Philosophy is less the pursuit of truth than it is the pursuit of the genuinely persuasive.

The obvious question: persuasive to whom? That depends on the philosopher’s temperament and circumstances – and perhaps degree of maturity.

Buddy Holly died 50 years ago today.

• “Peggy Sue”
• “Well All Right”
• “Dearest”
• “Love is Strange”
  
•  “Heartbeat”
• “Learning the Game”
• “Listen to Me”
• “What To Do”
• “Take Your Time”

“In media vita (In mid-life). — No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year, – ever since the day when the great liberator came to me, the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge – and not a duty, not a calamity, not a trickery! – And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others, for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure, – for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. ‘Life as a means to knowledge’ – with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily and laugh gaily, too! And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?” – Nietzsche

This passage from Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building changed my life:

A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in.

To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same. Of course, a man who is alive, is not always happy in the sense of feeling pleasant; experiences of joy are balanced by experiences of sorrow. But the experiences are all deeply felt; and above all, the man is whole and conscious of being real.

To be alive in this sense, is not a matter of suppressing some forces or tendencies, at the expense of others; it is a state of being in which all forces which arise in a man can find expression; he lives in balance among the forces which arise in him; he is unique as the pattern of forces which arise is unique; he is at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet at one with himself and his surroundings.

This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings.

The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

The rest is great, too.

For the last week, I’ve been reading Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

Bernstein’s discussion of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift, specifically the difficulties that arise in conversation between representatives of incommensurable frameworks, has been valuable.

I’ve had an unusually high number of painful conversations in the last four years, and I’m getting a clearer picture of why this is happening. Inter-paradigmatic conversations are intrinsically intellectually demanding and anxiety-provoking, even for those who love them. I am becoming increasingly aware that my taste for this kind of conversation is not only uncommon, but perverse. It has occurred to me that the sort of reaction I get when I attempt to engage people in these conversations is a natural self-defense of society, similar to a body’s response to a disease.

****

I can be buddies with nearly anyone, as long as I am polite enough not to try to establish a friendship with him. The catch is, if I sense that someone could be my friend but nonetheless insists on remaining a buddy, I don’t want to associate with him at all.

****

I’ve been fixated on the doctrine of “the death of the author” since Wednesday. Something about it offends me deeply. It’s burst into a full-blown problem. I have managed to clarify it enough that maybe I’ll get some relief from it.

Here is what I’ve come up with: Refusing to try to understand the author and his intent as fully as possible, and making this refusal a principle, is to formally seal oneself within one’s own paradigmatic horizons.

If this were limited only to the act of reading it would be detestable enough, but I think here reading signifies far more than reading – and extends inevitably to listening – the receptive element of relationship.

For me, relationship itself is reconciliation of paradigms – the enclosing of author and reader, speaker-listener and listener-speaker, within a shared horizon that encompasses both participants. Without this receptivity to the being of another, love is impossible.

What usually happens in relationships (and in conversations) is a sort of “parallel play” where one listener collages an image of the other (or of the other’s idea) out of whatever psychic clippings he has on hand, and tries as hard as possible to ignore the discrepancies between his image and the actuality of the other.

This appears at first glance to be a gentle approximation assembled roughly due to limited time and access to data. Unfortunately, I’ve been stupid enough to test this appearance. What I’ve found is that it is very similar in structure to another of my bête noire concepts, “responsible freedom” – that illusory “freedom” that survives as long as you don’t exercise that freedom as if it were your right. Similarly, these approximate friend-images depend on polite falsifications – “masks”. (One of the more horrible suspicions I’ve entertained is that all freedom is to some degree “responsible freedom, and that all love is to some degree mask.)

What this means is if you are too different from another person, and this person feels dependent on his paradigm for his own sense of security, self-esteem, mastery or purpose, that person is likely to falsify his image of you in order to protect his paradigm. Press more, and he will attack you – with his image of you, sometimes with unexpected ferocity.

This is what I call “spiritual injustice”. Spiritual justice is the will to understand each person from his own perspective; spiritual injustice is the willingness to misrepresent a person to make him fit within one’s own perspective.

Seen from this angle, the doctrine of “the author is dead” is nothing more than making a virtue of systematic spiritual injustice.

This is why the doctrine of “the author is dead” is personally offensive to me: To declare the author dead is tantamount to saying “I do not want to know you.” Without the sincere desire to know the other – however incompletely realized in practice – there is no friendship, and no possibility of love. Weirdly, in my experience it’s most unjust people who see themselves as most “loving”.

****

Politically “the author is dead” is also dangerous. Consider the spirit that dominates the world right now – Two paradigms: theocratism (the marriage of a dominant machiavellianism and a submissive religiostic fundamentalism) and liberalism (in the commonly used sense) distort one another’s images into strawmen.

****

Getting back to Bernstein’s book, my hope is that by studying the phenomenon of paradigm shift I can have more justice toward injustice. I believe this is the supreme structure of virtue: the ouroboros. When justice has justice for injustice it is most sublimely just; when love loves the loveless it is the most sublime love; when the rational understands the irrational; beauty sees the beauty in hideousness, etc.

****

A very tentative hypothesis: Understanding the term “ontological hermeneutics” might require a conversion experience – living through at least once the process of an invisible background becoming a foreground against a new background. Until then, hermeneutics remains an “external” or “Apollinian” study of perspective focusing mostly on effects of context on opinion.

****

What most people call “Christianity” might very well be a spiritual injustice perpetrated against Christ – and the perpetual process of overcoming that injustice. By that I mean overcoming the injustices against Christ who spoke the parables, fed the hungry and healed the sick at least as much as I mean overcoming the injustice of killing the Christ on the cross. Only Christ can have justice for Christ.

An animated depiction of individual and collective attention (intended as information design, not as art):

The scene is a large room with a table in the middle. It appears to be night time, the whole thing is filmed in shades of dark gray and black.

A young woman walks into the room, surrounded by two amorphous blobs of illumination, a dim larger one that expands and contracts smoothly and a brighter one that encases her body but flares and darts out in tendrils, sometimes several at once. When the woman walks into the room the brightness initially shoots around the room illuminating various objects, with the dim light seeps behind, gradually filling out the room. She sits at the table.

A young man walks into the room, also encased with two blobs of illumination. His light has a different character. His dim light stays closer to his body and holds a spherical shape. It tends to contract. His bright light moves more slowly and systematically than the woman’s. Where the woman’s brightness moves in abrupt, multiple streams the man’s tends to stay in a single, broader and smoother stream.

When the man sees the woman, his light immediately stops moving about and concentrates entirely on her, leaving his own body entirely.

Shortly after the woman spots the man. Her light extends from herself out toward him and then, following his light, the brightness traces back to herself, so her own body and his body are brightly illuminated with a connecting strand of light. Her dimmer light continues to illuminate the whole room, while his dimmer light contracts around the woman and the table, contracting even further as he sits down with her and begins to talk.

As they talk their lights move together in a sort of dance. Her bright light continues to dart out around around the room, and his follows behind. Sometimes his bright light moves upward, straight overhead, apparently on no object at all. Hers shoots along his line, then darts away, hitting random spots in the room simultaneously, then returning, leaving, weaving. Occasionally their lights converge and move together back and forth, alternating between the man and the woman, then the lights diverge again.

A third person walks up to the table and sets an object on it. The lights center around the object and begin to synchronize until the two brighter lights appear to be a single light with waves moving around its edges and the two dimmer lights blur into a gradation.

Dewey’s primary move appears to be the Hegelian dialectic (thesis / antithesis / synthesis ). An example of this move is his analysis of Marxism and Libertarianism. He saw the two of them opposed within a common assumption that collective human action is predominantly economic in nature. Within this view socialism appears to exist along the continuum between the extremes. Dewey, however, places socialism outside the continuum, for the reason that it acknowledges the existence and legitimacy of other forces which influence collective human life both at the individual and coordinated-collective (a.k.a. political) scale.

*

I tried to draw the Hegelian dialectic structure before I knew Hegel (or Kant, or probably someone else) had invented it. I called it a “duodualism” diagram.

After I drew it, I began to see the form everywhere in both in ideas and in symbolism (for instance in the Carthusian cross).

Heidegger saw angst as the response of a being (Dasein) facing the certainty of death. I don’t know if Heidegger would have agreed with how I’ve extended his concept of angst. I understand all being as composite. Being is composed of beings, and it is the composing of being. Any being at any scale facing its demise experiences angst, and this demise does not have any necessary connection to biological death.

Through this interpretation of angst I connect Heidegger to Kuhn. The resistence of normal science to revolutionary science is not hatred of the novel, but the destruction to the familiar required to order the unfamiliar within a new scientific paradigm. I extend this also to practical paradigms (the breaking of habits) and poetic paradigms (the changing of spiritual vision or cultural tastes).

This is one of those intellectual moves (or “dances”) I half picked up, half invented and started using without explicitly acknowledging the modifications I made.

Involvement (being involved) – ORIGIN late Middle English (in the senses  of enfold and entangle): from Latin involvere, from in– ‘into’ + volvere ‘to roll.’

Responsibility (being responsible) – ORIGIN late 16th cent. in the sense of answering to, corresponding: from obsolete French, from Latin respons– ‘answered, offered in return,’ from the verb respondere.

Absolution (being absolved) – ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin absolvere ‘set free, acquit,’ from ab– ‘from’ + solvere ‘loosen.’

Alienation (being made an alien) – ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French from Latin alienus ‘belonging to another,’ from alius ‘other.’
*

It is interesting to notice where in society a particular person sees himself as a participant in something to which he belongs versus where he sees himself acted upon by something apart from themselves (to slightly misuse Heidegger’s term, a “They”).

*

It seems likely that what defines a person’s political stance on the legitimacy of economic versus political power to regulate collective action is his sense of competence or incompetence (and vulnerability) in the respective social sphere. A person is likely to take responsibility where he is confident of his abilities and to feel alienated where he lacks confidence. A crude typology, based on this framing:

• Economic monist: The person who regards himself as a participant in economic life (an employee or employer) but views political organization (government) as something alien which corrupts, oppresses and/or impinges.
• Political monist: The person who regards himself as a participant in political life (a citizen or activist, working at anything from the neighborhood to international scale) but views economic organization (often the corporation) as something alien which corrupts, oppresses and/or impinges.
• Social nihilist: The person who regards himself as an individual trying to live his own life with minimal economic and political impingement.
• Social pluralist: The person regards himself as a community leader, working politically and economically to control the condition of his own, his family’s and his community’s life.

*

There are other examples of alienation. There are those who feel that history goes on entirely outside of themselves. There are also those who believe God is a being who exists outside of apart from themselves. Finally, some people think friend exists outside of and apart from themselves.

I make a distinction between remembering, recollecting and recalling. Remembering is reproducing on demand the content of memory. Recollecting is assembling disconnected memories into something coherent. Recalling is evoking immemorable meaning and filling the hollowness of memory.

*

Yin is remembered and recollected. Yang remembers, recollects memories and recalls.

*

Reading is to remember.

Comprehension is to recollect.

Hermeneutics is to recall.

*

Facts are remembered.

Arguments are comprehended.

Meaning is understood.

They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

– Edwin Muir

If a subjective being is influenced by his conditions (which includes both fellow subjects and objects) a being who wants to be responsible for himself must also take responsibility for his surroundings.

*

An experiment: if you haven’t read the preceding etymological meditation, trying reading it then rereading the sentence above.

The importance of judgment in design (as opposed to art) is secondary to inventiveness. That does not mean judgment is unimportant, but that when objective tests of a design’s functionality are available the importance of knowing what will and won’t work is partially supplanted by the testing. When testing is available the role of judgment is to eliminate obviously nonviable designs and to choose among the viable candidates the design most likely to test well. But neither native judgment nor testing is generative. The scope of testable possibilities is determined by the inventiveness of a designer.

*

Especially in competitive situations, where solidly usable and useful options already exist for users, and some other differentiating advantage is necessary, a designer capable of imagining many coherent approaches that possess the right qualities (qualities that intersect with the spirit of the brand and the desires of the target users) is more valuable than one who generates reliable, unimaginative ones. The availability of testing means designers are free to try new approaches at a much lower risk than full implementation trial-and-error.

In fact, designers are now not only free but increasingly obligated to take risky new approaches, precisely because the availability of testing has made good usefulness and usability the norm. The first two-dimensions of experience, which are easily attainable through method, are now just table stakes. Knowledge of methodology is no longer enough. Inventiveness supplies the differentiating third dimension of on-brand desirability, and that is a matter of talent as well as technique. To be competitive in the new environment a designer must know how to generate useful and usable experiences that are also both desirable and deeply on-brand. It is easy to be superficially on brand, by looking cool/professional/appealing within the bounds of graphic standards. To be deeply, behaviorally on brand means to execute every apparent and behavioral detail with precisely the right style. It isn’t enough to dress the part of on-brand desirability, or even just to act it. The design must be the brand authentically, and in positive relationship with the user.

*

Culturally, the availability of usability testing is great news for designers. If you were to survey designers on the most and least pleasant aspects of their job, ideation would certainly fall on the “most pleasant” end of the spectrum and arguing with clients over matters of judgment would land at the extreme of “least pleasant”. Testing can foster a spirit of collaboration, where the ultimate questions of functionality are settled in laboratory experiments, as opposed to in conference room conflicts where in reality the designer is close to powerless. The question is no longer “which of us is more qualified to know what will work?” or “which of us is the ultimate decider?” but rather, “which design should we try first?” The latter is a much more enjoyable conversation.

This pertains not only to usability. Usefulness is even more easily tested. Desirability and conformity to brand are slightly more difficult to test, but not excessively difficult.