Category Archives: Synesis

Christian cred

Etymology, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams, Synesis, Taoism

Think about these statements:

“Bear with me.”
“Please hear me out.”
“It will all make sense in the end.”

Why are these requests necessary? When are they made?

To what feeling in the listener is the speaker responding?

What kind of appeal is being made? Do we owe it to another to give him a full hearing?

When is the appeal denied? Is it a matter of credibility?

What is the experience of denial?

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To read the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament is to experience the most pluralistic religious vision ever recorded, from the most accutely and radically pluralistic people who ever lived. In what other scripture is the same story is recounted three different times from the point of view of three different people? It would have been easier and more obvious to collapse them into one univocal account, but instead the three experiences, three meaningful visions were presented together in a three-in-one synopsis – syn– (together) –opsis (seeing). [* See note 1 below]

I like to think of pluralism as a kind of parallax vision, that allows us to see hyper-dimensionally. With one eye you see a flat picture. With two eyes working in concert we see depth. Our so-called “inner eye” draws out the dimension of meaning. With a pluralistic synopsis we see meaning together – we share meaning and have community. We gain understanding, which the Greeks called synesis.

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By the time Jesus began teaching his distinctively Jewish universal vision of life, the Jewish tradition had survived and overcome numerous cultural crises. They had dominated and been subjugated, had won their home and lost it. They knew belonging and alienation, and they knew both sides of power.

Most importantly they knew that knowledge of experience means to know an experience from the inside. Experiencing is inseparable from that which is experienced, and this means, to use a common visual analogy, that  experience is inseparable from its vision, as how the world looks from that experience. (One of my favorite Jewish thinkers, Edmund Husserl called this “intentionality”: seeing and seen are inseparable, as are hearing and sound, feeling and sensation, etc. [* See note 2 below].)

The Jews knew better than anyone that power is something that can be seen, but even more, it is a way of seeing – of life and the world as a whole. Power has its own kind of vision. When an emperor sees himself, or his court, or a rival power, or he looks upon a conquered enemy or slave, that emperor sees something radically different than the slave regarding the same situation. Power is something different, powerlessness is different. A palace, a body, a tree, a poem… everything is the same in a sense, but things are deeply different. The same goes for a stranger, expat, wanderer, outcast or outcaste.

Out of necessity, the Jews had to develop a way of preserving themselves as a tradition within these conditions. That meant living on a line between provoking attacks from the outside and simply dissolving from cultural self-indifference or self-disgust. They had to internalize their strength. They had to find dignity in their vulnerability to escape the indignity of weakness.

There was no way such a response to such a universal problem was going to stay contained within a small ethnic tradition forever. Whether it was Jesus or Paul, somehow the radical insights of Judaism went universal.

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A series of words derived from the Latin word credere, “believe, trust”:

  • Credit
  • Credential
  • Credence
  • Creed
  • Credo

A series of words derived from the Old English word agan, “believe, trust.” :

  • Own
  • Owe
  • Ought (originally past tense of “owe”)

A series of words derived from Latin auditor, from audire, “to hear”:

  • Audit
  • Audition
  • Auditorium
  • Auditory
  • Audio

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An example of divergent accounts from two of the Synoptic Gospels (which some scholars believe were adapted from yet another lost Gospel, “Q”, possibly a compendium of sayings similar to the (in)famous Gospel of Thomas).

These two passages are taken from Jesus’s famous Lord’s Prayer, his instructions on how to pray.

Matthew 6:12: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Luke 11:4: “And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

In Matthew 6:12, the Greek word used was opheilema. [* See note 3 below.]

In Luke 11:4, the Greek word was hamartia, which means literally “missing the mark”.

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Out of time. Darn. I’ll finish this post if there’s any interest. [* See note 4 below.]

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* NOTE 1:  To call the New Testament inconsistent as some atheists do is to miss the point. To argue over which meaning is the right meaning as the fundamentalists do is to betray the point. To behave as though a plurality of possible meaning implies that all meanings are equivalent and that it is meaningless to discuss them… to go skeptical on that basis, and to ask cynically, rhetorically “what is truth?”… to wash one’s hands of the responsibility to engage dialogically in pursuit of understanding… that’s complicity in the conflict.

* NOTE 2:  Intentionality in Husserl’s sense is a core religious insight, expressed in a variety of forms, from the Jewish Star of David, to the Chinese yin-within-yang and yang-within-yin, to the Greek Janusian herms (with Hermes’s head fused to the head of a goddess, often Aphrodite), to the Hermetic hermaphroditic Androgyne, male on the right, female on the left, sun on the right, moon on the left. Listen for the inside-outside symbolic structure and you’ll find it everywhere. This capacity to hear and understand the form-language of symbol is what I believe is meant by “having ears that hear.”

* NOTE 3: Opheilema seemed like it might have a connection with the name “Ophelia” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if there was an etymological connection. According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Ophelia’ itself was either uncommon or nonexistent; the only known prior text to use the name (as “Ofalia”) is Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia.” It seems fairly obvious the name is a combination of opheilema and philia, love – “love debt” – love unrequited.)

* NOTE 4: Etymology of “interest”: ORIGIN late Middle English (originally as interess): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important,’ from inter– ‘between’ + esse ‘be.’ The -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss,’ apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important.’ Also influenced by medieval Latin interesse ‘compensation for a debtor’s defaulting.’

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

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These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

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[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

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  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.

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.

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.

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.

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…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.