Category Archives: Enworldment

One way to see design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Design is materialized philosophy.

When designing something — which always and necessarily means designing something for someone — the central question is always: what is the right philosophy for this context?

The purpose of design research is to get to the heart of this central question out, and then to pose the design problem in such a way that designers think about the design problem in the right way, from the philosophical perspective suited to the problem.

Design briefs are tiny philosophical primers.

A good design brief will effect a perspectival shift in the reader (the designer) that brings new possibilities into view, possibilities that were inconceivable prior to the shift. This phenomenon is what is commonly called inspiration.

It is the job of design researchers to produce precision inspiration.

Designers develop hybrid systems

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Politics

Reading Verbeek’s What Things Do, I’m reminded of Latour’s handy term “hybrid”, an entity that is neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but a fusion of both.

In Latour’s eye, the distinction between nature and society, or subject and object, which has seemed so self-evident since the Enlightenment, needs to be seen as a product of modernity that has far exceeded its expiration date. No other society makes this distinction in such a radical manner, and in ours it is more and more painfully obvious how poorly it allows us to comprehend what is happening in the world. The project of modernity, according to Latour, consists of the attempt to purify objects and subjects — we set objects on one side, subjects on the other, and draw a line between them. What is on the one side of the line is then material for scientists to investigate, with what is on the other side for the social scientists. … This purification and separation of subjects and objects, according to Latour, is coming to be less and less believable. Ever more entities arise that cannot be comfortably placed in this dichotomy. Latour calls these entities “hybrids.” The irony is that these hybrids thrive thanks to the modem purification: precisely because they don’t fit within the subject-object schema, we cannot recognize them and therefore they can proliferate at an astounding rate without anyone trying to stop or change them. But now, as their numbers become ever greater, it becomes more and more difficult to deny their existence. We are flooded with entities that straddle the boundary between humans and nonhumans…

Humans and nonhumans are just as bound up together in our culture as they are in others; therefore, Latour concludes, we need to study our technological culture similarly to the ways that anthropologists study other cultures. This means studying how the networks of relations between humans and nonhumans develop and unravel. In order to understand our culture, we must trace out both the process of purification and that of hybridization; we must understand how hybrids arise and why they are not seen as hybrids. In order to understand phenomena, they should be approached as black boxes that, when opened, will appear to contain myriad relations and activity.

If we grasp and internalize this understanding of hybrids, it becomes possible to compactly differentiate how designers approach their problems versus how engineers approach theirs — and why they so often marginalize designers and accidentally prevent designers from working in the way designers believe is best. Here it goes:

Designers develop hybrid systems. Engineers develop objective systems.

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I’ve written two elaborations of this idea, material to supply the understanding that makes grokking the compact definition above possible. I’ll post both, because there’s no time this morning to combine them.

Version 1

An engineering perspective treats design as a sub-discipline of engineering. Design adds an aesthetic (and among more enlightened engineers) and usable “presentation layer” to a functional objective system.

A design perspective ought to treat engineering as a sub-discipline of design. Once a hybrid subjective-objective system is developed through a design approach, objective sub-systems can be defined within the larger context of the hybrid system and built according to engineering methods. According to a design mindset, an engineered system is always and necessarily a subsystem belonging to a larger hybrid system that gives it its purpose and value.

The reason so few people see the obvious truth of the latter design perspective is that their vision is obstructed by a philosophical blockage. The hybrid system concept does not play nice with the modern subject-object schema. Designers learn, through the practical activity of design, to view problems in a new way that is incommensurable with modernity’s default philosophy (as described by Latour).

But designers are rarely philosophical, so the methods rarely progress to the point of praxis. Design language is all bound up with humans and the trappings of subjectivity (emotions, opinions, habits, etc.) on the side of who the design is for and the trappings of romanticism on the side of who does the designing (insight, inspiration, creativity, passion, etc.) Design practice is a jumble of “recipes” — procedures, jargon, styles and theater — a subterfuge to make design fit the preconceptions of folks who don’t quite get what designers are really up to. So design submits to modernist schema and goes to modernism’s special territory for people people, romanticism.

Version 2

Designers consciously work on developing hybrid systems where subjective and objective elements relate and interact. In design, people and things are thought of together as a single system. And things are not only material objects; they can be ideas, habits, vocabularies, etc. Whatever makes a design work or not work, including the engineered elements, as well as all business, cultural, environmental considerations are part of a design problem. When a designer opens a black box of their own making, they will see subjects interacting with objects and subjects, and objects interacting with other objects and subjects.

Engineering, on the other hand, works inside the subject-object dichotomy, and works on problems of objective systems. As a matter of method, engineering purifies objects and arranges them in systems. When an engineer opens a black box of their own making they see objective components interacting and working as a system.

From the view of engineers, the interior of the black boxes they make are their concern, and the surface layer of the box — the point where subjectivity encounters engineering, is the concern of designers. Engineers build the black box; designers paint and sculpt it to make it appealing to people.

Philosophy fails

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

This morning I was forced to use the redesigned Freshbooks. They’d totally revamped the user interface. It was very slick and visual. And it was six times harder to use.

This is a depressingly typical experience in these times. I’m constantly suffering the consequences of wrongheaded, well-meaning changes made to things I rely on to not change.

I was lamenting to a friend how much work, time and money Freshbooks (and companies like them) sink into solving the wrong problem and making new problem.

I complained: “Not only did they thought about it wrong — they didn’t even think about how they were thinking. This was a philosophy fail.”

And these are the mistakes that offend me: philosophy fails. People failing to reflect when reflection is most needed. They need to think about how they are thinking about what they are doing… and they instead choose to be all startuppity, and just do. Just doing is valorized, and it shouldn’t be, any more than just thinking. We need thoughtful practice matched with practical thinking: praxis.

Design talks

Enworldment, Philosophy

A list of design theory/practice ideas I’ve had that could become talks, all of which include monographesque provocatively non-descriptive titles with almost-clarifying subtitles, separated by colons:

  1. “No Pain, No Gain: Necessary Suffering in Innovation” – The agonizing experience of navigating the vacuum between framings fits poorly inside the fantasy image of creativity peddled by Design Thinking to the freedom-craving lanyard-tethered denizens of cubicle-land. Real, deep creativity is intensely painful at key points in the process, very few people are willing to undergo the ordeal, and anyone with authority will be tempted to use their power to abort innovative thought when they start to feel the anxiety inherent to the kind of radical reframing that produces innovative ideas.
  2. “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy of Design of: How Philosophy Is a Design Medium” – The implications of Dewey’s Instrumentalism crossed with both the methods and experiences of human centered design suggests that philosophies are mind-reality interfaces which ought to be thought of in terms of good design rather than faithful representations of truth.
  3. “Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.
  4. “Who Is Our Engineer? is the New “Who is Our User?”: The Relationship Between Designers, Engineers and Users” – One of the most misconceptions that limits the effectiveness of design in many organizations is the notion that design fits inside a engineering as the people who responsible for making the “presentation layer” of an engineered product or service. This talk argues that flipping this relationship inside out and viewing engineering as a discipline within design permits both engineers and designers to increase the effectiveness of the other. In addition it will be argued that every relevant design discipline has one or more engineering disciplines involved in actualizing the design, and that design competence in any particular medium involves a working rudimentary knowledge of its engineering aspects and and understanding of how to collaborate with engineers of that discipline.

Philosophy should disappear

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I had a thought last week I want to record for later use.

Short version.

  1. Great design disappears, and becomes an invisible extension of a user’s will.
  2. According to my belief that philosophy should be regarded as a kind of design, a philosophy should disappear once it is understood.
  3. This accords with enneagram theory, that type Five (thinking) integrates toward Eight (instinct). To successfully design a philosophy that disappears into the background of instinctive second-nature is to “go to eight”.

Some notes.

  1. Many people have observed the fact that great design disappears.
    1. Certainly, beautifully designed things are pleasing to those who place them in the foreground and admire their design — but in use these designed things must disappear into the background of a user’s attention and become an extension of the user’s will. (Of the many balances and tradeoffs designers make, this is one of the hardest.)
    2. A merely competent design is one that can be figured out. The user must stop and think (and in so doing foreground the design) but once the problem is resolved, the design can be backgrounded again.
    3. One of the most important marks of design excellence is making verbalization unnecessary. The only words that should be running through a user’s mind are ones connected with the user’s task. Any words pertaining to recalling or figuring out how to use the designed thing is an obtrusive interruption to the dialogue.
  2. Philosophies tend to be regarded as idea systems that help us resolve problems.
    1. This might be the result of the view that philosophy is about the objects of philosophical work, and the neglect of the subjects doing the thinking.
    2. Most philosophical work is created for the consumption of other philosophers. This situation is analogous to how computers were once primarily built for other computer professionals. As long as this was the case, they remained largely opaque to lay users.
    3. Most philosophy is engineered to solve problems not designed to help people understand (and prevent problems from arising).
  3. I think the big difference between an Eight-integrated Five and an Eight is that the former designed his own second-nature, where the Eight works with innate and passively-acquired instincts.

 

Design of philosophy

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

I have arrived at the belief that philosophy is another word for the design of conceptual tools used for the purposes of enworldment.

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Have philosophers taken a human-centered approach to their design work?

Before answering, consider the fact that many philosophers are professors who spend as much time preparing lessons, teaching, and evaluating the success of their teaching. They also write papers and submit them to peer juried journals. If accepted, their papers are published, and the ideas may or may not be put to use by others and cited.

Now, the question a designer is trained to ask at this point is: Who is the user?

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An innovation principle presented by the altogether brilliant design thinker Diego Rodriguez:

Design and trade-offs

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

For non-designers (and immature designers) the toughest part of design is trying on different trade-offs.

The reason it is so tough is this: while most people can shift between ideas with relative ease, it is harder to shift between conceptions — different logics of coherence and meaning that invest ideas with different significance.

Harder still is to allow new conceptions to animate perceptions. Old conceptions cling and highlight features of perception that would remain inconspicuous to fresh eyes. And each shift in design direction adds new relevancies without removing the old ones, so the problem becomes more insoluble with each iteration.

It is like memory: it is easier to learn on command than to forget. The old ideas, once seen, become hard to unsee. The old concepts, once learned become impossible to unlearn. Perception becomes almost cubistic — too many simultaneous perspectives are viewed at once.

Pluralistic play — the ability to flit between logics — to try on different conceptions and perceptions — this takes years of practice, and the practice can only start once a person has discovered the dimension of mind that multiplies the universe into innumerable overlapping everythings.

Idea dump: intimacy, design/engineering/philosophy, social science-technologies

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

The following is more of a diary entry than an article. I have put too little effort into editing, and it might make sense only to me. I just wanted to get a snapshot of these ideas as they exist today, before they change or disappear.

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The start of an idea: it seems that many “linguistic turn” philosophers become anxious encountering any concept that fails to promise eventual public accessibility and acceptance. I have a hunch I cannot yet support but this all seems rooted in a binary either-or of private and public: EITHER we speak precisely, logically and empirically in the least ambiguous language possible, OR we speak a muddledly, and self-sentence ourselves to imprisonment within our own private language cells.

I do love the private-public distinction and find it useful, but I think the most fascinating varieties of philosophy are between these extremes, in a region that could be called intimate, or what Martin Buber called the interhuman. This is where Nietzsche works, and I may read him with this theme in mind on my next tour of his corpus.

The intimate is where poetry happens. When poetry goes public it is lost to prosaicism. When poetry goes private it is lost to insanity. Poetry is intimacy suspended between insanity and prosaicism.

It is not true (or at least not right) that all language aims to be explicit. Sorting out the purpose of a particular vocabulary and determining its degree of explicit monosemic and pregnant polysemic content is an interesting problem — and less a philosophical problem than a design problem.

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Speaking of various kinds of problems, I’ve done much reflection in the last couple of years on what distinguishes engineering problems and design problems (my most recent formulation: an engineering problem concerns systemization of rule-bound entities, where a design problem concerns hybrid rule-bound and choice-making entities), but I have also been thinking quite a bit about the relationship between design and philosophy. It might be my most radical idea that philosophy is best understood as a species of design, and how it is designed determines what it can do. (I see a philosophy as a mind-reality interface analogous to a computer user interface to support intelligibility of unmanageable truths and semi-obscure phenomena. Philosophy-as-design strikes me as the furthest consequence of Jamesian Pragmatism.)

It might be interesting to converge these two themes, philosophy-as-design and design-vs-engineering. It might go like this: maybe we have been accidentally designing philosophies optimized for solving engineering problems, and further, when we think about philosophy in these engineering terms we successively engineer the possibility of design out of of our philosophies. We trust only logical rules that compel reason to accept a single conclusion, or the problem does not compute and returns a syntax error. We engineer philosophies good only for engineering, and this has distorted our understanding of what a science is and can be, including the social sciences. This is why 20th Century social sciences and social engineering are linked: social engineering was all that could be done with the philosophy that thought the social sciences.

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I’ve been groping with a vague new thought. Generally we define sciences ontologically, by their object of study. What if we defined sciences pragmatically, by the types of technologies they produce? The pragmatic definition of Actor-Network Theory then might be: the science that produces design. 20th Century sociology might be: the science that produces social engineering.

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For the past few years I’ve been enamored with (or maybe dominated by) Bruno Latour’s account of science and technology, and particularly his refusal to separate the domains of science and technology. Sciences use technologies at least as much as technologies use science. There is no pure scientific learning followed by pure technological application.

My intuition harasses me with the question of whether there is (or ought to be!) a similar dynamic at work in the social sciences. Currently the social sciences seem (I am not as well-informed as I would like to be) to place enormous emphasis on the front-end observational hypothesis-formation segment of the scientific method. Where is the interactive experimental moment of the scientific method, where technologies are employed to generate more knowledge? And what exactly is a social science technology, anyway? Have we asked that question enough? I am leaning toward a belief that a social science technology is a design, and in an experimental setting it is a design prototype introduced into a social situation. The social sciences merge with human-centered design practices. Not as the pure understanding that precedes a pure application, but as a profoundly mingled reciprocity.

Philosophy design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

For the last several weeks I have been trying very hard to care about Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In general, though, (with some exceptions) I have found its problems and approaches to resolving problems too tedious, too inapplicable and too dry to keep me engaged. It is cognitively, practically and aesthetically irrelevant to me.

Or to put it in UX language, for me, the experience is not useful, usable or desirable. I am not the user of this stuff.

I suspect the user of analytic philosophy is other professional philosophers who want to philosophize to other professional philosophers.

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pirate_flag

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the UNIX of philosophies.

My project is to design a Macintosh philosophy. (A well-designed thing to be used by people who don’t want to be forced to tinker with technicalities, unless they want to. And perhaps a thing that appeals especially to designers looking for tools to help them design better.)

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Philosophy is a kind of design. It is a mind-reality interface.

Every philosophy permits us to render some aspects of reality intelligible, while confusing or obscuring others; supports us in some practical activities and while muddling others; helps us intensify the feeling of value of some things while devaluing others. In other words, a philosophy makes our life experience as a whole useful, usable and desirable. But like with every design, tradeoffs are necessary, and where to make these tradeoffs is a function of the user and the use context. We can be conscious about it and make these tradeoffs intentionally — or we can be like bad clients and persist in trying to have it all.

And as with all good designs, philosophies disappear.

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Even bad interfaces disappear, leaving only frustration, alienation, friction, dissipation, confusion.

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We would laugh at an argument over whether iOS or Android is truer. Maybe it is time we laugh at philosophical arguments the same way. Let other people  sit around and debate whose philosophy does the best job of representing the truth. I will do an experience assessment.

 

Outline

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas, Synesis

Introduction

  • What philosophy is
  • What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
  • Practical use of philosophy for design
  • Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
  • Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.

Ontology

  • Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
  • Being encompasses more than physical entities
  • Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
  • Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
  • Order bounded by chaos
  • Chaos is superabundance of orders
  • Order filters chaos
  • Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
  • Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
  • Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
  • Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
  • Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
  • An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)

Epistemology

  • Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
  • Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
  • Knowing is both explicit and tacit
  • An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
  • Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
  • Tacit morality: sensing value
  • Perspective and pluralism
  • Pluralism vs reductionism
  • Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
  • Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
  • Self as a society
  • Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
  • Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
  • Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
  • Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
  • Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
  • Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
  • Social hermeneutics
  • Social creativity
  • A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)

Ethics

  • An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
  • Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
  • Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
  • Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
  • Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
  • Virtue ethics
  • Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
  • Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
  • Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
  • Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
  • Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
  • No method to emerge from perplexity
  • No way to predict the outcome
  • Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
  • Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
  • Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
  • Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
  • Virtue of constancy
  • Virtue of honor – agreements

Thought scraps

  • Empathy vs sympathy
  • The way philosophy is read… hermeneutically: not step-by-step explanation
  • Blindness vs darkness

A Designer’s Philosophy

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

I am starting work on a book called A Designer’s Philosophy.

The book will outline a comprehensive philosophy suitable for a designer. To some extent it will include a philosophy of design, but that will not be its primary focus. One of the central, deliberately accepted assumptions of the work is the principle of pluralism, which is why it is “a” philosophy for one particular way of approaching life. This book will offer a set of conceptual tools to help a certain kind of person self-orient, understand, articulate and act in the world in a cohesive, consistent and meaningful way: a sort of user-interface for the environing, pregnant chaos we know as reality.

It will be based very heavily on American Pragmatism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics (fused in the tradition of Richard J. Bernstein), synthesized with several like-minded but diversely-focused parallel practical traditions including current UX practice, Soft Systems, Design Thinking and Actor-Network theory. I will also steal freely from late Wittgenstein, various Existentialists, philosophers/historians/scholars of science and even some not-very-reputable theologians.

But this will not be a scholarly book. I will do my best to include no quotations or footnotes, or anything that complicates the dead-simple but elusive concepts this book exists to convey. It will be a comprehensive, organic vision and whatever introduces a seam or calls attention to a grafting scar, such as a nod to the discoverer of this idea or that, will be cut, smoothed and disguised to the best of my ability.

In other words, this book will be a great theft. I will acknowledge the thinkers to whom I owe an intellectual debt in one little easily-skipped blurb introducing a bibliography. Essentially, I am going to steal a great number of insights and make them my own, then provide a list of the households I hit as a cursory acknowledgement of indebtedness. But in fact, it will be an act of thieves’ honor: “I’ve hit these homes and made off with all the loot I could carry in my own arms. I think I grabbed the best stuff, but it might be profitable to hit it again.”

My goal is to make this book as visual, as simple and as compact as possible. If I can distill it into a pamphlet of 16 pages of diagrams that will be perfect, because that makes letterpress a viable option.

The philosophy will divide into three parts (not including introduction and conclusion):

  • Ontology: “What is being?”
  • Epistemology: “How do I know truth?”
  • Ethics: “How should I live?”

The book will be 100% free of techniques, case studies, scientific corroboration and any other content that might give it the slightest chance of success. This book will be beautiful, and meant to be fetishized (and fetishized with the purest conscience, because the book will show why fetishes are necessary and valuable). My view is that while philosophy can be understood as a form of pre-science indispensable to scientific progress, it can also be understood as a form of art, and at its best is an inseparable synthesis of prescience and art, a beautiful and inspiring surveying and mapping of a field of possibility upon which methodical disciplines can travel, settle and flourish.

Because it is unlikely to sell and because I want complete control over its physical form, I’m anticipating self-publishing it in a very small run.

Worldviews

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Ideas

A worldview (weltanschauung) is a holistic vision of existence, which by its nature has an appearance of completeness. It is a totality comprising 1) perception of a particular pattern or field of relevance and irrelevance in its experience, 2) conceptual articulation of relevant experience into an interrelated, nested system of categories, 3) appraisal of values according to tacit but self-evident standards, and 4) the development of a characteristic set of practical responses to its experiences. All this manifests as an individual vision of the world — a way of seeing — but it also naturally generates outwardly visible phenomena corresponding to the dimension enumerated above: 1) an intentional thrust, 2) a characteristic symbol-system, of language and image, 3) an identifiable aesthetic-moral style, and 4) a body of explicit beliefs and formal customs. All of this together constitutes a proto-culture, a germ of tradition.

What is not outwardly visible, however — despite appearances — is the worldview itself that engendered these forms.

“Kernel of culture, invisible as sight,
Darkless and lightless in the back of an eye”

The worldview must be sought to be found, otherwise one tends to discover and rediscover only one’s own worldview. (* See note to nerds, below.)

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(A sidenote: Worldviews are not formed in a vacuum. They form within cultural conditions, which in turn formed within cultural conditions. In the beginning is always culture, and culture is within reality, but culture is reality — and also it somehow produces cultural progeny. This is the chicken-and-egg problem. No culture, no humans; no humans, no culture.)

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My theory: Coherent worldviews are constantly, spontaneously generated by a variety of spiritual impulses: philosophical, artistic, mystical, political, etc. Some cultures promote their production, others suppress them, but they are always coming into existence, and most die off without attracting the slightest notice, perhaps because the worldview itself lacks awareness of its essential differentness. But some worldviews acquire vivid expression as actions or artifacts, and gain cultural currency — and not necessarily from minds congenial with the actor or author of the works.

The symbol-systems in particular (especially when separated from the rest of the “tradition”), meant to represent particularities of the engendering worldview (its “meaning”), are also frequently capable of representing or describing features of other worldviews, quite different from the origin.

In particular, the symbol-systems are capable of hosting several perennially recurring worldviews, found in nearly every time and place, which recur precisely because they are capable of thriving within just about any symbol-system. They enter into the symbol-systems and animate them various spirits, and to the degree that these spirits can harmonize (however uncomfortably) within these symbol-systems the culture gains viability and force.

Three of these recurring worldviews are of particular interest: Fundamentalism, gnosticism, and philistinism.

  • Fundamentalists interpret symbols strictly literally, which means in strictly objective terms, using violent magical stop-gap concepts to fill in the gaps and form a totalistic worldview. In regard to others, fundamentalists oppose and impose.
  • Gnostics interpret symbols strictly figuratively, which means there are no gaps to fill, because the concepts are liquid, with no solid, practical obstructions to free-flowing completeness. In regard to others, gnostics stand apart, uninvolved.
  • Philistines just do what is expected, in order to keep doing, and symbols are just one of many practical concerns. In regard to others, philistines cooperate, uncritically.

Wherever there is culture, these three generic spirits move in and make their indispensable contributions. Nothing happens without them.

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  • Note to nerds:

What the discipline of hermeneutics pursues is the recovery of the generative worldview behind created forms. The pursuit is a futile one — that is, it is never brought to completion — but the pursuit of completion is the goal that makes the activity possible. For this reason, any “hermeneutic” loyal to some set worldview, for instance a “Marxist hermeneutic” or “feminist hermeneutic” is impossible. The point of hermeneutics is precisely to overcome the limits of one’s particular worldview in order to experience beyond one’s horizon and to modify one’s worldview. An ideological “hermeneutic” is a contradiction in terms.

Not that re-interpretation of common phenomena into terms of  one’s own worldview is illegitimate. This activity is necessary. But when one reinterprets an author without first earnestly practicing hermeneutics, one strips away the author’s human status and treats the author and the work as mute, passive phenomena. A reader kills “the author” for the same reason any person kills another: to extinguish an active, apparently harmful subjectivity and to render it a passive object. A corpus has an author; without an author a corpus is corpse. It returns to dust, to impersonal text, to unprotesting material with which one may work as he pleases.