In the business world, the default attitude toward thought is that thought is a means to an end. We think in order to figure out how best to change the world. This is true to a degree, but not nearly true enough. First, the process of thinking is not that clean. Often that process of … Continue reading Reflecting on enworldment
Everything is ethnomethod. Not only human behavior, but human-shaped environments. And not only these, but the language we use for discussing the human world. But it extends even further. How we use language in general — this, too, is ethnomethod. And most people go on applying these ethnomethods in the private spaces within their ethos, … Continue reading Ethnomethods enworld
Let’s stop distorting the meaning of subjectivity by situating it within an essentially objective world. But that objective world within which we understand ourselves to be situated is produced by our subjectivity, through its own participation in reality. It is reality within which we are situated. Objectivity (and the objective truth we know about it) … Continue reading Reenworld thyself
Yang Earth is inclined to understand truth Earth-upward. Yang Heaven is inclined to understand truth Heaven-downward. Yang Man is inclined to understand truth Man-outward. * My pragmatic phenomenological re-interpretation of Guenon is a yang Man interpretation of a yang Heaven truth. Before you listen to me, though, be sure to consult the I Ching, and … Continue reading K’an enworldment
For every potential enworldment, there exists in potential an enworlding being.
Too many people think art is the production of interesting, pleasing or entertaining sounds, images, performances, etc. This mode of making produces sterile artistic product. We have forgotten that real art founds whole new ways to exist in the world. Art is not here to be looked at, listened to or experienced. Art is here … Continue reading Art is enworldment
Enworldment is my preferred term for lifeworld. I think it’s prettier and it has some desirable overtones: enworldment sounds like something that we intentionally shape for ourselves, where one can easily imagine an amoeba inhabiting a lifeworld. – Enworldments are held together by conceptions. Conceptions manifest in a variety of ways — only one of … Continue reading Enworldment design (again!)
Over the weekend Susan pressed me for details on how an enworldment can be intentionally changed. How does enworldment design differ from Stoicism’s mental toughening-up exercises, or new age self-helpers who advise us to tell ourselves a new story? It was helpful to be forced to get concrete, and to make some contrasts with transformational … Continue reading Differentiating enworldment design
Another way to think about enworldment within the larger context of philosophy would to be to draw another anomalous analogy between the domain of thought and the domain of engineering. Some philosophy explores lines of thoughts out of sheer interest in the thought itself. Something about the ideal material fascinates the thinker. What can be … Continue reading Enworldment design
I am contemplating a radical shift in language. I’ve talked about “designing philosophies”, and observed that most of the time when we think about philosophy and design we almost automatically think about applying philosophical ideas to design practice, and rarely the reverse — applying design ideas and practices back to how we do philosophy. But … Continue reading Enworldment
As preparation for writing my next book, tentatively titled Enworldment (A Philosophy of Design of Philosophy), I’m indexing the articles I’ve written on approaching philosophy as a design discipline. Some of the earlier articles have a blunt simplicity to them that I want to recover, at least for the introduction. I’m going to list some of … Continue reading Enworldment
I move around in a world of enworldments. When I meet a person, their enworldment is what I am trying to intuit. When an artifact — object, environment, artwork, anything — attracts my attention, it is because it implies an enworldment with a person at its center. At times I’ve wanted to call a particular … Continue reading Enworldments
I’m really struggling. I have a sprawling multi-volume book in my mind and I can’t get it out. It’s that genre and voice problem again. It took me almost two decades years to get nine pages into an acceptable form. But I have 991 pages still jammed up in there. Susan suggested that maybe I … Continue reading Block
From Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar”: If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one … Continue reading Vocabulary
Every year around this time I lose my curriculum. I pick up books and abandon them. This year I’ve picked up and dropped several books about the formation of worldviews. I started at Worldview and Mind by Eugene Webb. Then I switched over to Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. Then I spent a few days … Continue reading Annual disorientation
I’ve used the word “natural” to four very different ways, and each is defined against a different opposite. These are each The first two are the boring obvious ones. Natural versus manmade. Is it from the wilderness, or is it from our own hands? Natural versus supernatural. Does it obey the laws of nature, or … Continue reading Natural as opposed to what?
I am finally getting around to reading Husserl’s Ideas. I should have read this long, long ago. He already developed the language I’ve needed to say what I most need to say. One important capability of phenomenology — in my opinion, the most important capability — is this: a phenomenological attitude permits us to port … Continue reading First principles last
I am desperately trying to find much simpler ways to convey how service design works. Here is one of my recent simplifications. And it is a simplification that intentionally errs toward over-simplification. It not precisely, exactly accurate, but it is directionally true and helps illuminate the logic of the methodology. It is a helpful heuristic. … Continue reading Palindromic structure of service design
If you know what to intuit for, the world is infused with halos of every possible tone. As with light, the gamut of intuitions trail off into the analogue of inperceivable nothingness of infravisible infrared and ultravisible ultraviolet. Intuitions, though, trail off into inconceivable nothingness of infraintelligible sub-ipseity and ultraintelligible super-alterity. Or try another anomalogy: … Continue reading On halos
One of “my” older, stranger and truer insights is this: Being is essentially polycentric. I believe this insight was conveyed to me by S. N. Goenka through his ten day Vipassana courses, but I learned it in a way that was not recognizably “taught” — at least, not recognizable until decades later. The insight began … Continue reading I, Polycentric