Category Archives: Philosophy

Anaximander, Levinas and the injustice of appropriation

Philosophy

It occurred to me this morning, the play of infinity and totality can be projected into  Anaximander’s single surviving fragment.

Simplicius transmitted the fragment as:

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

 Nietzsche presented Anaximander’s maxim as:

Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.

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It seems to me that Gadamer’s idea of appropriation of tradition involves grasping older symbolic concretions in increasingly differentiated terms. (Did Anaximander himself think in phenomenological terms? Probably not. Does his thought expose a truth whose structure holds in the most rarefied phenomenological insight? Yes.) Is appropriation essentially an act of abstraction, projection and application, rather than recovery of the original idea?

Perhaps a true thought compels through its empirical fitness but persuades through manifesting universal structures which continue to apply to ever deeper empirical observations. (The universal structures are not formal rules of intelligibility, but truths revealed through application of those rules. What I am trying to do is differentiate the structures I have in mind from Kant’s tables and also from rules of logic.)

By “deeper” I mean greater intellectual dimension, downwardly into chthonic irruption, and upwardly into cultural epiphany. Depth is a function of apperceptions subsuming apperceptions. From what I’ve seen so far, it should be assumed that no apperception is ultimate. Every apperception is self-evidently ultimate until overtaken by higher apperception.

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Every apperception unjustly calls itself ultimate until it is overtaken and illuminated by higher apperception; at which time it pays penance, returning to the apeiron from which all things are articulated.

Spiral

 

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The pain of the truth of Levinas is that of the Dionysian insight, which is knowing the apeiron.

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(Sensual overindulgence is what Dionysianism looks like from the outside, but Dionysianism seen from the outside is precisely what Dionysianism is not.)

Metaphysics

Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphysics – the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: representing medieval Latin metaphysica, based on Greek ta meta ta phusika ‘the things after the Physics,’ referring to the sequence of Aristotle’s works [crazy!]: the title came to denote the branch of study treated in the books, later interpreted as meaning the science of things transcending what is physical or natural.

Theophanic – of a visible manifestation to humankind of God or a god. ORIGIN Old English, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek theophaneia, from theos ‘god’ + phainein ‘to show.’

Exophanic – of revelation of the fact of beyondness. ORIGIN Greek, from exo ‘outside’ + phainein ‘to show.’

Cataphatic –  of knowledge of God obtained through affirmation. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek kataphatikos ‘affirmative,’ from kataphasis ‘affirmation,’ from kata– (as an intensifier) + phanai ‘speak.’

Apophatic – of knowledge of God obtained through negation. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek apophatikos ‘negative,’ from apophasis ‘denial,’ from apo– ‘other than’ + phanai ‘speak.’

Transcendent – beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience. ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French transcendre or Latin transcendere, from trans– ‘across’ + scandere ‘climb.’

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My definition of metaphysics: The philosophy of that which is beyond direct experience.

Obviously, this is tricky territory. How does one think about that which is, by definition, unthinkable?  Not only is the “object” of metaphysics beyond the reach of thought (and therefore as nonsensical as sight without seeing). The possibility is raised of intellectual entities that thought cannot wrap its fingers around even the entity is sitting in the palm of its hand. The latter idea might seem complete nonsense to many… but not to the soul who has even once come to understand something initially unintelligible and subsequently discovered that not only this particular thing was illuminated with intelligibility, but the entire world has now opened out in a way inconceivable prior to the epiphany.

Until a person has undergone the epiphany of what I call practical transcendence – having an actual before and after experience of intelligibility – the tendency is to treat metaphysics strictly as thinking about objects that are beyond our knowledge. Every single metaphysical conception a thinker has is marked either with this awareness or its conspicuous absence. For all I know there are many other similar marks. This is the one I know.

Those who don’t know don’t know that they don’t know unless they actively work to discover it. Otherwise, everything you can think of is self-evidently knowable, and nothing if left over. “Give me one intelligible example of something that’s unintelligible. Just what I thought: you babble nonsense and cannot provide a single example. Why should I take this seriously?” That’s a good question!

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Things would be very different if blindness and darkness were the same thing. Light-and-knowledge analogies break down at this point. Sight sees objects in presence of light and notices darkness in the absence of light. Blindness lacks sight. It is wrong to say blindness sees nothing. Blindness does not even see nothing. For a concrete demonstration of the difference try a blind spot experiment. Really try it. Don’t just read about it.

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A cataphatic metaphysic (which posits specific knowledge of what is beyond the limits of our knowledge) and an apophatic metaphysic (which posits limits to our knowledge) is total. It separates religious dogmatism from other religious forms. Religious dogmatism is only bad when it becomes severed from a religious tradition rooted in something inconceivably deeper. A dogmatist excommunicated from a sustaining community with all its spiritual organs intact is in serious spiritual trouble. He is at risk of loving his dogma as a thing that he knows and possesses that closes him to the radical beyondness and protects him from dread.

An exophanic apophatic metaphysic and a transcendental apophatic metaphysic is also different. An expohanic metaphysic tries to acknowledge and relate all experiences that indicate beyondness, which means all perceptions, feelings, intuitions, explicit thoughts are given legitimacy as entities they are and are interrelated. An exophanic metaphysic is an ontology that sees the terminus of ontology as beyond the grasp of ontology itself.

What I am calling a transcendental metaphysic employs hermeneutic practice to find ways to expand the scope of ontology (what is often called “horizon”, not in order to demystify the beyond, but to intensify and deepen the mystery of the infinite beyond that always remains despite our human efforts. Pursuit of the infinite is divine futility.

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Metaphysics is the philosophy of the Other.

We love only what is Other; what cannot be possessed. We can possess a dogma or an apple. We cannot possess the infinite which surrounds us.

Whether you are aware of it or not, belief in the future is metaphysical, and so is belief in the past. Belief in matter is metaphysical, and so is belief in the space that extends around you. Belief in who you may someday become is metaphysical, and so are your beliefs of who you were as a child. Most of all, however, each of us is to the other is metaphysical when we accept one another as soul, as Thou, as one who lives and thinks and feels and sees, to whom we make the gassho or say “Shalom” or “Namaste“. Every soul is the whole world – vast, unique and interlapping with our own world.

Each metaphysical belief is only a symbol of Other. The Other is not reducible to any symbol nor to every symbol, for that matter.

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Thomas Kuhn, coiner that well-drained term “paradigm shift“:

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, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

Truth is for the vulnerable

Philosophy, Synesis

The phenomenological concept of “intentionality” (that subjectivity is necessarily bound up with objects – that there’s no seeing without something seen, no thinking without thoughts, etc.) is a clue to a new path to self-understanding and other-understanding, which makes the world much more vast and uncanny. To authentically pursue understanding of another person (which necessarily an uncompletable pursuit) – the other must not be understood as an object of intentionality, but rather as a partner in intentionality, a co-subject with whom one involves oneself in participating in reality. One understands others by how the entire world changes through involvement with them in a shared world. The image of the other is part of the world, but cannot be primary. Behind the face of every other is a transcendental gate. Involved cosubjectivity of synesis is an opportunity for literal, practical, experienced transcendence. What you come to know through synesis is impossible to anticipate until it is undergone.

Synesis is philosophical friendship and it is also the essence of literature.

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That old complaint of women: “He sees me like an object” is actually deeply insightful. (The cliche that all cliches are true is no less true for being a cliche.) It means “He won’t see with me, won’t androgize with me, won’t be involved with me, won’t realize he can participate in being that exceed him.” In other words, “He doesn’t know the possibility of marriage.” To make it worse, the man who takes the world as a world of objects cannot be appealed to because appeals presuppose intersubjectivity, which is precisely the realm of truth he’s closed to, and can never be brought to know unless he chooses to go there himself.

Intersubjective knowledge (direct experience of intersubjective world-transformation) requires receptivity. Receptivity is the domain of the vulnerable.

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The qualities associated with the feminine should be differentiated from the qualities of the vulnerable and further from the qualities of weakness and passivity. This would not only benefit women, but all people disfavored by the current language, truth standards, “best practices”, values, ethical codes – our ethos.

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Have you ever been in a situation that somehow made it impossible to say or do what you knew you ought to be able to say or do? Have you ever noticed you spontaneously become yourself around some people and become something you are not around others? And by “become something you are not” I do not mean you put on a mask of some kind and fake it. I mean you literally cannot be who you are, even inwardly.

Some people have never felt this way. Those people are of superior character. The whole ethos affirms it. They’ve never felt moved to question that fact. But, have some compassion: If you were in their place, would you question it? No – you would not question it, and you would be deeply irritated to see others questioning it.

The “analysis paralysis” myth

Philosophy

“What does the word ‘obstinate’ mean? – The shortest route is not the most direct but that upon which the most favorable winds swell our sails: thus do seafarers teach us. Not to follow this teaching is to be obstinate: firmness of character is here polluted by stupidity.” – Nietzsche

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The premise of this post: a culture of deliberation only arises intentionally. Effective deliberation happens only when a group decides on deliberation as its principle and enforces that principle.

“Analysis paralysis” appears to be caused by analysis, but is in fact caused by resistance to reason, by those who think they can use means other than reason to get their way.

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Those who appeal to urgency and the need for expedience to shut down deliberation and take immediate action rarely, following the logic of their argument, accept the course of action advised by their opponent. Nor do they realize or admit that resisting deliberation can take ten times longer than… simply deliberating in good faith.

The reason is obvious: in many cases the urgency is exaggerated or manufactured and expedience is only justification for coercion for people who simply prefer coercion, or who are averse to the discomfort of hearing out unfamiliar perspectives.

(This tactic has been highly effective and remains popular in politics. A party will exaggerate a threat in order to suppress dissent, and institute “emergency” measures, all in the name of urgency. Beware the politician in a hurry…)

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If a group consists largely of submissive souls who are not inclined to demand respect and are not outraged having their perspectives disregarded, the most expedient path is to establish a hierarchy invested with coercive powers. A domineering soul leading an obedient group is highly efficient. What is can accomplish is limited but it will accomplish what it can very rapidly.

However, if a group is constituted of people who consider respect to be non-negotiable, the most expedient path is to make deliberation impossible to circumvent. If a domineering soul harbors even the slightest hope that he can force his will rather than engage in genuine deliberation he will waste hours or days arguing that there is no time to discuss matters. Or he will resort to whatever forms of intimidation he believes will be tolerated by the group.

A group has to decide as a group what behaviors it will tolerate and not tolerate. The real threat to progress is not endless deliberation over what to do, but an absence of clarity around how the group will come to a decision.

By making its principles clear a group can set rules for itself and follow them efficiently, whether those rules are a militaristic “I make the calls” ethic, or a more collaborative and empathic style of arriving at a common understanding. Clarity also helps weed out misfits. If a person cannot tolerate coercion (or deliberation), knowing ahead of time that he is entering an ethos where coercion (or deliberation) is tolerated he can avoid being subjected to what he finds unacceptable.

But having a laissez-faire attitude of “you two come to a decision yourselves” – this presupposes deliberation. When what is at issue is deliberation itself – when the argument comes down to one party arguing that he does not have time to understand the other – a laissez-faire attitude toward the dispute undermines deliberation.

Deliberation is much more fragile than coercion. Deliberation only arises when a group decides on it. Coercion is perfectly at home in the jungle, in the desert, in a breakdown of social order – anywhere an individual survives or perishes alone.

The strong and tough naturally love coercion, and they create conditions that favor their strength and toughness. The vulnerable need the protection of one another and need to understand the conditions under which they can flourish. Those conditions do not arise on their own, and they do not persist where they are not cultivated. Vulnerability is no argument against a thing.

Not a soldier

Philosophy

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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I admire the virtues of a good soldier, but I am proud to be the opposite of a soldier.

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A nation who doesn’t honor its soldiers is in trouble.

A nation whose highest ideal is the soldier is in trouble.

Religion and political alienation

Philosophy

Alienation: The state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved. (ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin alienatio(n-), from the verb alienare ‘estrange,’ from alienus.)

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From the review of Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age:

“The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it”, says Voegelin, “is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation”. The Ecumenic Age – the age when the great religions, especially Christianity, originated – denotes a period in the history of mankind that roughly extends from the rise of the Persian Empire to the fall of the Roman. “An epoch in history was marked indeed when the societies which had differentiated the truth of existence through revelation and philosophy succumbed, in pragmatic history, to new societies of the imperial type”.

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A thought occurred to me this morning in spin class: If our modern conception of religion arose in conditions where remote and overwhelmingly powerful governments prevented citizens from taking responsibility for their own political fate and forced them instead to find meaning apart from the realm of political action, is it possible that religion (as we have come to conceive it) assumes and reinforces an essentially alienated stance toward government? That is, do Ecumenic religions by the way they frame collectivity and individuality encourage political non-involvement and passivity and treat political leadership as radically other?

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Perhaps government that wishes to operate as an empire (with a distinct leadership class and a alienated and submissive citizenry) and Ecumenic Age religions (which treat government as an irresistible dominating force beneath which one’s best strategy is alienated parallel coexistance as an individual or a member of a counterculture) are symbiotic.

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Was original Christianity just a form of Judaism giving up once and for all on Jewish political autonomy? Before Paul’s evangelical mission Christianity was a Jewish movement. But in its response to political alienation – radical political resignation paired with radical self-responsibility, and meaning rooted in the individual soul supported by a counterculture – Christianity’s appeal became so universally compelling its spread beyond the Jews was inevitable.

Who could be a more qualified incubator for this vision of religion than a people who struggled and survived repeated enslavement and liberation?

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It is true that many Christians are fervent defenders of democracy, but it is not at all clear that what these Christians are electing is a president, a fellow citizen raised for a time to preside over our self-government by-the-people-for-the-people.

It appear what they wish to elect is something more like a temporary Emperor. Under this kind of order their Christian subculture continues to make sense. If they can’t have their Emperor, no problem. Now they can have something even more to their liking: a Big Government to oppress them and to provide material for innumerable lone voices crying in unison in the wilderness.

Whether they win and elect an Emperor or lose and find themselves oppressed by Big Government, the Ghost of the Roman Empire never fails to appear and to provide a reality-reinforcing antithesis to their Holy Ghost.

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.