The constructive order builds up systems of objectively comprehensible givens. The systems may be of material or ideal nature, but the structure is always small defined units combined into larger defined units, which, through their complex interaction, generate emergent behaviors at the larger scale. The understanding proper to these systems — systemic wholes — is construal, examining parts in their interactions, to see what the units are and how they function together to produce emergent behaviors. It is assumed: implicit in the behavior of any whole are implicit processes that, when explicated, account for it entirely, in terms of what units compose it and how those components interact. In the constructive order the smallest unit is primary and the largest is explained by the smaller.
But how are the given objects of the constructive order given?
They are received from a conceptive order that is subtly omnipresent, and therefore absent, in the constructive order. To the constructive order, reality itself is objective, but, in truth, objectivity is a subjective phenomenon.
In the conceptive order, the largest unit is primary and smaller units are significant as articulations within the whole comprising it. But this whole is not an object, but a subject, which is, among other things, an ontology, and a field of objectivity. Part of what prevents the conceptive whole from being comprehended as object is that it is all-inclusive, lacks alterity, and therefore has nothing against which it may be defined as a thing. The conceptive order encompasses literally everything, and each can be called an everything, the articulations of which define every possible thing that particular everything comprises — material, ideal or otherwise. The all-inclusive unit of a conceptive order is the subject, always, ultimately, one.
It is human natural to attempt to objectively comprehend and construe the meaning of anything problematic that raises questions. But conceptive difference cannot be understood in this way. When one everything-sized subject attempts to comprehend and construe another everything-sized subject as such, it finds itself perplexed, for there is no exterior by which a fellow subject may be grasped, only disturbing symptoms of difference in its sense of givenness.
To understand these differences requires very different modes of understanding — modes that include, while exceeding, objectivity. These extra-objective inter-subjective modes of understanding are the very heart of design work.
Designers (when/if they are functioning as designers) navigate subjectivity without committing the category mistake of trying to objectively grasp subjectivity. It seems irrational from the objectivity-constrained understanding typical of managerial social engineering.
These modes effect transfigurations in one’s own subjectivity which, only after the transfiguration is effected, reveal givens beyond those initially given prior to the transfiguration. These transfigurations reveal not only the “what” and “how” of another person’s objectivity but something of the “why” which animates it and invests it with purpose.
And this is what makes the conceptive order so important. It is the very source of importance itself. It is also the source of shared values and felt togetherness.
A transfiguration — or conversion experience — is a partial or complete change in first-person experience on the level of some significant gestalt whole, which spontaneously rearticulates a whole field of experience — of what seems true, why it is important and how one should respond. Transfiguration manifests objectively — as transformation — but the change is plainly prior to fact, method or moral precept. The change happens at an ontological level, top-down, and changes the order of “construction materials” — systematizable things. Such transfiguration often requires considerable deconstruction and reconstruction of systems.
Someone who assumes superior knowledge, who sees no reason to learn deeply and transfiguratively — someone who instinctively, habitually, neurotically or otherwise compulsively condescends from a position of superior insight or technical expertise might be capable of many impressive things, but such a person cannot design.
Such a person — individual or collective — will lose intersubjective consciousness and begin to inhabit and build a purely constructed world.
A purely constructed world is a world given only to one subject, and it is lonely, arid and eventually meaningless.
A world of systems constructed by a single objective logic necessarily induces nihilism.