All posts by anomalogue

The hermeneutical-rhetorical circle

Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

As a user experience practitioner, it is interesting to me that the hermeneutical circle (the movement between whole and part that characterizes the process of understanding) originated in ancient rhetoric. The privilege of my profession is that we get to stand on both sides of meaning, as understanders (in the mode of researchers) and as creators of things to be understood (in the mode of designers), and best of all, we get to iteratively connect the two modes. (I’m picturing the infinity symbol: we research understandings, we design things to be understood, we research understandings of our designs, we redesign… etc. )

It seems everything we do in user experience wants to be iterative. (* See note.) I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is because we are in the understanding business, and iterativity is the form of understanding.

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An idea to try on: user experience strategy/design as a species of rhetoric. Pan-sensory, interactive rhetoric. (I’ve been enjoying the perversity of using words revaluated by Gadamer to express benevolent thoughts as villainously as possible. This one falls short of the last example of the pattern, characterizing brand as “prejudice design”. )

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In his wonderful book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis Richard J. Bernstein made a very interesting criticism of Gadamer: that Gadamer did a good job of outlining a theory of hermeneutics, but in regard to practice he left us hanging.

My view is that experience design can be a practical extension of Gadamer’s thought, and in fact is following a semi-conscious trajectory toward this point. It’s always exciting to find new ways to integrate my philosophical mornings and my professional days.

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(* Note: Conversely, much of the friction we experience in the world of business seems to center around the flattening of circularities. Business likes predictability, so it likes nice straight lines. Non-linearity is innately unpredictable.)

Ways To Diagram Three Entities

Design

As promised, my visual tantrum on the subject of imprecise use of visual depictions of triadic relationships:

triadic-relationships

Top, l to r: three dimensions; three interconnected parts of a system; three ratios
Middle, l to r: overlap of three domains; three steps; two means supporting an end
Bottom, l to r: three elements in a list; three hierarchical tiers; three nested domains

Gadamer busting on Romanticism

Ideas

A nice zinger from Gadamer’s Truth and Method:

…the criteria of the modern Enlightenment still determine the self-understanding of historicism. They do so not directly, but through a curious refraction caused by romanticism. This can be seen with particular clarity in the fundamental schema of the philosophy of history that romanticism shares with the Enlightenment and that precisely through the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment became an unshakable premise: the schema of the conquest of mythos by logos. What gives this schema its validity is the presupposition of the progressive retreat of magic in the world. It is supposed to represent progress in the history of the mind, and precisely because romanticism disparages this development, it takes over the schema itself as a self-evident truth. It shares the presupposition of the Enlightenment and only reverses its values, seeking to establish the validity of what is old simply on the fact that it is old: the “gothic” Middle Ages, the Christian European community of states, the permanent structure of society, but also the simplicity of peasant life and closeness to nature.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s faith in perfection, which thinks in terms of complete freedom from “superstition” and the prejudices of the past, we now find that olden times — the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analyzed away by consciousness, in a “society close to nature,” the world of Christian chivalry — all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth. Reversing the Enlightenment’s presupposition results in the paradoxical tendency toward restoration — i.e., the tendency to reconstruct the old because it is old, the conscious return to the unconscious, culminating in the recognition of the superior wisdom of the primeval age of myth. But the romantic reversal of the Enlightenment’s criteria of value actually perpetuates the abstract contrast between myth and reason. All criticism of the Enlightenment now proceeds via this romantic mirror image of the Enlightenment. Belief in the perfectibility of reason suddenly changes into the perfection of the “mythical” consciousness and finds itself reflected in a paradisiacal primal state before the “fall” of thought.

In fact the presupposition of a mysterious darkness in which there was a mythical collective consciousness that preceded all thought is just as dogmatic and abstract as that of a state of perfect enlightenment or of absolute knowledge. Primeval wisdom is only the counterimage of “primeval stupidity.” All mythical consciousness is still knowledge, and if it knows about divine powers, then it has progressed beyond mere trembling before power (if this is to be regarded as the primeval state), but also beyond a collective life contained in magic rituals (as we find in the early Orient). It knows about itself, and in this knowledge it is no longer simply outside itself.

There is the related point that even the contrast between genuine mythical thinking and pseudomythical poetic thinking is a romantic illusion based on a prejudice of the Enlightenment: namely that the poetic act no longer shares the binding quality of myth because it is a creation of the free imagination. It is the old quarrel between the poets and the philosophers in the modern garb appropriate to the age of belief in science. It is now said, not that poets tell lies, but that they are incapable of saying anything true; they have only an aesthetic effect and, through their imaginative creations, they merely seek to stimulate the imagination and vitality of their hearers or readers.

Another case of romantic refraction is probably to be found in the concept of an “organic society,” [Note: uh oh — this one hits close to the bone] which Ladendorf says was introduced by H. Leo. In Karl Marx it appears as a kind of relic of natural law that limits the validity of his socio-economic theory of the class struggle. Does the idea go back to Rousseau’s description of society before the division of labor and the introduction of property?

I filed this under the Romanticism theme in my wiki.

Thought-structure library

Ideas

I’m contemplating creating a thought-structure library. It could actually take the form of a practical philosophy pattern language.

I can see it dividing into several strata, corresponding to the theoretical (the objective, atomistic, systematizable realm of knowledge, around which most of us draw the line delimiting truth), the practical (the purely intuitive or instinctive sphere of inarticulate know-how, which is rarely as firmly linked to the theoretical as most of us think * , or rather is linked to it very weirdly ** ) and the meaningful (the “subjective”, holistic, gestalt realm of meaningful totalities in which our moral/aesthetic values and our symbol-systems are rooted.

A lot of it will be diagrams, especially in the stratum of the meaningful. It is going to look very cool. (I’m going to have to find my old visual tantrum, the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide”, which I created in response to an epidemic of depicting every triadic relationship as facets of a cube. The cube has semantic value which should not be ignored for the sake of finding a less boring way to depict a generic aggregate-of-three. Use three apples or something to depict that, ok? A cube represents either three dimensions (which also means something specific: co-presence of attributes) or three aspects of something (that is, you can view an identical entity multiple ways). Really, you don’t need an image to depict an aggregate. We all understand aggregates. The difficulty is in depicting anything other than an aggregate. But I digress into the same tantrum that induced the “Ways-To-Diagram-Three-Entities Guide” in the first place…

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* Thus the need for field research. If people actually had a clear theoretical understanding of what they do we could just conduct interviews and user research would be a hell of a lot cheaper. Fact is, the gulf between theory and practice, which is so widely recognized in application of theory (expressed in sarcastic remarks to the tune of “that sounds great in theory”) is just as bad running the opposite direction. We rarely reflect on our actions theoretically unless something goes wrong, and theory is asked to assist.

** What we are trying to accomplish has a lot to do with how we schematize our world. Fact is, the theoretical is founded on the practical more than the reverse. And the practical is largely founded on the meaningful. If we saw no value in science, there would be no science. This is a gross simplification, offered in the spirit of provocation.

Negativity

Ideas

Negativity does not mean focusing on what is unpleasant. Negativity means focusing on absence rather than presence.

Many people advise one another to not be negative. This is negativity in regard to negativity: wishing the absence of the negative. Negating negativity does not produce positivity.

But why prefer the positive to the negative? Why try to eliminate negativity? Negativity is not necessarily bad. Negativity has positive value in that it makes room for positivity by signaling problems with what is established.

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That all-too-common prohibition against pointing out problems unless one already has a solution is a nasty trick — a self-preservation strategy for the incumbent version of the truth. To cooperate means there can be no collaborative effort toward diagnosing and confronting problems. It is a sentimentally disguised divide-and-conquer move. The power of dialogue is denied to dissent and granted to preservation.

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Those who know only negative responses to “negative emotions” — confusion, anxiety, disorientation — are hermeneutically crippled. One must learn the positive meaning of the negative. The most important thing for a knower to know is that he does not yet know.

The negative emotions are the sense organs of interpretation.

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Who cares if you have all the answers if you’ve failed to see the questions?Seeing the question is the hard part. Answers are cheap.

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A well-formed question practically answers itself. A question is a perspectival field. Along the lines of the question an answer is sought.

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Many malformed answers result from the failure to ask the question thoroughly enough: one coddles bad ideas that need to be asked into oblivion.

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The term no-brainer is ironically apt.

The world doesn’t get simpler the smarter you are.

Expulsion

Ideas

What happened to him
on the desert plate
of glaring white,
under steep, soft blue,
when heaven sagged,
seeping purple-brown heat;
clouds and ocean
wound around his face,
and the horizon convulsed
and constricted in welts,
and gathered and bound
his groundless feet,
and he slid from the world
unseeing, unseen,
heavy and blind,
a dark, silver drop?

More synetic branding

Brand

The perspective of an organization’s brand reveals that organization, its approach to its business and its offerings as superior. Its greatest importance — brand’s purpose — is to make these revelations of superiority happen.

However, a brand perspective affects more than just the specific objects brand seeks to reveal — it organizes many incidental things around the view, and these things also indicate the perspective.

However, just as where one stands in a room organizes the entire room within a particular perspective, not only the object of one’s attention to (say, a couch one is walking around to inspect it from all angles), the perspective of the brand changes the appearance of the brand’s context. The brand perspective “tilts its context”.

The brand perspective then is given reinforcing coherence by including all possible cues of where one stands when one sees by the brand perspective — that common ground from which one sees when one really understands what the organization stands for. They intuitively indicate where to stand, or better, indicate in a very immediate way that you stand on common ground with the brand in the way stars indicate to navigators where they’ve sailed their ships.

Brand is primarily a perspective one wishes to share. The word for the understanding one gains through seeing by a shared perspective is synesis. Synesis is the Greek word for understanding (literally “together”, both in the sense of “seeing together with…” as well as “seeing as together”) in perspectival unity. The goal of synetic branding is to bring customers to see the world from the point of view of the brand (the brand’s synetic point), by the brand perspective.

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The fundamental elements of a brand model are:

  1. The brand perspective: From where it stands in regard to its purpose, how does the organization see what it is and does?
  2. The brand position: From where it stands in the competitive landscape, relative to itself how does the organization see its competition? (This is relative positioning: there is no single competitive landscape, only the landscape viewed from competing synetic points.)
  3. The brand attributes: From where it stands in the world, what looks right? What outward appearances conform to the ideal when one stands here?

A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.

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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.

Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.

A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side,  the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.

Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.

Synetic branding

Brand, Design, Philosophy

A good brand experience makes an organization’s perspective manifest to its stakeholders.

Some stakeholders are outsiders who have an outsider’s relationship to the organization. (e.g. current or prospective customers, the press, the interested public.) Other stakeholders constitute the organization itself. (e.g. employers, employees, partners, shareholders.)

The manifestation of the perspective takes the form of a sharing of understanding. Some of this understanding is explicit. Certain facts are agreed upon. The most important aspects of the understanding, however, are implicit: what is the significance of the facts at hand? What is the relative importance of each fact? How do the facts connect? What aspects of an offering are essential, and what aspects are less important or negligible?

Every act of design is one of balances and trade-offs. The best designs make its trade-offs feel obvious and necessary, to the point of invisibility. What is marginalized or omitted is what was irrelevant. (A classic example of this kind of trade-off is the London Underground “Tube map”.)

So, within the brand perspective is embedded the company’s standards and rankings of value. Those things seen as most important are given the most attention and emphasis. The less important things are ignored or downplayed, sometimes pointedly. The standards and values determine how an organization behaves, how it presents itself and how it develops and delivers its offerings.

(The classic example: What makes a computer more or less desirable? Low price and high performance? Those who see it that way are unlikely to purchase a Macintosh. However, if you view computers the way Apple does and put a premium on how it feels to use and own a computer, you are likely to consider only a Macintosh when purchasing a new computer. Another example: What do you consider important the most important quality in a car? Style? Performance? If so, you probably won’t buy a Toyota. However, if you see reliability as the single most important quality in a car, it is very likely you will consider Toyota. Boring, but compelling. Consequently, there are many Toyota owners, and very few Toyota enthusiasts. Toyota makes cars for people who don’t love cars.)

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If an organization wishes to have an authentic, compelling brand its leadership must 1) actually have a perspective on what it does that is different from its competition, 2) the perspective must be one that can be shared, 3) the leadership must know how to share its perspective, 4) the perspective must be practically consequential (the perspective changes the way one acts), and 5) the organization’s leadership must have the courage to believe its own eyes and to actually live and lead according to how it sees. It cannot constantly second-guess itself, equivocate, compromise or waffle between its perspective and the myriad other ways of seeing.

This does not mean one denies the existence or validity of other ways of seeing. It does not mean that one does not believe in the possibility that other ways of seeing might turn out to be better. (If you have a taste for such things, allow your mind to boggle for a moment at what it means to see a new definition of better as better than the one you currently hold! Better… how?)

It does, however mean one sees for himself. It means that one listens to others in order to see with them what they are seeing, and to share with them what one is seeing. This listening and sharing — dialogue in the proper sense — presupposes an expectation of seeing for oneself and the insight that one could at any moment see differently, and that difference could be deeply and extensively consequential.

Most of all it means that a leader who wished to lead an organization with a real brand must see by a genuine brand vision.

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Leaders who lack vision rarely know it. They believe an ability paint a vivid, desirable and detailed picture of the future and to lay out a plan for actualizing that picture is having vision. The mistake is understandable — some imagination and ability to visualize and describe is involved. It is a valuable skill for a leader to possess. However, this is not vision.

Vision is seeing what their organization is and does in a distinctive, persuasive and consequential way. This way of seeing makes their organization look, feel and behave differently from its peers.

It is a subtle difference, but a substantial and consequential one. The ability to share one’s ambitions and plans persuasively might help an organization perform better, but it won’t help it accomplish anything new. If this were all vision were, nobody would care much about vision. It would just be another skill.

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There are multiple levels of branding needed in user experience projects:

  1. The company has an articulated brand, its offerings are deliberately on-brand. What is required is framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  2. The company lacks an articulated brand, but has developed its offerings through a tacit brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement)  and b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience.
  3. The company lacks an articulated brand, and has developed its offerings through a tacit and unclear or inconsistent brand vision. What is required is a) articulating the brand (minimum: brand perspective, brand attributes and positioning statement), b) framing the company and product in a reinforcing on-brand experience, c) a establishing a program to communicate the brand articulation throughout the organization and, d) and additionally, developing parallel programs to operationalize the brand – that is, to redesign the organizations processes to produce on-brand offerings and uniformly on-brand customer experiences at every touchpoint.
  4. The company lacks brand altogether, and has developed its offerings strictly through imitation of best practices or inconsistently according to fragmentary individual or factional whim. What is required is a) anthropological study of the organizational culture and the stakeholders it serves  to understand the possibilities, given the organization’s traditions, constitution and contexts. From this foundation a brand strategy consisting of a brand articulation and supporting operational changes can be developed to transform the organization into a coherent culture.

Brand is the outward expression of an authentic, coherent culture. This is why, despite the fact that all companies have logos and most have corporate graphic standards, very few have actual brands.

Most brands are like most people. They try to play a part without really being it. It is hollow and unpersuasive.

Quantity and quality

Philosophy

I want to get clearer on the relationship between quality and quantity. My view is this: every quantification is an indicator of a quality, and it is solely from this that the quantification derives its significance. Further, our concern for the quantitative is rooted in and derived from qualitative concerns.

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The quantitative seems more real than the qualitative because on principle it is follows explicit rules of thought. It is easy both to see for oneself and to demonstrate to others correctness or incorrectness of such thinking, and therefore it is easy to establish synesis (shared understanding), around the correctness of the calculations. (The same is true for logic.) Agreement on qualities (and measuring them) on the other hand is much harder to establish.

As a means to establish agreement, the quantifiable and the logical are indispensible tools, and absolutely should not be seen as opposed to the quantitative.

However, these tools are a means to qualitative ends.

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Failure to examine the linkage between the quantitative to the qualitative is where we go wrong (in business, in education, in politics, etc.).

The urgency of finding agreement and stabilizing reality in some kind of expedient synesis causes us to gloss the hard questions in order to have easy answers.

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In the shell game of modernity, experts shuffle quantities before us until we forget what qualities are hidden beneath. Eventually, we forget  about the qualities contained in the quantities. Eventually, dazed by the blur of Whats and Hows and Whos we forget Why.

Medusa’s comb

Philosophy

Akrasia – ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek, from a- ‘without’ + kratos ‘power, strength.’ The term is used esp. with reference to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Incontinent – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French, or from Latin incontinent-, from in– ‘not’ + continent– ‘holding together.’

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Akrasia — often translated as “moral incontinence” — is the incapacity to maintain continuity in one’s being. The discontinuity can be experienced in the moment in the form of indecision, disorientation or confusion, but it can also be experienced as a moments of great clarity, but a clarity that contradicts the preceding moments of clarity and sees no reason to reconcile moments.

The latter form of akrasia appears to the one experiencing it to be an irruption of insight. One sees the light, is saved, reborn. The old self’s perspective is invalidated and replaced with the new. The new wisdom attacks the old perspective’s claim to wisdom and sees no reason for reconciliation.

Akrasia can be seen as sporadic hubris, or hubris can be seen as low-frequency akrasia.

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The serpent is a traditional symbol of wisdom.

Medusa’s head was a ball of wild, biting serpents.

Nothing in excess

Philosophy

The why by which one approaches life determines one’s how, which in turn articulates the what.

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Qualities articulate categories. Categories provide the abstraction necessary to quantify. This is the principle of individuation.

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Some mythical hearsay:

In the Greek pantheon, Apollo was (among other things) the god of surfaces and of individuation.

Myth tells us that Apollo fell in love with the Nymph Daphne. Daphne did not return his love. He chased her and tried to rape her. Daphne prayed to Mother Earth for help. She was transformed into the laurel tree.

This is when Apollo adopted his philosophy of moderation. The laurel was made sacred to his followers, and among the inscriptions on his temple in Delphi appear two sayings:

Know Thyself.

Nothing in Excess.

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There are no two of anything, not strictly speaking. Only instances of a category can be counted.

Some categories are unavoidably perceived. Some are far more artificial than we realize. If society as a whole stopped seeing them, they’d no longer have reality.

But make no mistake, categories originate in us.

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The notion that the quantifiable is more real than that which resists quantification — even in areas where qualities are vastly more important than quantities — is a why firmly reinforced by prodedural hows resulting in a pretty hideous what.

This does not mean we don’t attempt to quantify wherever we can. It means that we start from the fullness of reality and humbly quantify as much of it as we can and respect the remaining unquantifiable reality as both real and as the wellspring of value.

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The protest “but how do we measure that?” … that “but” signifies illegitimacy of the yet-unmeasurable and the ultimately unmeasurable.

Measure it and then it can be considered part of reality. Until then it is imaginary, arbitrary, merely subjective.

Can we measure this claim that only the measurable can be considered valid? If not, can we consider this standard valid?

Gadamer on adventures and episodes

Philosophy

I read this passage in Gadamer’s Truth and Method during my family’s adventure in New York:

The representation of the whole in the momentary Erlebnis obviously goes far beyond the fact of its being determined by its object. Every experience is, in Schleiermacher’s words, “an element of infinite life.” Georg Simmel, who was largely responsible for the word Erlebnis becoming so fashionable, considers the important thing about the concept of experience as this: “the objective not only becomes an image and idea, as in knowing, but an element in the life process itself.” He even says that every experience has something of an adventure about it. But what is an adventure? An adventure is by no means just an episode. Episodes are a succession of details which have no inner coherence and for that very reason have no permanent significance. An adventure, however, interrupts the customary course of events, but is positively and significantly related to the context which it interrupts. Thus an adventure lets life be felt as a whole, in its breadth and in its strength. Here lies the fascination of an adventure. It removes the conditions and obligations of everyday life. It ventures out into the uncertain.

But at the same time it knows that, as an adventure, it is exceptional and thus remains related to the return of the everyday, into which the adventure cannot be taken. Thus the adventure is “undergone,” like a test or trial from which one emerges enriched and more mature.

There is an element of this, in fact, in every Erlebnis. Every experience is taken out of the continuity of life and at the same time related to the whole of one’s life. It is not simply that an experience remains vital only as long as it has not been fully integrated into the context of one’s life consciousness, but the very way it is “preserved and dissolved” (aufgehoben) by being worked into the whole of life consciousness goes far beyond any “significance” it might be thought to have. Because it is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.

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Popular fiction is episode. Literature is adventure.

Fact is episode. Insight is adventure.

Most vacations are episodes, and that’s why I’ve always despised them.

No place to lay your head

Philosophy

Foxes have the holes, birds have their nests, and workers have their work stations. Everything established, everything with an accepted precedent, has its place in the world.

If, however, you are a new product-producer participant in humankind’s perpetual self-reinvention of humankind you will have no place until you make yourself a place.

Our choice is not either-or. We are not forced to either deny ourselves or to deny the world.

Humility

Philosophy

People demand humility but are deeply offended if their demands are indulged.

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The offense at what strikes one as superior to oneself is very different from the offense at that which presumes to be superior but is sealed against learning otherwise. The former always attributes its offense to the latter. The latter always attributes the offense it arouses to the former.

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We all believe in better or worse, even when we pretend to know better.

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Arrogant – ORIGIN late Middle English : via Old French from Latin arrogant– ‘claiming for oneself,’ from the verb arrogare.

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Possession is consummated socially. Until possession is publicly acknowledged there’s only a claim.

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Good practical advice from Nietzsche:

Artist’s ambition. — The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

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You can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by submitting to it.

You can also betray its importance by denying its significance with suspiciously excessive vehemence.
Finally, you can acknowledge the importance of social opinion by working to influence it, superficially at the factual level, or deeply at the level of vision.

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We have the capacity to see everything differently, and that’s very weird.

Aesthetic differentiation

Brand, Hermeneutics

Gadamer on the Romantic/modern conception of aesthetics:

The shift in the ontological definition of the aesthetic toward the concept of aesthetic appearance has its theoretical basis in the fact that the domination of the scientific model of epistemology leads to discrediting all the possibilities of knowing that lie outside this new methodology [“fiction”!].

Let us recall that in the well-known quotation from which we started, Helmholtz knew no better way to characterize the quality that distinguishes work in the human sciences from that in the natural sciences than by describing it as “artistic.” Corresponding positively to this theoretical relationship is what we may call “aesthetic consciousness.” It is given with the “standpoint of art,” which Schiller first founded. For just as the art of “beautiful appearance” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality — it is a form of the “alienated spirit,” which is how Hegel understood culture (Bildung). The ability to adopt an aesthetic stance is part of cultured (gebildete) consciousness. For in aesthetic consciousness we find the features that distinguish cultured consciousness: rising to the universal, distancing from the particularity of immediate acceptance or rejection, respecting what does not correspond to one’s own expectation or preference.

We have discussed above the meaning of the concept of taste in this context. However, the unity of an ideal of taste that distinguishes a society and bonds its members together differs from that which constitutes the figure of aesthetic culture. Taste still obeys a criterion of content. What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stamp from the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses and knows what belongs to it and what does not. Even its artistic interests are not arbitrary or in principle universal, but what artists create and what the society values belong together in the unity of a style of life and an ideal of taste.

In contrast, the idea of aesthetic cultivation — as we derived it from Schiller — consists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and in dissociating the work of art from its world. One expression of this dissociation is that the domain to which the aesthetically cultivated consciousness lays claim is expanded to become universal. Everything to which it ascribes “quality” belongs to it. It no longer chooses, because it is itself nothing, nor does it seek to be anything, on which choice could be based. Through reflection, aesthetic consciousness has passed beyond any determining and determinate taste, and itself represents a total lack of determinacy. It no longer admits that the work of art and its world belong to each other, but on the contrary, aesthetic consciousness is the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everything considered art is measured.

What we call a work of art and experience (erleben) aesthetically depends on a process of abstraction. By disregarding everything in which a work is rooted (its original context of life, and the religious or secular function that gave it significance), it becomes visible as the “pure work of art.” In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness performs a task that is positive in itself. It shows what a pure work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own right. I call this “aesthetic differentiation.”

Whereas a definite taste differentiates — i.e., selects and rejects — on the basis of some content, aesthetic differentiation is an abstraction that selects only on the basis of aesthetic quality as such. It is performed in the self-consciousness of “aesthetic experiences.” Aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is directed towards what is supposed to be the work proper — what it ignores are the extra-aesthetic elements that cling to it, such as purpose, function, the significance of its content. These elements may be significant enough inasmuch as they situate the work in its world and thus determine the whole meaningfulness that it originally possessed. But as art the work must be distinguished from all that. It practically defines aesthetic consciousness to say that it differentiates what is aesthetically intended from everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere. It abstracts from all the conditions of a work’s accessibility. Thus this is a specifically aesthetic kind of differentiation. It distinguishes the aesthetic quality of a work from all the elements of content that induce us to take up a moral or religious stance towards it, and presents it solely by itself in its aesthetic being.

Provable / significant

Philosophy

From time to time. — He sat himself at the city gate and said to one who passed through it that this was the city gate. The latter responded that this was true, but that one should not want to be too much in the right if one wanted to be thanked for it. “Oh,” the former replied, “I desire no thanks; but from time to time it is nonetheless very pleasant not only to be in the right but to be acknowledged to be right as well.”

– Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims 297

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A (the?) essential tension: What is most provable matters least. What matters most is the least provable.

Grammatical x-ray (exposed on Chinese film): Thesis [passive] : antithesis [active]. Thesis [active] : antithesis [passive].

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“No, what is most provable is the most important.” Prove it.

Parenting a company

Brand

Raising a child is not an act of building or assembly, but of cultivation. The child develops out of the generative forces given to him as his nature at birth. Some new qualities can be implanted, but these new qualities grow out of his nature. To think of the qualities as annexations is a deep mischaracterization of character-building which makes success a matter of pure luck. The parents literally does not know what they are doing.

Parents cannot make their children into whatever they’d like. A child begins life with a nature — a  temperament, talents, strengths and weaknesses. This nature can be cultivated into an adult personality that does full justice to the child’s nature, aligns all his natural forces, and provides the child with authentic self-awareness — or the nature can be selectively ignored, wasted, suppressed or perverted to suit the parent’s prejudices and aims, with results that range from mediocrity to dysfunction.

The same can be said for a company. A company can be cultivated through good management and groomed to convey a brand to the outside world and to itself. Or leaders can fantasize out and decree a “brand” for the company that suits their own taste or the whatever they think their customers will like. The brand might “take”, but if the organizational culture — however embryonic it is — is ignored, the brand might flounder or even undermine the company’s development. Or worse, deprived of the inspiring resistance of nature, the leadership might concoct the normal hackneyed list of desirable traits (you know, integrity, openness, innovation, customer-centricity, blah, blah, blah) and create another generic corporate non-entity.

People who start from the outside and try to bring themselves into conformity to the world’s expectations tend to be somewhat bland, ineffectual and dully conflicted. The same is true for companys.

Last mile

Philosophy

Philosophy has a “last mile” problem. Popular culture, and its disparate “worlds”, including business and, sadly, education) is missing some fundamental insights which have been well-understood for nearly a hundred years, but which have never made it beyond humanities classrooms, with disastrous consequences.

Overcoming Romanticism

Philosophy

There is a huge difference between someone who seeks ways to measure things and someone who rejects the existence of anything he cannot measure.

Measuring is a mysterious activity.

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A Romantic correctly notes that some things are beyond the grasp of cognition, and positively values these things. The commonest form of Romantic, however, proceeds to make a mind-boggling mistake: preserving the cognition-resistant truths as rare, fragile, precious mysteries. The greatest mystery is that anything like an ordered, cognizable world could arise at all. The Romantic is the crowning achievement of this order: they spontaneously see the most mysterious thing of all as the opposite of mystery.

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Humility demands that we recognize the surpassing reality behind and beyond whatever a man can think. Knowledge does not and cannot possess or master anything. It only relates.

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The fullest form of relationship a human being can have is the human-to-human relation, whether this relationship is to another person or to the entire world as a whole.

I might actually disagree with Buber on an important point: The I-Thou relationship does not exclude the I-It relationship, and I-Thou is not a complete human-to-human without I-It.