Category Archives: Philosophy

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.

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, metaphysics

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

This morning Susan asked if I finally passed last week’s philosophical kidney stone. She says I seem to have worked something out.

I had a productive weekend. I think I figured out how phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and metaphysics fit together now as one coherent attitude toward life. I figured it out in a wordless way, though, so I can’t quite express it, yet. (I expect an image or analogy to occur, soon.) I believe this constellation of ideas is essentially liberal. I think I also see how it differs from conservatism, and especially neoconservatism.

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Good article: “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

Borges – “The Aleph”

Judaism, Philosophy

I found Borges’s “The Aleph” online and put it in my wiki. It is a portait of intersubjective betrayal.

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The theme of intersubjective betrayal is terribly important. Intersubjective betrayal is the kind of betrayal we moderns reserve as our sacred right. It is also, incidentally, the most deeply damaging kind of betrayal. According to us, our subjectivity is our private property, and being our own property we can dispose of it as we wish: we are allowed to invent; that is, we are permitted to lie arbitrarily. Unfortunately, this attitude precludes genuine love, and also authentic culture. To be honest about one’s subjective existence means to share subjectivity with another. Sharing of subjectivity is the ground of love. To be intersubjectively dishonest/”inventive” is to chop out the roots of love and to salt its soil. If you believe things have somehow gone deeply wrong in our culture, consider the possibility that the origin of the problem is the privatization of the subject.

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I see “The Aleph” as a complement to the better-known “The Secret Miracle”, which… wow – as I write this I’m realizing there’s a lot more depth to “The Secret Miracle” than I’d noticed. It is no accident that Jaromir Hladik was Jewish. At this moment the story appears to me less as a meditation on time in general, than on the Jewish understanding of time and intersubjectivity.

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Judaism is the intersubjective religion. To speak mythically: Christianity is the slow dawning of the strange fact that the gentiles are the lost tribe.

Do you speak mythos? (Or, to put it mythically: do you have “ears that hear”?)

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I’d much rather be insane than bored.

What I would really love: a very beautiful shared insanity, which faithfully includes everything and excludes nothing, which interrelates and orders the entirety of subjective and objective existence. Unfortunately there are very few genuine philosophers in the world, so everyone believes our current not-so-beautiful, deeply fragmented, semi-shared insanity is reality itself.

The dance

Pragmatism

I do a lot of intellectual collaboration at work, and it’s helping me grasp something important about group dynamics: deep teaching and learning are often accomplished in the background unnoticed, while facts and explicit methodology are exchanged in the foreground – and mistaken for the totality of the shared knowledge.

The background can be characterized as the subjective and practical dimension of the sharing, or what I have been calling “attunement”. (I picked up the word from Heidegger, but I am using it differently, to mean an inter-subjective sharing of practice and perspective.)

Attunement can be compared with either learning to dance or inventing a dance with another. The learning is not objective, though it does involve facts. It is learning subjective “moves”, imitating another’s intellectual motions until the motions become one’s own; the new motion becomes second-nature. Then the dance can proceed semi-consciously with partners in response to the total situation, including the other subjects and the objects. The shared consciousness is unselfconsciously absorbed in its objects, until it chooses to self-reflect. The goal, however, is not bound up in the self-reflection. It is bound up in a new way to see and think and act and often also to feel.

(When I was 14 I read a book on tennis. It offered an underhanded trick for destroying your opponent’s serve. Ask your opponent to explain his serve to you. The fluid naturalness of unselfconscious practice gets entangled in self-reflection and broken into discrete pieces. Or think about learning to play a song; or learning to read a new author and hear his natural voice.)

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The books I have always loved to read are the books in which the author dances. (The author can never be dead to me. I read because nobody is more alive and present to me than the authors I love.) Years ago I was confused and unnerved by the fact that I was rarely able to give summaries of the content of the books I’d read. It looked like I’d retained nothing, but I knew I’d retained something perfectly – I could not articulate it. I knew I’d learned it, though, because when I needed it, there it was, perfectly available for application. Now I would explain it this way: after I learn a dance I can do the dance spontaneously, but the instructions are not immediately available to recall. I have to figure them out each time. Half of my memory is amazing. The other half is nearly nonexistent.

(This bizarre quality of my memory is a major vulnerability. People regularly assume I can do things I cannot do at all, such as providing simple sequential instructions or recounting events that just happened. My normal state of mind appears to be completely different from what is considered normal. I am literally “differently abled” – handicapped, but with peculiar compensatory abilities that I’m learning to make valuable in the business world. I will never feel at home anywhere until the people around me understand and accept the fact of my inabilities and provide me the protection I need. I’ve been anxious my entire life, and I am really, really tired of feeling that way.)

Innately good

Holarchy, Ideas

I was raised with the idea that people are “innately good”. Good? Meaning that we are innately incapable of cruelty? That we are innately not in need of development of goodness? Or that we are born good but learn evil from “society”? Those were the various meanings I heard in the claim of innate goodness, and they all struck me as self-evidently false, even dishonest.

However when I see good as the ability to acknowledge, to be invested in, to identify oneself as belonging to super-egoic existences – relationships with other individuals and formal and informal cultural institutions that surround us and are the substance of self – I do see people as innately good. We have the innate desire to belong to and to participate in and to love all of what is beyond self, but supports and surrounds self.

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“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le veritable amour c’est l’ame, qui enveloppe le corps.’ (‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body’)” — Nietzsche

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From puritanism to radical capitalism: Humans are innately sinful –> Humans are innately self-interested –> Humans are exclusively self-interested –> Humans should be expected to behave exclusively out of self-interest –> In “the world” I should be expected to behave exclusively out of self-interest. The radical capitalism of the United States is the combination of modalism of moralities (contextual moral relativism) and puritanical moral pessimism. In the world of business a puritan permits his “innately sinful” nature to run amok and wholeheartedly “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”.

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Genuine transcendent relationship depends on honesty. This includes the sub-self beings of which compose us. They have to be taught to speak truthfully to one another, and to be patient in speaking and listening. This practice is philosophy.

Holism and systems theory

Holarchy

As far as I can tell, the only way to bridge my own intuitive holistic sensibilities and the infinitely-fragmented-and-quantified reductionist world of business is systems theory. Learning a new language is always tedious – and frankly I’m a little annoyed to be learning this merely useful language rather than something glorious like Hebrew, Greek or German – but my first priority is learning to communicate with the natives, and they speak the objective language of dollars and minutes and milestones.

The Star Grid

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

When I was ten years old I read an astronomy book which claimed that from a particular point in our galaxy one could look out into the night sky and see all the stars arranged in a perfect grid.

The idea of the Star Grid impressed me so deeply it became one of my dominant guiding idea-images.

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It is fair to ask: What if this idea is factually false? My guess is that it is factually false. However, this idea is not essentially factual but mythical, and this means fact is secondary to… something else… in the truth of the idea. The stars are the anchor point of an analogy, but the analogy was only the scaffolding of a way of seeing. Once that way of seeing was established the scaffold could be disassembled. Frankly, I care as little about the factuality of the Star Grid as I do about the metaphysical reality of the world of physics or of the existence of the so-called “historical Jesus”. As Black Elk said, after relating his tribe’s myth of its origin: “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. ”

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Does any of this mean I disregard facts? No. I respect – I obey – facts within their domain. But the domain of facts is limited. I observe the limits of factuality’s sovereignty as scrupulously as I observe factuality’s laws within its limits (in the objective world, which is “Caesar’s”). Beyond those limits I observe the laws of meaning which belong to the subjective world. (Properly understood, the subjective world is essentially “inter-subjective”. A “subject” is best understood as a point of participation within a collective spiritual existence that sustains and exceeds any particular soul. Subjectivity is rarely understood, despite the fact that everyone knows their subjectivity best of all. Did I say “despite”? I’m sorry: because. There’s known unknowns, there’s unknown unknowns, but the biggest bitch of all – the one who took Rumsfeld down – is the too-emphatically-known known.)

Know what I mean?

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All this abstract crap is utterly practical and applicable to concrete life.

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“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

Joints

Fables, myths & parables, Holarchy

Truth does not accrete in a vacuum of ignorance; truth articulates from pre-existent, pre-articulate wholes. Truth does not extend outwardly; it intends inwardly. Truth resolves; truth cannot be constructed. Truth is not a machine or a story or a system. It is not invented; it is discovered and rediscovered.

The primordial truth is a crude, chaotic undifferentiated whole. Language divides the whole into finer and finer distinctions. Only in hindsight are we born on some particular day, on a bed, in a room, in a building, in a city. In actual fact, we are all born exactly at the same time, in exactly the same place, and we all say exactly the same thing about it: “waaaaaaah.”

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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

Metaphysics and epoche

Philosophy

The phenomenal can be interpreted variously, but it must be incorporated in any interpretation. In other words, in a legitimate interpretation no phenomenon can be omitted

A dimension or pole of the metaphysical manifold can be omitted from a legitimate interpretation, but this omission is not a matter of will (a.k.a. “faith”). It is a matter of experiencing the metaphysical extensivity in the phenomenon or not experiencing it. To superimpose an interpretation onto an experience, either before or after, is bad faith. If the interpretive superimposition leaves the phenomenal element intact, somehow that is even worse.

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Proper faith tries on possibilities and makes a genuine effort to see differently. If it succeeds, it succeeds; if it fails, it fails – but faith is necessarily intellectually honest.

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Subjective intellectual honesty is the ground of friendship. Active, receptive intellectual honesty is the ground of philosophical friendship. It has been said that true friendship only exists among philosophers.

Subjectivity

Philosophy

Until a person discovers the existence of the existential I (Dasein), subjectivity exists as the objective psychic content of an objective self.

Until a person discovers the existence of the existential We and connects it back to existential I, subjectivity exists as the container of objectivity. What stands beyond the existential I literally is  unthinkable, because one does not know what to look for or how to think with the appropriate structures. Such a thinker can find only Himself at the ultimate bounds of knowledge. This ignorance is spiritual bliss.

A vision

Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy

Having vision is a matter of seeing from a distinctive point of view. What is seen from that perspective is not itself the vision but the result of the vision.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to vision and leaps over the perspective directly to the objects of sight. Any vividly imagined aggregate of ideas is “a vision”, whether it is seen coherently or not.

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A vision, being perspectival, is holistic. If, in the course of resolving a problem, you have a vision of its solution, if you are open and alert, you will notice that much more than the object of the vision is affected. With genuine philosophical problems everything is affected simultaneously.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to holism and leaps over the quality of wholeness directly to the object-parts that “constitute” a whole. Any aggregate, whether it is seen coherently or not, is called holistic if it satisfies all criteria of “completeness” – that is, no omission is identified. The being of the wholes is reduced to sum of parts.

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Thinking literally: If you stand in place and have someone else shift the furniture around for you have you changed your perspective?

If you change your opinion on this or that isolated fact have you changed your perspective on it?

Existential entities

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The existential I – Heidegger’s Dasein – is the cheapest and most exciting philosophical discovery.

The existential You – Buber’s Thou – is more elusive. Catching sight of the concept of the existential You points the way to the development of the intellectual and ethical practice of existing in the I-Thou relationship. The rules in this strata of being are different from those of ordinary objective thought.

Developing the practice of the I-Thou relationship, one necessarily discovers the existential We, the ground of I-Thou. With that discovery one begins to move into the profound and boring world of Pragmatism.

(At this point, I’d call myself a Hermeneutical Pragmatist. When I’m done reading Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology I am looking forward to reading Richard Rorty.)

Being concept-bound

Philosophy

To think conceptually is not the same as to be concept-bound.

One decisive difference is in one’s interpretation of sequence: are the conceptualized elements that constitute the concept understood to precede and produce the meaning of the concept; or do the conceptualized elements follow and attempt to account for the spontaneous meaning of the concept?

To make this concrete: Let’s say that a wife is angry with her husband. He asks her why. She begins to explain, listing reasons. However, each time she lists a reasons her husband calls it into doubt, pointing to an assumption she’s made about his motives. According to him it is these unsubstantiated assumptions that have caused her offense – not his actions as he meant them. He points out to her that since the reasons are faulty, her anger is unfounded. Here’s the crux: the assumption is that her anger is founded on the assumptions.

In this example if the husband actually believes his own argument, he is concept-bound – and this is true even if the wife has in fact misinterpreted the meaning of his actions. And if the wife is not genuinely emotionally persuaded but is no longer confident in her assessment of her husband’s behavior she is also concept-bound. She has been bound-up by her husband’s argument, and made unable to act on her interpretation, not relieved of a painful conception and enabled to act according to a less painful and more persuasive truth. If the wife were brought to see what happened from a shifted perspective and found that her offense has simply vanished this would have been thinking conceptually without succumbing to conceptualization.

The conceptualization of facts preceding meaning is itself one of our deepest concept-binding conceptualizations.

Derivative conceptualizations are sometimes conceived to to relieve a thinker of unwanted conceptualizations. Examples are: 1) Skepticism, the belief that calling all individual elements of a way of seeing into doubt will weaken the sense of an unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive meaningful whole; 2) the notion that conceptual thought is the root of unwanted interpretive or pre-interpretive wholes, so avoidance of clear thought is avoidance of concept-boundness; and 3) a favorite of moms everywhere, that we can decide to conceptualize individual elements and the whole in a way that suits us in order to feel how we wish to about life.

The way out of concept-boundedness is to be faithful to one’s full experience and to reflect on this experience conceptually.