Reflections on gifts
I’m giving a designer friend of mine a beautiful, perfect gift, and it’s got me thinking about gifts, again. I just looked up my old posts on gifts, and two of them have held up pretty nicely. Designs and gifts Don’t steal gifts
Search Results for: gifts
Thanksgiving chord: gifts and gratitude
I was looking through the gratitude quotes in my wiki and saw this: Nobility and gratitude. — A noble soul will be happy to feel itself bound in gratitude and will not try anxiously to avoid the occasions when it may be so bound; it will likewise be at ease later in expressing gratitude; while … Continue reading Thanksgiving chord: gifts and gratitude
Gifts of service
When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort. My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service. Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world … Continue reading Gifts of service
Don’t steal gifts
When given a gift, accept the gift and do not steal it. * To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property, is to betray the spirit of gift-giving. A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object … Continue reading Don’t steal gifts
Designs and gifts
In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts. * Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive … Continue reading Designs and gifts
Designing our world(s)
Most of our personal being is bound up in wordless, intuitive participation. Our easiest words are part of our social participation. Explicit thought enters the scene mostly where intuitive participation fails. We see this very vividly in the field of design. When we craft an artifact that really works, people take the artifact up into … Continue reading Designing our world(s)
Design, existentialism, technocracy, etc.
If a philosophy is more a matter of questions than of answers — or to take this beyond mere language, that praxis is more a matter of problems than of responses — and I do see it this way — then the fact that the questions and problems that concern me most are all, without … Continue reading Design, existentialism, technocracy, etc.
Collective autism
(Note: I wrote this back in June of 2022, but abandoned it. It was never properly finished, and it falls apart toward the end. I’m publishing it now, in February 2023, in unfinished rough form because I need to link to it from a post I am writing today.) The first time I saw Brené … Continue reading Collective autism
On the subject of subjects
I have been thinking a lot about “background philosophies”, the ideas we think with, and “foreground philosophies”, the ideas we think about. I have equated background philosophies with subjects. Whether it is a personal subject, or an academic subject, it does not matter. My thought has brought me to an understanding of subjects that on … Continue reading On the subject of subjects
The roots of givenness
My family uses a haggadah from the Jewish Labor Committee. It gets overbearingly, even comically, socialist at many points, but we love it. Before blessing the wine, we read: Consider the cup of wine which we are about to drink. Countless sets of hands played a role in bringing this wine to our seder: the … Continue reading The roots of givenness
Self-respecting faith
I didn’t want to talk about souls in my book, but I am going to have to. The whole point of all of it is souls. * When we think, we construct logical syntheses, and offer them to the conceptive mind. The conceptive mind may accept an offering as a whole, as second-natural — and … Continue reading Self-respecting faith
Interim report
I am trying to write a post, but it keeps expanding and extending under its own power. It is displacing my reading. I am waking up and just writing. I hope this is my book. If this is the book I end up writing, my old working title, The Ten-Thousand Everythings would be the natural … Continue reading Interim report
Co-marveling
Helen and I built our relationship on sharing experiences. It began with cooking together, then mountain biking, and then listening to music — and then marveling to music. This is very different for me; I’ve always seen relationships in terms of conversation, and most importantly, exchange of ideas. But from childhood to late adolescence, Helen … Continue reading Co-marveling
Reciprocities
Why is it that reading Nietzsche always sends me back into working in my wiki? I just made a new theme: Reciprocity. And under that page I created three headings: Of help Of harm Of love I will offer a chord of quotes to indicate the theme that unites these three reciprocities. Of help: “Pity … Continue reading Reciprocities
Please do not decenter yourself
Decentering one’s self or one’s identity as a response to one’s former egocentrism or ethnocentrism is just this year’s model of altruism. Altruism is benevolence modeled on a stunted vision of individualism, which it tries to overcome by simply inverting it: Selfish people care about themselves at the expense of others, so unselfish people care … Continue reading Please do not decenter yourself
Fructivism
My friend Nick Gall hates being called a fructivist, but not only is he one, he was the first one, because he invented it. Here’s my own sloppy definition of fructivism: Fructivism is an ethic that prioritizes fruitfulness — the proliferation of creative possibilities — over more traditional virtues. I needed to define fructivism because … Continue reading Fructivism
Esoterism practice
This morning, for no particular reason I’ve been poking around in Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer In addition to the various particular errors we may make regarding particular thinkers, there is also a common mistake that we commit again and again in our interpretation of all … Continue reading Esoterism practice
Teaching 9
Clifford Geertz helped me see that understanding (or, empathy) is not an act of directly experiencing what another person experiences (which renders understanding impossible, if not essentially absurd), but rather the ability to participate in their symbol system, so that we can understand a proverb, a poem or a joke — or, as I like … Continue reading Teaching 9
Synesis
To understand another culture it is necessary for an ethnographic investigator to suspend or temporarily suppress their own reflexive cultural judgments, at least long enough to get a sense of how life looks and feels from within the other culture’s lifeworld. If the investigator carries their own convictions and habitual judgments into the investigation, they … Continue reading Synesis
Why I get emotional about design
When I use a product, I feel the milieu that produced it. Products are crystallized philosophies. In a designed object I feel people — the people who produced it and sometimes a precise person for whom an object is intended. This “personal from” and “personal to” is what makes design what it is. When I get … Continue reading Why I get emotional about design