This is the way to present something truly new. Latour, from Reassembling the Social:

In what follows I am not interested in refutation — proving that the other social theories are wrong — but in proposition. How far can one go by suspending the common sense hypothesis that the existence of a social realm offers a legitimate frame of reference for the social sciences? If physicists at the beginning of the previous century were able to do away with the common sense solution of an absolutely rigid and indefinitely plastic ether, can sociologists discover new traveling possibilities by abandoning the notion of a social substance as a ‘superfluous hypothesis’? This position is so marginal, its chance of success so slim, that I see no reason to be fair and thorough with the perfectly reasonable alternatives that could, at any point, smash it into pieces. So, I will be opinionated and often partial in order to demonstrate clearly the contrast between the two viewpoints. In exchange for this breach of fairness, I will try to be as coherent as possible in drawing the most extreme conclusions from the position I have chosen to experiment with. My test will be to see how many new questions can be brought to light by sticking firmly, even blindly, to all the obligations that this new departure point is forcing us to obey. The final test will be to check, at the end of this book, if the sociology of associations has been able to take up the relay of the sociology of the social by following different types of new and more active connections, and if it has been able to inherit all that was legitimate in the ambition of a science of the social. As usual, the result of whether this has been successful or not will be up to the reader.

The reason this jumped out for me is that it reminds me of my “policy” for responsible productive ideation:

First: inform your intuition. Second: leap forward recklessly. Third: test backwards scrupulously.

Latour, however, is using this same move, not for ideation, but for presenting an argument.

And really, if you are attempting to present a new vision, this is the only way to do it. Here is why: those who are committed to an old competing vision are able to scuttle the alternative way to see the problem, not by asserting conflicting arguments, but by simply asking old questions and requiring answers, which requires assumption of the old perspective. But what is at issue is precisely how the questions are asked. (This is a principle Gadamer called the hermeneutic priority of the question.)

Questioning in alien terms midway through a presentation constitutes an attack on an alien perspective, disguised as inquiry. And it is effective. If the presenter is stupid enough —  or powerless enough — to consent to interruption and to attempt to answer before the presentation is finished, he will find himself entirely unable to make his points to the satisfaction of the inquisitor. He has to go all the way to the end of his idea and make it understood.  If he stops short of the goal and turns around,  his truth will be paralyzed or lost in limbo.

Continue reading Presenting perspectives →

The things that really matter depend on concrete realities — without being reducible to concrete realities.

The thing that destroys what really matters is twofold: 1) reducing what really matters to concrete terms and 2) behaving as if what really matters can exist apart from concrete reality.

Jarrett’s formula: “First I listen. Then I ask good questions. Then I respond.”

Unconditional love means only that the door is always open. The lover might walk out through the door to the loved one, or the lover might welcome the loved one in: it is a matter of what love demands at that moment.

The same is true for forgiveness. Forgiveness is not always something that is extended to another, and maybe it never is.

Philosophy is practical literature.

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Literary immersion lets us try on a philosophy. We don’t suspend reality — we provisionally swap realities.

If we prefer the literary reality, we might want to keep it.

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The best reading recalls what memory cannot possess.

In other words reading can be prayer.

Marty Neumeier’s positioning statement: “We are the only X that does Y.”

Dan Saffer’s hunt statement: “I am going to research X so that I can do Y.”

(Do not sneer. The most amazing insights are the ones so simple and retroactively obvious you cannot believe that you didn’t already know them. Literally: you cannot believe you didn’t know them, and so you don’t believe it, and so you credit yourself with having conceived it yourself.)

I am going to try to boil everything I know into X/Y statements.

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 of building objects and utilizing tools as means to this end. He rejects precisely the cornerstone of service, utilizing the time and effort of human beings and reducing them to mere resources.

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Continue reading Gifts of service →

A trial lawyer is an expert in using coercive reason against aggressive and unreceptive minds, and usually in order to persuade witnesses observing the exchange from an outside “objective” perspective, not the partner involved in the exchange. Reason is used to buttress one’s own position and to undermine the opposing position. And the conversation is more staged than real.

A teacher is an expert in using collaborative reason in dialogue with cooperative and receptive minds. The exchange is meant to persuade the partner, and is not (primarily) performed for witnesses. Reason is used to reveal the strengths of each position as well as to expose weaknesses, but less for the sake of advocating or eliminating unworthy positions than to spur creativity and to improve the positions, or to find paths to superior positions.

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A trial lawyer in a classroom teaches by destroying stupidity and clearing the ground for new ideas.

A teacher in a courtroom creates possibilities in a space overcrowded with offensiveness and defensiveness.

Factual knowledge is “knowing that.” Here language is in its element.

Practical knowledge is “knowing how.” Here knowing is half-mute. Telling only complements showing.

Moral knowledge is “knowing why.” Here knowing ought to be mute.

Continue reading Belief, confidence, faith →

All generals believe in the existence of the battle they’re about to fight against one another.

They probably also agree on many facts concerning battle conditions: the terrain, the weather, the disposition of the forces, and where they disagree it has less to do with opinion than it does the availability of facts.

Beliefs diverge when they consider one another’s intentions, perceptions and character, and the psychological state of the men in their charge.

The generals must disagree on who ought to win the battle.

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Many types of agreement exist, and each requires different methods for resolution. Consider the differences between dis/agreements of perceptions, facts, insights and morals.

From Buber’s Between Man and Man:

Sometimes I hear it said that every I and Thou is only superficial, deep down word and response cease to exist, there is only the one primal being unconfronted by another. We should plunge into the silent unity, but for the rest leave its relativity to the life to be lived, instead of imposing on it this absolutized I and absolutized Thou with their dialogue.

Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity. But I do not know — what the soul willingly imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did it) — that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to the responsible understanding. Responsibly — that is, as a man holding his ground before reality — I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiable unity of myself without form or content. I may call this an original pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged beneath all biographical change, all development and complication of the soul. Nevertheless, in the honest and sober account of the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached, so much so, beneath all formations and contents, that my spirit has no choice but to understand it as the groundless. But the basic unity of my own soul is certainly beyond the reach of all the multiplicity it has hitherto received from life, though not in the least beyond individuation, or the multiplicity of all the souls in the world of which it is one — existing but once, single, unique, irreducible, this creaturely one: one of the human souls and not the “soul of the All”; a defined and particular being and not “Being”; the creaturely basic unity of a creature, bound to God as in the instant before release the creature is to the creator spiritus, not bound to God as the creature to the creator spiritus in the moment of release.

The unity of his own self is not distinguishable in the man’s feeling from unity in general. For he who in the act or event of absorption is sunk beneath the realm of all multiplicity that holds sway in the soul cannot experience the cessation of multiplicity except as unity itself. That is, he experiences the cessation of his own multiplicity as the cessation of mutuality, as revealed or fulfilled absence of otherness. The being which has become one can no longer understand itself on this side of individuation nor indeed on this side of I and Thou. For to the border experience of the soul “one” must apparently mean the same as “the One”.

But in the actuality of lived life the man in such a moment is not above but beneath the creaturely situation, which is mightier and truer than all ecstasies. He is not above but beneath dialogue. He is not nearer the God who is hidden above I and Thou, and he is farther from the God who is turned to men and who gives himself as the I to a Thou and the Thou to an I, than that other who in prayer and service and life does not step out of the position of confrontation and awaits no wordless unity, except that which perhaps bodily death discloses.

Nevertheless, even he who lives the life of dialogue knows a lived unity: the unity of life, as that which once truly won is no more torn by any changes, not ripped asunder into the everyday creaturely life and the “deified” exalted hours; the unity of unbroken, raptureless perseverance in concreteness, in which the word is heard and a stammering answer dared.

Meditating on Yeats’ “Second Coming”.

It is often assumed (by skeptical natures) that “passionate intensity” is what defines “the worst” and that “lack of conviction” is the prescription to  cure it.

This in fact is a state of severe imbalance. The best must rediscover their passion — but a complex one that reaches beyond the biological and psychological self without losing them. The center must hold as the gyre opens.

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The synthesis of self and other resolves in such a way that the terms of the antitheses become authenticity and address.

If the 17th-18th centuries exalted perception, and the 19th-20th centuries exalted conception, can we agree in the 21st-22nd centuries to exalt tranception?

It’s very important to note the fact that whenever we lose the capacity to interpret reality according to the norms we’ve been taught, what we experience is not a net loss but a gain. Beneath all our knowledge and habitual perception is something fascinating and good, though terrifying.

Psychedelic: ORIGIN 1950s: formed irregularly from Greek psukhe ‘breath, life, soul.’ +  delos ‘clear, manifest’ + –ic .

Psychedelic art reminds a mind that “all the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

Many people out there — more than you think — inhabit private worlds stocked with behaving automatons. Some of these automatons refuse to behave in an orderly and comprehensible manner. You may have been an automaton to one of these people at some point.

If such a person finds your behavior unintelligible, he (rarely is it a she) will impose intelligibility.

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Powerful solipsists make rules to enforce their solipsism.

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Some rules exist for the sake of the individual.

Some rules exist for the sake of the group.

Some rules exist for the sake of the institution.

Some rules exist for the sake of the ruler.

But most rules exist for the sake of staving off anxieties, or for annihilating perplexities.

Continue reading Annihilation by question →