Category Archives: Philosophy

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation

Hermeneutics

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a poetic demonstration of Gadamerian historicity. It is a self-interpretive narrative experienced from the inside, degrading retroactively as it unfolds into the future, always faithful to the truth of the utter faithlessness of memory. The content of memory might be the past, but its sole allegiance is to the future.

Kaufman is the best philosophical filmmaker I know of. He seems gimmicky because his urgency is rare, and his ingenuity is distracting.

Intelligence and urgency

Philosophy

I like this Aldous Huxley quote: “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”

Does that mean that a Huxley-qualified intellectual who thinks sex is infinitely interesting is in some sense superior to one who never saw why sex was such a big deal?

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Intelligence is one important element of intellectuality, but urgency is also important. Intelligence and urgency increase one another’s effect exponentially, and sometimes catastrophically. The poor souls who are both urgent and intelligent to an extreme drive way the hell too far out into the frontiers of knowledge and create great caches of insight where nobody has ever been, then they die in solitude. They literally sacrifice themselves to knowledge.

The sacrifice is redeemed by the merely intelligent and the merely urgent. The merely intelligent build infrastructure around the new knowledge – sanitation (solid scholarship), communications (standard language, histories, textbook knowledge), logistics (publishing, championing). The merely urgent digest all these insights, simplify them, smooth them and carry them back to civilization. The merely urgent are the agents of popular change.

I can tell you: there is a lot out of astonishing insight out there, freely available, that civilization has not even begun to digest. The question is whether we’ll eat, or whether we’ll keep pointing at our empty distended bellies as proof that we’re already too full. We’re starving to death on a mountain of nourishment.

The most fascinating knowledge in the world

Philosophy

I’ve put considerable effort into learning the most fascinating things in the whole world. Therefore, by my own standards I know the most fascinating things in the world, and being someone who prizes knowledge, I have made myself into my own ideal of the most fascinating person in the world. It’s too bad these standards are strictly my own. Dang. (But there’s an upside: because knowledge isn’t treasured it’s inexpensive. I can buy miraculously good books for ludicrously low prices. This book I’m reading right now ought to cost more than a house, but I got it for $20, brand-new.) Still, I’d love to meet someone who recognizes the value of the insights I’ve worked for and fought for. I feel like I’ve accumulated zillions of dollars in a currency nobody exchanges.

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Maybe it would be fruitful to ask some questions about what makes my fascinating knowledge so fascinating. Is the knowledge itself fascinating? Are the applications of the knowledge fascinating, as case studies? Does the knowledge itself only become fascinating as it is being applied, so that the conjoining of theory and practice is what is fascinating? Or is the activity of applying the knowledge the locus of the fascination – and if it is fascinating as an activity, is it a participatory or spectatorly fascination? Or is the fascination bound up with the entity acted upon in the application of the knowledge? Or is it being, oneself, the object of the application, being acted upon, affected? Maybe it’s a matter of presentation or packaging.

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I asked myself a question five years ago: If I discovered there were no practical purpose at all in my learning and thinking, would I do it anyway? My answer was “yes”. I need to keep it that way. And I need to protect my life as a means to do this learning and thinking. Because when I ask that same question about just about everything else my answer is “no”. That “yes” and that “no” is one’s ethical kernel.

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Love is what we do for no reason.

Once you are clear on what in your life is ends and what is means you can be a real son-of-a-bitch.

Maybe my existence in regard to all other people is absolutely purposeless. Then what? What do we owe one another?

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

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Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

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We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

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I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

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There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

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How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

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Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

What is truth?

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Some ways truth is established, practically:

  • In representing the contents of life in a clear, orderly and self-evident way. Truth = tidiness.
  • In accurately anticipating and influencing the future. Truth = security.
  • In bringing fragmentary facts home to a unified body of understanding. Truth = digestion.
  • In reaching agreements with those around you. Truth = home.

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On that last point, truth as home: Young philosophers love to believe they don’t need a home, that they don’t need to share truth.

Fact is, the philosopher needs to share his truth more than any other kind of person. Sharing truth is the philosopher’s job.

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The youthful philosopher (who seeks truth) is larval, just fry. He is aware only that he cannot share the prevalent truth. This is his point of departure. He heads off toward an oasis – his truth – he sees hovering on the edge of the horizon. He dreams of sitting at the side of his own pool, reflecting in solitude to his heart’s content. He drives at his truth, driven by idiotic instinct, just like a salmon drawn back to the head of the stream where he was born. Does he reach his truth? Yes, but not the truth he thought he’d find. He doesn’t find any oasis, but he certainly finds himself submerged in something cold and disturbingly fluid, and it can be summarized as something like: “My God, I don’t want to be alone here.”

Look for this form, and you’ll see it again and again. Wittgenstein slowly losing his mind alone in his house high on a cliff above Norwegian fjords; Nietzsche (who called his philosophical kind “hyperboreans”) living alone in Sils Maria; Christopher McCandless hitchiking to Alaska and dying there; and so on.

Anyone who goes out into true solitude and comes back knows three things for certain: 1) physical sustenance is nowhere near sufficient; 2) the power to coerce is the opposite of what is needed; 3) religion is not about magical miracles, but something more radically surprising.

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It doesn’t matter how tough or antisocial a human being is. A person in solitary confinement goes insane.

A philosopher who thinks too far can fall into plain-sight solitary confinement. He can speak with others, but he cannot make himself heard and he cannot digest most kinds of company.

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Longing is the core of mystery
Longing itself brings the cure
The only rule is suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,
And what you want to happen
In time, sacrificed.

– Rumi

Trees

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

When we walk on the forest floor, the part of the tree we are given at eye-level is the narrowest point, the trunk, slightly above the tree’s midpoint.

To see how the trunk spreads itself upward into the open light, we can simply turn our faces to the sky. However, to see how the trunk spreads downward, we have to dig with our hands, and come to terms with dirt and sweat. Tender leaves and delicate blossoms will not be found down there. This is where the tree braces itself against the weather and procures its nourishment. Below the ground, a tree is not fucking around: it is all business.

That’s one way to see it.

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Through a seed, the world organizes itself into a tree.

It is also true that a seed “grows” into a tree. We know what this means. But let’s not get carried away with the usefulness of our habitual intellectual devices. Objectivity is instrumentally useful (techne), but this usefulness is true in a certain limited sense; it does not make it “the truth”. To get closer to something like “the truth” we must acclimate ourselves to a different and larger mode of knowing, a mode where we consciously articulate meaningful order out of the whole: the profoundly chaotic world we have arisen and awakened within. What is this chaos, essentially? It is akin to being an infant, or waking up from a deep afternoon nap.

Maternalization

Philosophy

For many years I was fond of pointing out something sort of awful: New mothers are the most selfish, egotistical beings in the entire world.

They see themselves as the pinnacle of altruism, selflessly sacrificing themselves to another person who is not themselves.

Obviously, that is a diaperload of crap. New mothers merely transfer their selfishness to their baby: their outrageous personal ambitions, fantasies, preoccupations. Every megalomaniacal, hyper-romantic conceit the woman wisely kept tucked within the concealment of her subjectivity explodes out of her in a massive fireball of unrestrained self-indulgence, onto this allegedly external, separate being in her arms… For all practical purposes, that baby is her. This is why new mothers are in so many cases universally reviled, even though nobody will admit it.

I always liked very much how horrible and obviously true this observation was. (I do pretty seeing; but I do ugly seeing, too. I just like truth; and when the truth is ugly I know I love truth for her mind, not for her pleasing features.)

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Here is an example of a perspectival shift I have had on this topic.

I now see unrestrained maternal self-indulgence as the ideal transegoic experience, of entry into authentic intersubjective relationship, what I call Logos.

Postpartum depression is the destruction of a girl’s ego under pressure of maternal responsibility, which any mother will tell you is absolutely crushing. The mother undergoes biological bootcamp. She is disoriented, sleep deprived, stripped of all familiar comforts and freedoms, ordered around by the insistent cries of an imperious officer. She is broken down and built back up into a mother. The mother is no longer the girl she was. That girl could not accomplish the things the mother has to. But the mother is not a stand-alone woman. She is a participant (probably a broken one) in a new transegoic being, the mother-baby, which comprises the mother and the baby, but is not reducible to the two individuals. I’ll call this “maternalization”.

But, in exchange for this period of depression, which is nothing less than a nonintellectual analogue of philosophical perplexity, the mother gets to experience the joy of the transegoic, which is the analogue of philosophical breakthrough. She gets to feel the nestedness of being, that we are in each in We as much as each of us are I.

Mothers worship their babies like little gods because the mother-baby relationship is the first religion many mothers have experienced. Worship is the natural response.

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That women put their children in daycare because they think they ought to want to pursue a career… it overwhelms me with misogynistic contempt. Women (on the whole) still lack independence of thought. Here is immediate, primordially intense reality revealing itself, and what does your average “liberated” woman do? She remains enslaved to general opinion, to all-too-common sense, to vanity. She’d rather appear free than to exercise authentic freedom and risk being seen as Not Independent. So, she tears her guts out, comes to work in despair, weeping… and accepts this as normal and necessary. Phuh.

(Note: Obviously, none of this vitriol applies to women who have no choice but to work, nor does it apply to women who sincerely love their careers more than their babies. I’m only talking about women who ignore what is closest in favor of what is furthest.)

Not vision

Philosophy

Imagining something vividly is not “having a vision”; nor is imagining something vaguely but intensely. 

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Very few people have a vision of anything. They’re sitting in the same seats as the rest of the audience, seeing what everyone else, seeing as everyone else sees.

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Having a vision is having a vital line of sight on something, a place where others – if they are willing – can walk and see from, too. Vision isn’t about the object. It is about the subject, and about cosubjects.

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Do you know why we all love to relax with popular fiction? Because the author is writing to an already seated audience. We can remain seated, too, where we already are. The interpretation is effortless and there is no possibility of angst.

Seeing follows looking

Philosophy

I reread the David Foster Wallace piece I posted yesterday. I thought I agreed with him, but now that I’ve reread the whole thing I realize that while I agree with his goal I disagree with him on how the goal is reached.

We do not get to choose our beliefs. We are only able to move about and see from different angles. What we see at these angles determines our beliefs for us.

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Starting with the belief you’d like to have and shifting angles in order to make the belief believable 1) is intellectual dishonest, and 2) will leave you with bad-faith “faith” that puts the heart and mind in conflict.

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If you hate what you see, your only recourse is to look differently. You cannot change your seeing directly. The seeing is determined by the looking. You have to work with your angle of sight. Take the metaphor of “perspective”, of “seeing differently”, of “insight” seriously. Stop squinting. Keep your eyes open. Get your intellect off its ass, out of its comfy chair and make it walk around its objects until the objects show themselves to you in a way that reveals new and better meaning.

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Intellectual honesty without ideals is cheap. Ideals without intellectual honesty is cheap. The marriage of intellectual honesty with ideals is more difficult and much more valuable.

Read my mind (part 2)

Philosophy

(I wrote this in 2008, but kept it private. I’m not sure why. I’m making it public now because it seems more relevant than ever.)

If the leadership of an organization is not attuned to the needs and sensibilities of those they lead, the administrative layer will thicken in compensation. Everything will have to be codified, be made explicit, denatured, formalized and mechanical. This is the consequence of leadership that leads from a thick distance, tries to objectify and functionalize those they lead.

The leadership will need everything spelled out for them and they still won’t get it.

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For most of us it would be an improvement to be treated like a tool. A craftsman feels a tool as he works. A craftsman doesn’t just “set expectations” with the tool and demand remarkable, profitable work to happen simply because the tool is top-quality. A surgeon would never pick up his scalpel wearing thick, wool mittens.

Read my mind

Philosophy

I believe women have the sacred right to punish the men who claim to love them when those men fail to read their minds. I am not joking or being ironic.*

A man who protests that he is not able to read minds, who demands clear, explicit communication does not deserve a life with a woman. (And he’ll probably be the first to agree: “I don’t deserve this.”) If he cannot read her that means he is not really with her, attuned to her. He still sees her as an object placed within his own environment, against his individual background, to be seen “whole against the sky” — and contrary to the opinion of some of the world’s foremost experts on love, that is not love, but, rather cheap, youthful infatuation.

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Women, especially ones who lean toward second-wave feminism, tend to be a bit confused about masculine perception. Every man, from the basest semi-animal brute to the highest culture, always and invariably responds to his kind of woman as if to an object: the meaning of the woman flows in through the man’s eyes and senses. The issue is not whether the woman is experienced as a beautiful object to a man, it is whether he experiences her as poetry or as utility. If the former is the case, the woman is a poetic object and therefore a primordially intense object-mediated subjectivity, with whom the man will be preoccupied with and to whom he will be attuned. (And the woman will not only be beautiful, she will be beauty itself, its origin, its standard, and its terminus.) If the the woman is merely useful functionally or socially or emotionally… that’s when a woman is an object in the worst way.

The unforgivable sin in marriage is for a man to fail to become so deeply attuned to his wife that he is literally spiritually one with her, completely capable of reading her mind and responding to her and to the world as an extension of their shared will. This, and nothing else, is marriage. If a man can achieve such a thing with a dog or a toaster oven, I say join the two in holy matrimony. But if a man cannot love should not be permitted make a mockery of marriage simply by submitting to the whole legal and religious wedding rigmarole and bolting his name onto that of his unfortunate female counterpart.

One last moral point: if you’re not married before you have a child, you’d better make yourself married. It is never too late. It is not enough to just stick around. You have to figure out how to love your family for real, or you are a failure as a husband and father.

(* NOTE: Not that it’s not funny.)

Much too much

Hermeneutics

The surviving bits of my good taste are breaking down. Now I’m quoting Nick Drake lyrics: “If songs were lines in a conversation / the situation would be fine.”

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This has been said before, but it is true enough to bear repeating: some people really are palatable only after they’re safely gone. Once they’re out of the way you can invent over them a bit, tone them down, lend them dignity, make them self-sufficient, or even invest them with power. When they’re right there with you, though, they can protest at what you’ve made of them. Or they can ask for something you are unwilling to give. And what if what you refuse is precisely that which you cannot imagine yourself refusing anyone?

As a direct result of what appears to be a universal cultural condition, these unpalatable people leave themselves behind in diluted forms, in sounds and images and words, sometimes in legends – passive forms easy to falsify and adore. Alive and close up, as a speaking face – much too much.

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Art is an act of desperation. The rest of what we call art is craft, entertainment, stimulation and vain noise.