open the question of what specific functions are needed to accomplish those goals). It can apply to varying granularities of time, ranging from the time it will take to complete the whole process, to the time it will take to complete each particular step within the process, all the way down to the number of minutes it will take to complete each sub-task in a project plan.

The question of which particular things must be predicted is very important because predictability comes at a cost. Every point of predictability necessitates a trade-off of some kind.

For instance, predictability in regard to the form a solution will take limits innovation: it means the form is pre-defined. The kind of solution available to this kind of pre-definition is most often an assemblage of “best practices”, which is a euphemism for “imitation”. An assemblage of existing elements is easily pre-visualized and implemented methodically and predictably with easily predicted results: a competently executed best-practices frankenstein will perform well enough to earn an employee a shiny new resume bullet and maybe a year’s job security. When a client comes in white-knuckling a feature-aggregate “vision”, nine times out of ten what looks like fixation on an idea is in truth only a side-effect of severe risk aversion.

Genuine innovation requires a different and slightly more harrowing approach. It requires a higher tolerance for open-endedness. Innovation entails, by definition, the discovery of something significantly new: a possibility nobody has yet envisioned and considered. Until it is discovered, the innovation cannot be shown to or described to anyone. (Innovation: ORIGIN Latin innovat– ‘renewed, altered,’ from the verb innovare, from in– ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’, from novus ‘new’).

Innovation does not necessitate radical unpredictability, though, and it also does not entail an undisciplined or purely intuitive approach. The locus of the unpredictability is in particular points within the process where discovery and the need to innovate are concentrated. At the micro-level, a solid innovation process is still mostly constituted of predictable activities, but wherever open-endedness is needed, the demand for predictability is relaxed or suspended. At the macro-level, at the overall success of the solution a solid, user-informed innovation process is predictably effective in its results, even if it is unpredictable in matters of form.

Most companies fail to innovate, not because they lack ingenious, inventive, creative people capable of innovation,  and not because innovation is unavoidably risky, but rather because the thoughtless demand for predictability at all points precludes innovation.

A big contributing part of this problem is that for many people, practice means predictability. It means pursuing closed-ended goals, and evaluating ideas with pre-defined criteria. The notion of an open-ended process, where evaluation involves human deliberation and multiple satisfactory outcomes are possible seems antithetical to “best practice”.

Here is where Bernstein becomes useful. It turns out that the Greeks were aware of this distinction, and had names for the types of reasoning  involved in each process. According to Bernstein, one of the most fundamental and damaging philosophical blindnesses of our time is the identification of techne (of technical know-how) with method. We tend to impose our conception of techne on understanding and practice in general, and in the process we lose something very important and central to humanity, a type of reasoning Aristotle called “phronesis”, generally translated as prudence or “practical wisdom”.

 The chapter from which this passage is taken is excellent from beginning to end, but here is the most directly relevant part:

…Phronesis is a form of reasoning and knowledge that involves a distinctive mediation between the universal and the particular. This mediation is not accomplished by any appeal to technical rules or Method (in the Cartesian sense) or by the subsumption of a pregiven determinate universal to a particular case. The “intellectual virtue” of phronesis is a form of reasoning, yielding a type of ethical know-how in which what is universal and what is particular are codetermined. Furthermore, phronesis involves a “peculiar interlacing of being and knowledge… Understanding, for Gadamer, is a form of phronesis.

We can comprehend what this means by noting the contrasts that Gadamer emphasizes when he examines the distinctions that Aristotle makes between phronesis and the other “intellectual virtues,” especially episteme and techne. Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is knowledge of what is universal, of what exists invariably, and takes the form of scientific demonstration. The subject matter, the form, the telos, and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differ from phronesis, the form of reasoning appropriate to praxis, which deals with what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

For Gadamer, however, the contrast between episteme and phronesis is not as important for hermeneutics as the distinctions between techne (technical know-how) and phronesis (ethical know-how). Gadamer stresses three contrasts.

1. Techne, or a technique,

is learned and can be forgotten; we can “lose” a skill. But ethical “reason” can neither be learned nor forgotten…. Man always finds himself in an “acting situation” and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation.

2. There is a different conceptual relation between means and ends in techne than in phronesis. The end of ethical know-how, unlike that of a technique, is not a “particular thing” or product but rather the “complete ethical rectitude of a lifetime.” Even more important, while technical activity does not require that the means that allow it to arrive at an end be weighed anew on each occasion, this is precisely what is required in ethical know-how. In ethical know-how there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation.

3. Phronesis, unlike techne, requires an understanding of other human beings. This is indicated when Aristotle considers the variants of phronesis, especially synesis (understanding).

It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment…. The question here, then, is not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge…. The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

For Gadamer, this variation of phronesis provides the clue for grasping the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics.

 …

…for Gadamer the “chief task” of philosophic hermeneutics is to “correct the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness” and “to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology based on science.” It is the scientism of our age and the false idolatry of the expert that pose the threat to practical and political reason. The task of philosophy today is to elicit in us the type of questioning that can become a counterforce against the contemporary deformation of praxis. It is in this sense that “hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.”

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To put it in Bernstein’s and Gadamer’s language: a solid, innovative design methodology requires an intelligently coordinated blend of techne and phronesis, guided by phronesis, itself. It is an immenently reasonable process – meaning that the participants in the process make rational appeals to one another in order to come to decisions – but what is being arrived at is not predetermined, and the decision-making process itself is not determinate. Many good outcomes are acknowledged as possible. The innovators are not looking for a single right solution, but rather a solution that is among the best possibilities.

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Incidentally, innovation is not needed always and everywhere (any more than predictability is). Unrestrained innovation is not a desirable goal, as fun as it may sound.

People inside-outside

Philosophy

I think I took more from Gadamer than I realized. I think I may have introjected that understanding into my reading of Buber, too, though I am not sure how much.

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Some distinctions:

1) an empathetic, reconstructive understanding of the subjectivity (that is the way of seeing) of fellow-subjects

2) a sympathetic, participatory understanding of shared subjectivity (a seeing-with)

3) an objective, psychological understanding of a behaving, communicating fellow-person

4) an objective, participatory understanding of one’s interactions with and reactions to another discretely distanced behaving, communicating fellow-person.

1a) – 4a) the mere awareness and acknowledgment of each of these distinct ways of knowing, apart from their practical application

1b) – 4b) the practical application of this knowledge

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Knowing a dynamic from the outside and knowing how to participate in a dynamic from the inside are entirely different matters.

Myth of the framework

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

According to Bernstein (quoting Popper who coined the phrase) the “‘Myth of the Framework,’ is a metaphor which suggest that ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language,’ and that we are so locked into these frameworks that we cannot communicate with those encased in ‘radically’ different frameworks or paradigms.”

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When you understand what people like Bernstein, Kuhn and Gadamer are actually trying to do, watching the spectacle of what they appear to be doing to people who approach hermeneutics (and related problems) from philosophically naive perspectives (both “for” and “against”) is funny but exasperating. The naive opponents manifest precisely the principles they attempt to deny. The naive proponents tend to take positions Bernstein is trying to overcome and become relativist caricatures: living strawmen for the naive opponents to successfully attack.

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Part of the reason I have become less enthusiastic about personality typologies over the last several years is that they are so easily used to assert the Myth of the Framework.

An intersubjective indication of God’s personhood

Philosophy

I reviewed some old posts last week and was happy to discover that I liked them. Here’s a rewording of one of them:

  • Another person exists to us in at least two ways: as fellow objects and fellow subjects. The subjective aspect of other people here is called “the other”.
  • The subjective influence of other subjects is experienced as a change in one’s self.
  • A change in one’s self is not experienced primarily as a change in one’s own qualities as an individual person-among-people, but as a shift in the entire world on the whole and in many parts simultaneously. In other words…
  • A change in self (manifested as change in the experience of entire world) is a holistic change.
  • Subjectivity pervades the entire world, and in fact is the whole world; it is not localized in an individual’s mind. Mind is not localizable, and therefore is not objective-form.
  • Intersubjectivity, then, is experienced as a change in the whole world, attributable to the subjective influence of the other.
  • To the degree that it is radical, change in subjectivity is impossible to understand prior to the change. It is understandable only in retrospect. This kind of change is practical transcendence.
  • Anxiety (or angst or dread) is the premonition of a radical change in subjectivity. Anxiety is a reaction to impending transcendence.
  • Perplexity is the yet unfinished radical change in subjectivity – in the whole world. It is the pain of transcending.
  • The impulse to defend oneself against subjective influence is the fending off of anxiety and subsequent perplexity.
  • Denial of the existence of truth is commonly a defense against the subjective influence of other.
  • The subjectivity of the other is transcendent. The relationship with the other, we-hood is also transcendent.
  • An I knows the other in participation in we-hood.
  • Each we is a greater self, a whole within which each I is a part.
  • By participating in we-hood, an I senses its situation within greater selfhood.
  • Each we is embedded in yet greater we
  • The concept of an ultimate We points to personhood of God.
  • An image of God: The principle common to self composed of instincts; a friendship composed of selves; being that arises where “two or more are gathered”.

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To get a clearer sense of how I understand subjectivity see my second post, “a plan for a short video clip”.

Coercive argumentation

Philosophy

At this moment I am completely uninterested in coercing people to believe against their will answers to question they have no interest in asking. For me there is no pleasure in conversation where the other party is interested primarily in how my points can be invalidated.

I am not saying that debate is useless. Some people enjoy siege and defense, and plenty of real good can come of it. But if you keep your house locked up and rain down arrows and pour molten lead on the head of everyone who comes knocking at your door, this will narrow the range of guests joining you at your dinner table.

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Perhaps some of the best truths must be invited in before they can be known. What basis is there to accept as true only ideas that can overpower your best intellectual defenses?

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For a debater truth is that which wins debates.

The twin fears

Philosophy

One one hand, we don’t want to be tyrannized. On the other hand, we don’t want to be alienated.

We want to be connected to other individuals and belong to some human circle of some breadth, but not at the expense of having our individual particularities and potentialities suppressed or condemned.

Temperamental and circumstantial variability between people can lead to disagreements on what is threat and what is threatened: some will say individual being is threatened by the tyranny of social being; others will claim that social being is threatened by the alienating effect of individual being exalting itself at the expense of all other considerations.

Philosophical minds who see tyranny as the greatest danger tend to gravitate (or levitate?) toward the liberation of radical subjectivism. Philosophical minds who see alienation as the greatest danger tend to pursue the common ground (or groundedness) of objectivism.

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These fears point toward two metaphysical poles of consciousness, which in my metaphysical manifold (the star diagram) is the vertical axis. The lower pole represents fragmentary being – instincts that flow “up” into our awareness from the semiconscious and apparently unconscious regions of our minds. The upper pole represents the unification of fragmentary of being in greater scales of being, the kind of being of a person absorbed in a conversation or in love.

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Anxiety toward the upper pole tends to see unification as necessitating suppression of essential differences – trending ultimately toward a tyrannical uniformity. In response, the upper pole is denied or an intellectual tourniquet is applied at some scale, either at the level of individuality, or at the level of the romantic couple, or of the family, or of a circle of intimates, or even of a political party, a nation, a religious sect. (One comfort of a self-idolizing collectivity: the members always find ready agreement among themselves that what they worship is the God, or some analogue to God. Solipsism can infect being at any scale, not only individual minds. Ideology can be seen as mass solipsism.)

Anxiety toward the lower pole tends to see the instincts as unwelcome disruptions that destabilize unity. The very existence of certain unacceptable impulses is denied or generalized into voiceless indistinction – packed into categories such as “the sinful nature of man”, or “the unconscious”, or “neuroses” – with the practical consequence that certain instincts are marginalized and denied a place in greater scales of being. An intellectual tourniquet is applied somewhere below the motivations that disrupt acceptability, perhaps at the level of action, or speech, or thought, or acknowledgement, or even awareness.

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It is interesting to observe that the twin fears justify and reinforce one another.

A person who fears the “upper pole” does so because the fearers of the “lower pole” provide them ample grounds for fear: the collectivities that fear the irruption of instincts really do create circumstances hostile to individuality, full of taboos, compromising social requirements and distractions from what one experiences as personal destiny.

Conversely, the individuals allergic to every kind of being that exceeds them while requiring something of them – (such people usually don’t mind the concept of greater being as long as it stays hermetically sealed in a non-practical “beyond”, and will often orient their lives around this theoretically-omnipotent, practically-impotent Transecndence) – will sometimes reject entire categories of ethical behaviour, or even morality as a whole, and in so doing destroy the possibility of authentic participation in being beyond individuality and its multifarious insticts. It may appear to seek intimacy with other people, but what it really seeks is stimulation of its instincts in response to other people (which it confounds with “love”).

The antitheses provide one another a legitimate enemy. They are founded on a single obsolete conception of being.

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Culture will not live in the median between the dominant antitheses of our time.

Culture will not live in the compromise between the individual and the collective, or the dualism of subject and object, or the babble of relativism and absolutism, or the distinguishing of artifice and nature, or the separation of (neutral) observation and interpretation, or the existence or nonexistence of God.

These antitheses can only be resolved in practical transcendence, in a different way of understanding.

Not a textbook

Biography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I have a couple of exciting new leads: Paul Feyerabend – who is certain to be a terrible influence on me (consider the title of his main work: Against Method) – and Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist. The last time I read this book was in early 2006, and the two leads of that reading were Kuhn (paradigms) and Gadamer (fusion of horizons), so anyone who has spoken with me at any length at all will immediately understand the impact Bernstein has already had on me.

(I’m gradually acquiring the entire bibliography of  Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and my library is becoming even more home-like.)

What’s fascinating about Bernstein is that his books appear at first glance to be closer to textbooks than original philosophical works, but that is not the case. He does original philosophy in the medium of comparative discussions of other people’s thinking. His philosophy is deeply social, but this does not mean he places the locus of his philosophy outside of his own understandings or his own experience. (It is understandable why someone unfamiliar with his mode of thought might see it that way. This is actually one of the issues he addresses in his writing.)

I buy lots and lots of books for my friends. I’ve given more copies of this book away than any other book.

Feeling panoptic

Ethics, Philosophy

One of my favorite philosophical feelings is looking out on the world and seeing every relevant problem roughly settled. Unknowns and dangers remain, but everything is in its place, doing what it must do and ought to do.

I think this is the feeling happy old men have when they walk around on land they own and love.

It may be the ideal mood of introverted sensation (of the Jungian personality typology).

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I’m calling this mood and this sense of things panopsis. (ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek panoptos ‘seen by all,’ from panoptes ‘all-seeing’ + –ic .) The optical root of the word is key.

The kind visualizations I do, when successful, induces panopsis in regard to a problem and how to go about thinking about it.

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Panopsis might be a gentle form of ideology, or it might be the worst kind of ideology in larval form. It might be fundamental to sanity, or it might be something more ominous. The morality around this state of mind is problematic for me.

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According to Buber:

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

According to Levinas:

In religions and even in theologies eschatology, like an oracle, does indeed seem to ‘complete’ philosophical evidences; its beliefs-conjectures mean to be more certain than the evidences – as though eschatology added information about the future by revealing the finality of being. But, when reduced to the evidences, eschatology would then already accept the ontology of totality issued from war. Its real import lies elsewhere. It does not introduce a teleological system into the totality; it does not consist in teaching the orientation of history. Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality…

The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. The first ‘vision’ of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision – it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type – which this work seeks to describe.

I didn’t abandon Levina because I thought he was wrong.

But then, according to Nietzsche:

What is romanticism? – Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type, and that included (and includes) Schopenhauer as well as Richard Wagner, to name the two most famous and pronounced romantics whom I misunderstood at that time – not, incidentally, to their disadvantage, as one need not hesitate in all fairness to admit. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In his case, what is evil, absurd, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, owing to the excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need above all mildness, peacefulness, and goodness in thought as well as deed – if possible, also a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and savior; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence – for logic calms and gives confidence – in short, a certain warm narrowness that keeps away fear and encloses one in optimistic horizons.

Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian pessimist; also the “Christian” who is actually only a kind of Epicurean – both are essentially romantics – and my eye grew ever sharper for that most difficult and captious form of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to those who need it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the commanding need behind it.

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or super-abundance that has here become creative?” At first glance, another distinction may seem preferable – it is far more obvious – namely the question whether the desire to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being prompted creation, or the desire for destruction, for change, for future, for becoming. But both of these kinds of desire are seen to be ambiguous when one considers them more closely; they can be interpreted in accordance with the first scheme (which is, as it seems to me, preferable). The desire for destruction, change, becoming, can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with the future (my term for this is, as known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. To understand this feeling, consider our anarchists closely.

The will to immortalize also requires a dual interpretation. It can be prompted, first, by gratitude and love; art with this origin will always be an art of apotheosis, perhaps dithyrambic like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, or bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and glory over all things. But it can also be the tyrannic will of one who suffers deeply, who struggles, is tormented, and would like to turn what is most personal, singular, and narrow, the real idiosyncrasy of his suffering, into a binding law and compulsion – one who, as it were, revenges himself on all things by forcing his own image, the image of his torture, on them, branding them with it. This last version is romantic pessimism in its most expressive form, whether it be Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will or Wagner’s music – romantic pessimism, the last great event in the fate of our culture.

(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type – this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseperable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word “classical” offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future – for it comes! I see it coming! – Dionysian pessimism.)

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It might be possible to dismiss Levinas as a romantic pessimist if I view him through Nietzsche’s optic. However, this type of dismissive viewing is precisely what Levinas is calling into question in his work, and I cannot shake off that question. But hermeneutically engaging romantic-pessimist thought… is it dangerous or unhealthy? I think it probably is. I’ll return to Levinas when I have happiness to waste.


Parallax and intentionality

Biography, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had been using the metaphor of parallax for a couple of years before Zizek’s Parallax View came out. The entire book turned out to be structured around the parallax metaphor and he used it essentially the same way. At that point in my life I was inclined to interpret that kind of coincidence as either an inevitable rediscovery of core esoteric truths or as some sort of synchronicity.

Once I learned about the connection between Hegel and Marxism, though, I realized parallax is one of the most universal and obvious examples of the dialectic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). If the dialectic form is a pre-existing cultural entity – and not a minor or obscure one, either – it is possible that the “rediscovery” of it was a lot more guided than it seemed to me at the time. I may not have been taught it explicity, but it is not difficult to see how it could be absorbed passively.

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The key to understanding passive cultural absorption is realizing objective conceptual thinking is only one of several forms of understanding a mind has available to it for interrelating and unifying the multifarious parts and aspects of its experience.

Naive thinkers are marked as such by their incapacity to distinguish the objective form of thought (which is ontological) from the objective being of a thing “thought about”. This observation is itself not “objective”: it exists as what I have been calling an intellectual move, or “the dance”. It’s the fundamental insight of late Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists.

Maybe I picked up the the Pragmatist dance from following along, trying to understand – trying to think-with a philosophical author, as opposed to thinking-about the apparent subject matter presented by the author in my own way, by my own pre-existing habitual moves. Maybe having been raised Unitarian-Universalist, which was a major tributary of Pragmatism, made me receptive to thinking in that way. Maybe there was a temperamental predisposition. At any rate, later, when I learned the counts and the names of the steps and the history of the dance’s invention and development, it was a factual consummation of something super-factual.

It gave objective form to a transmissible form of essentially subjective truth. It made it easier to share. Before, I’d have to demonstrate it, or indicate it with strange analogies.

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I had this thought last week and forgot to write it down:

Can we learn essentially subjective (that is, existential) truths from other subjectivities, or are we limited to objectivity – learning objective facts about subjectivity from one another?

Are we subjectively inert, sealed inside our own temperaments, and our own experiences?

Another big question: If we can learn essentially subjective truths from one another, is that best achieved through talking about subjectivity – through psychologizing? A theme I’ve encountered repeatedly among thinkers working from the Pragmatist and the Phenomenological traditions is intentionality: that there is no such thing as thinking without an object of thought. Thinking divorced from intentionality is nonsense.

Perhaps sharing a problem with another subjectivity, a problem that involves coming to a deep understanding for the sake of being able to collaborate on solving the problem is a more direct route to subjective learning than psychologizing.

I’ve even wondered if psychologizing isn’t ultimately a defence against sharing psychology – a counterfeit intimacy used as a block against authentic intimacy with the other – a sterile mutual self-exploration where shared experience is founded on sameness. Otherness is distant, sealed on the far side of an experiential membrane – never pursued, never approached, never welcomed. The radical other is an object of fascination, or fear, or mystification to be contemplated or classified but never touched.

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I see art as essentially bound up with subjective sharing.

Lesser art depends on recognition. It calls out to those who already know. Art decays into nostalgia and then pastiche.

Great art makes new knowers.

Philosophy is thought-art.

Reckless claims

Philosophy

My point of view: There is no metaphysical individual. Individuality is entirely immanent.

A modern point of view: To view one’s individuality as essentially real and placed spatially within a monistically material world…

A perennially pernicious point of view: To identify one’s individual consciousness with the monad…

To see one’s individual consciousness as a metaphysical entity within an essentially conscious monad…

Three years with hermeneutics

Biography, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Rereading Bernstein after three years, I’m tempted to say (very tentatively) that Bernstein influenced me as radically as Nietzsche did.

Where he led me was a infinitely more vulnerable than where I was before (which, though it was painful, was tough and explosively ecstatic) but I can’t help but believe it was a movement toward something superior, at least on days when my thought is clear.

Much of spirituality is just crude philosophical self-defense. Even much or most of Christianity-Judaism is a reversion to the old pre-Judaic religion. Reading Bernstein put an the end to all that for me, and that is why so many people who were allies (in metaphysical individuality) before began to intuit a sort of treason, even before I became conscious of it myself.

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This morning I reread the section of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism that gave me the word I desperately needed to designate the bizarre world-altering experience I’d had reading Nietzsche: “hermeneutics”. I remember the relief I felt when Bernstein quoted this passage from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, I continue, when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.