Faith is a subjective integral stability that takes reality as given in some particular way.

I have understood praxis as the reciprocity between practice-informed theory and theory-guided practice. I think this is right as far as it goes. But praxis always has a knowing-doing subject, and that subject is developed through praxis.

Is it habit? Certainly habit is necessary. Social constructivists would love it to be sufficient.

It is not, however, sufficient. Not every construction, however habituated to it we might become, is spontaneously recognized as a gestalt. Some complex forms stabilize as simple gestalts, where others remain familiar complexities that we are able to construe with increasing speed and ease. Contrary to constructivist prejudice, gestalt recognition isn’t double-plus fast construal and construction. It is a spontaneously recognized form latent in a person’s given sense of everything, much as stable crystal formations are latent in a supersaturated solution. Perceptive and conceptive wholes — gestalts — articulate within a metaphysic supersaturated with formal potentiality. With apologies to Heidegger, I call any capacity for gestalt gestell. (Technik is only one degraded possibility of gestell, just as the They is only one degraded possibility of public being.)

Beneath habit — and often in existential tension with it — is faith.

(When faith stabilizes on an atomistic, reductionistic understanding of reality and forms habits of distrusting gestalts and accepting only systematic accounts, the tension between habit and faith snaps, and social constructionism becomes self-evidently true. Your skepticism is selective, o ye of excessive habit.)

At the heart of praxis is faith-in-motion that integrates and stabilizes in the midst of the practice-theory cycle. Faith is both the cause and the effect of praxis.

This morning I wrote an email to a professor, to get advice on possible programs of study. In this email, I described what I have been doing in the wee hours of the morning for the last quarter century:

Background: I have been working as a human-centered designer (HCD) for the last three decades, while spending my mornings trying to find adequate conceptual framing and language for HCD. Design work is material and systematic, but it is also intersubjective and conceptual; ultimately, it involves as much transcendental tinkering as it does material craft. Designers tend to strategically suppress these esoteric undersides of our craft. I think the field would benefit from clear articulation of the realities of our work.

My studies have led me into some iffy corners of the philosophical world. I wouldn’t call these regions irrational, but they might not be acknowledged as philosophical in some philosophy departments.

My reason for pursuing a degree is that I have been working in isolation for decades, without any critical accountability or community, and I think my work has suffered for it. But the wrong kind of criticism can be worse than none.

I have developed a design praxis. I want to convey this praxis to other designers so we are equipped to explain and justify ourselves to others. Some of that equipment will be arms and armor.