All posts by anomalogue

Meliorism

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Meliorism – the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin melior ‘better’ + -ism .

*

A selection of passages I’ve indexed in my wiki under “meliorism“:

*

Thus speak and stammer: “This is my good, this I love, thus does it please me entirely, thus alone do I want the good.

I do not want it as divine law, not as a human law or a human need; it will not be a guide-post for me to over-earths and paradises.

It is an earthly virtue which I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all any common wisdom.

But that bird built its nest with me: therefore, I love and cherish it — now it sits with me on its golden eggs.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

*

A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in… he is at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet at one with himself and his surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work… The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

– Christopher Alexander

*

There are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world’s salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism… [which] treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

– William James

*

We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one – like any idea that concerns what should be.

– John Dewey

*

I’m preparing a pragmatist attack on metaphysically-grounded conceptions of morality. To make a pragmatist attack means to suspend for a moment the question of truth or falseness, and consider only the practical implications of a belief. How does a belief affect the believer’s actions? A few preliminary points:

  • When a person believes in a morality endorsed by something beyond humankind, whether God or nature, he is less likely to take personal responsibility for it. Passivity is passed off as faith: reality will take care of itself. (Someone who believes in natural rights appears to honor rights by attributing them to nature, but is he as likely to defend them as someone who values his rights but considers them vulnerable?)
  • When a person believes in a morality that is not a matter of agreement between people, but rather something that comes down from an authority higher than humankind he is less likely to take seriously the obligation to persuade other people of its truth. He is far more likely to impose it on others who are equally convinced they know the truth but are mistaken.
  • When a person believes in a morality that exists to serve a cause higher than humankind, he is less likely to consider the human consequences of his morality – neither to himself nor to others who follow his morality voluntarily or involuntarily.
  • When a person believes in a morality that is beyond human reason, his critical defenses are dismantled. If empirical observation and reason can’t tell him he is being manipulated and exploited, what can? Further, if reason is suspended, how does a person know what has overruled reason and whether it is itself valid? What is being trusted, and why? How does a person even know it is a virtue, and not a vice?
  • If a person believes morality is necessarily metaphysically grounded, if he comes to discover that metaphysics is radically mysterious and not solid and static like land but liquid like the shimmering surface of a sea he might sink into the depths of skepticism and antinomianism and never think to reach out for a human hand or listen for a human word. He will reject morality itself as false, rather than his human – his all-too-human – view of morality.

Notice the tendency here: metaphysically grounded moralities tend toward extremes of passivity and aggression.

Obviously, these points do not address the question of whether there isn’t in fact a metaphysically-grounded moral truth, despite the practical consequences. That is a separate question.

This is also not an argument against metaphysics, per se. My attack is strictly limited the use of metaphysics as a positive grounding.

Ira Glass

Philosophy

My parents took Susan, the girls and me to see Ira Glass last night. It was incredibly valuable.The most exciting part was Ira’s discussion of his narrative method. The formula he gave:

Story [Pause] Story [Pause] Story [Pause] Reflection

This reminded me of an idea I first grasped reading Kuhn (on how students learn the sense of scientific theories) and recently re-read in Bernstein:

To Gadamer, the hermeneutical process used in making a legal judgment exemplifies the hermeneutical process as a whole. Gadamer argues that the judge does not simply “apply” fixed, determinate laws to particular situations. Rather the judge must interpret and appropriate precedents and law to each new, particular situation. It is by virtue of such considered judgment that the meaning of the law and the meaning of the particular case are codetermined. “We can, then, bring out as what is truly common to all forms of hermeneutics the fact that the sense to be understood finds its concrete…form only in interpretation, but that this interpretative work is wholly committed to the meaning of the text.”

Ira’s formula reverses my usual way of communicating: Reflection Reflection Reflection Story [Pause] “are you still with me?”I have great hope that this method will improve my communication effectiveness. That doesn’t mean all my posts will follow this formula, because my posts are how I clarify my own thoughts to myself, but I will certainly use it in practical situations, especially at work.

*

Ira also said something striking that I consider to be the essence of Jewishnes: Empathy is the essence of sanity.

Other useful insights:

A good story is easy to visualize.

“Dialogue is golden.” Include real dialogue in stories. Dialogue slows the story to the speed of the actual event.

Hermeneutic butterfly effect

Philosophy

If understanding is a nonlinear, recursive process, where each new particular understanding changes the totality, and the totality in turn changes the meaning of each particular – it is reasonable to wonder if understanding might exhibit the qualities nonlinear, recursive processes. That is, the butterfly effect may be seen in a shade of meaning of a word. The structures that govern the totality may be reveal themselves self-similarly in each particular. Understanding, though ordered, might be radically unpredictable, worked out in the process of understanding, without any shortcut.A chaotic-determinist meditation: Reality cannot be simulated at the speed or comprehensibility of reality itself. Reality outpaces all attempts at simulating the working out of its processes, but the working out of its processes is the only way to know an outcome. Reality has more variables than any simulation can accommodate, but every variable however subtle has the power to change the outcome. In principle, everything is predictable. In actuality, nothing is predictable.

The “analysis paralysis” argument as filibuster

Biography

The people I know who most frequently cry, “Analysis paralysis!” and demand that everyone take immediate action without further discussion generally claim to do so for the sake of expedience. There is no time for this, they argue. The group must stop talking and start doing, and make progress toward its meeting its goal.

Try pushing back on moving forward with their plan, however, and their behavior begins to suggest that perhaps something besides expedience might be motivating them. 1) They are often suspiciously willing to argue for hours that wasting time on further discussion is ridiculous given the urgency of the situation; and 2) they are suspiciously unwilling, for the sake of expedience, to yield to the course of action advised by their opponent. It is the other guy who needs to be sensible, to be a team player, etc.

Consider this possibility: Perhaps “analysis paralysis” only appears to be caused by analysis and deliberation, but that the root cause is resistance to deliberation by those who think they can use means other than deliberation to get their way. They hold a project hostage with their stubborn uncooperation (or other bullying behaviors) until the group pays the ransom: doing things their way.

Essentially, the type of bickering, non-communicative talk used to argue against deliberation is a sneaky form of filibustering.

*

All too often, other people on a project (people who dislike conflict and really do want to get things moving) are eager to whatever it takes to end the conflict. What’s the quickest route to end the stalemate? Putting an end to further deliberation, of course! The filibusterer keeps arguing to end it, and the other guy keeps going, anyway. The team takes the path of least resistance. They pressure the one arguing for the deliberation to capitulate.

After all, has deliberation gotten us anywhere?

*

A filibustering argument against deliberation  creates an illusion of symmetry: two sides are talking but neither side can come to an agreement. It works to discredit deliberation by aping the forms of deliberation while undermining it, and in so doing demonstrates the futility of talk.

Further, the content of the filibuster’s speech is expedience, team-play, progress, being realistic, reasonable, efficient. Who can argue with that? The other party is positioned as arguing against all these good things. He is obstructing progress, insisting on being indulged, not caring that the team is facing a deadline, wasting time on more talk. The other guy doesn’t agree with him, but he just won’t give up.

Talk isn’t working, but he keeps on talking, anyway.

See? Sneaky!

*

Subtle distinctions with important consequences:

Not all talk is dialogue. Not all argument is deliberation. Dialogue requires a sincere attempt by all parties to understand one another. Deliberation is the genuine attempt to reach consensus on a course of action.

Dialogue and deliberation are precisely what an “analysis paralysis” filibuster obstructs. It argues against the need to reach common understanding, and passes this off as simple disagreement. It argues against considering rival courses of action and presents the failure to agree on this fact as a failure of deliberation itself.

Dialogue and deliberation require a good-faith effort by all parties involved. They fail from lack of desire for them to succeed. This fact is easily exploited when a group values harmony and efficiency so much that it will purchase it at any cost, even reason, collaboration, empathy, respect and all those other pretty “core values” words that people love to talk about, but are so ready to betray to “practicality” (* See note below).

To allow an “analysis paralysis” filibuster to kill deliberation is to cooperate with it and succumb to it, and to reward coercive tactics that undermine authentic collaboration.

*

Think about the people you have known in the past who have played the “analysis paralysis” card. They usually have one of several of the following characteristics:

  1. They are in a position of power and know they can get away with coercion.
  2. They simply don’t enjoy analysis and look for excuses to avoid it.
  3. They are intellectually disinclined to understand perspectives other than their own. Often this is because…
  4. They tend to think there is a right answer, and if someone cannot prove them that the answer they have found is wrong, it proves that their solution must be the right one.
  5. They fail to see that a misunderstanding by definition looks exactly like an understanding to one who misunderstands.
  6. They have very strong wills, and see stubbornness as a virtue.

*

Any group that considers itself founded on principles of respect and collaboration can quickly cure its “analysis paralysis” by doing the following:

  1. Agree that all attempts to circumvent deliberation will not be tolerated by the group and will automatically fail.
  2. Make it clear that the most expedient course of action is to use open, reasonable dialogue to come to a solution acceptable to everyone, which might not be one of the original proposals, or even a compromise, but a creative synthesis superior to all the initial proposals.
  3. Establish that decisions are to be made by weighing the merits and weaknesses of each proposal (as opposed to adopting the first proposal as the default, and requiring the first proposal to be shown faulty before rival proposals are considered.)
  4. In disagreements, require each disagreeing party to represent the view of the other to the satisfaction of the other, to establish that common understanding has been achieved.

*

Analysis paralysis will not be cured by indulging those who paralyze analysis through filibustering. The only cure is a political one. The group must say together: “We do not have time to argue for hours with you that we do not have time to argue. Converse respectfully or forfeit the argument.”

—-

* NOTE: Practicality, of course, is a euphemism for “expedience” which is in truth the only “core value” most people hold, because expedience is the principle of having no principles at all. I also keep hearing people calling expedience “pragmatism”, which galls the hell out of me. Take my word for it, or read up on it yourself: genuine pragmatism takes far more balls and brains than most people have.

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

I wrote a manifesto for my company and put it on our intranet:

An attempt at a distillation of [this company]’s culture, in words we frequently use when describing and differentiating our approach:

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.
  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.
  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

These three principles govern how we relate to one another on our teams, and how we relate to our clients.

Our goal is to help our clients actualize empathy + alignment + realism in their own organizations, both externally with their customers and internally with one other.

We believe that empathy + alignment + realism are core principles of ethical effectiveness. By articulating, championing and exemplifying these principles, and by helping our clients and partners put them into practice [this company] makes a positive contribution to the world of commerce and to the world as a whole.

*

These principles do not exhaust the range of values active in [this company]’s culture. However, if you look closely at those values it gradually becomes clear that they all grow out from the root principles of empathy + alignment + realism.

A helpful analogy: the root principles are the DNA of our culture; the core values are the genetic traits of our company – which is the starting point for our brand.

Our brand is developed continually through collective self-cultivation (iterative clarification, accentuation and application of our principles and core values, alongside the company traditions that support them) and collective self-presentation (our formal brand guidelines – visual identity, voice and tone, interaction style). The latter can be seen as a sort of grooming: We present who we authentically are in the best possible light.

*

[This company] will strengthen its brand externally, partly through explicit branding efforts, but more because [this company] has a powerful internal and semi-internal (our clients and partners) brand community.

This is something we also can perfect internally and then package for our clients: internal brand community as the key to authentic and powerful external branding. It is grounded in a simple idea: the most effective way to be perceived as something is to actually be it.

Branding can be seen as the practice of compellingly and authentically externalizing a company’s culture. Internal branding is the conscious aligning of a company’s culture to its external brand, so the two mutually reinforce.

–

  • Empathy means to take care to really understand how other people see, feel and think.

Empathy is not figuring other people out; it is not discovering what they are after, or knowing how to manipulated them to get them to do what you want them to do.

Empathy is, in Aristotle’s language, synesis, or understanding. Synesis is like sympathy, but involves the entirely of another’s subjectivity – cognition, language, moral priorities, hopes, fears, symbol-system, his aesthetic sense, his social environment… it is not a theoretical, externalized theory, but a holistic vision of life in which an understander is involved. Synesis turns parallel talking into dialogue.

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

  • Alignment means to pursue solutions which do full justice to the concerns of all involved.

Alignment is not stalemate or compromise. It is not accomplished in a battle where each party pushes as hard as it can for its own interests until it has won as much ground as it can. Alignment can only happen when all parties have a stake in the other parties’ well-being. All parties must desire and aim for a solution that satisfies everyone involved. This aim has an abstracting effect: what concern is embedded in each conflicting solution? What solutions are possible that satisfy all concerns and dissolve the conflict?

Alignment presupposes pluralism: that there can be multiple satisfactory solutions. It is not a question of which solution is viable, and which solutions are not viable. It is a question of which viable solution can be agreed upon by all parties in the deliberation.

Alignment is, in Aristotle’s language, phronesis, or prudence. Phronesis is what turns churning debate into productive deliberation.

For alignment to work, all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others, but in the end, the focus of the deliberation must be, not on the parties in the deliberation, but on their shared problem.

  • Realism means to find solutions which do exactly what they are meant to do within their real-world context.

Realism is not functionalism. Realism is also not being resigned to “the way things are”.

Also, realism is not factoring oneself out of the picure in a misconceived attempt at objectivity.

Realism means being scientific. It means cheerfully putting your ideas to the test, and letting them go if the test shows the ideas are not viable. It means cheerfully adopting another’s ideas as one’s own if they are shown to be better.

Realism means that you stay subjectively, personally involved in the problems you are deliberating, but in such a way that you are open to change.

For realism to work (and to not devolve into the poverty of functionalism or complacent pseudo-conservatism), all parties in the deliberation must (empathically) respect the others and enlarge their understanding of the problem at hand to include the concerns of the others. The group must collectively turn toward the problem itself, and work toward solutions that satisfy the concerns of everyone involved. Finally, the solutions must be subjected to test, whether that test is a formal experiment or some other criterion or standard for success.

“Has he no friend?”

Philosophy

Some Nietzsche:

In honour of friendship. – That the feeling of friendship was in antiquity considered the highest feeling, even higher than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient sage, indeed, as it were, as its sole and even holier sibling: this is very well expressed in the story of the Macedonian king who gave a world-despising Athenian philosopher a talent and got it back. ‘What?’ said the king, ‘Has he then no friend?’ He meant: ‘I honour this pride of the wise and independent man, but I would honour his humanity even more highly if the friend in him had won over his pride. The philosopher has lowered himself before me by showing that he doesn’t know one of the two highest feelings – and the higher one at that.’

*

The golden watchword. – Many chains have been laid upon man so that he should no longer behave like an animal: and he has in truth become gentler, more spiritual, more joyful, more reflective than any animal is. Now, however, he suffers from having worn his chains for so long, from being deprived for so long of clean air and free movement:–these chains, however, I shall never cease from repeating, are those heavy and pregnant errors contained in the conceptions of morality, religion and metaphysics. Only when this sickness from one’s chains has also been overcome will the first great goal have truly been attained: the separation of man from the animals. – We stand now in the midst of our work of removing these chains, and we need to proceed with the greatest caution. Only the ennobled man may be given freedom of the spirit; to him alone does alleviation of life draw near and salve his wounds; only he may say that he lives for the sake of joy and for the sake of no further goal; and in any other mouth his motto would be perilous: Peace all around me and goodwill to all things closest to me. – With this motto for individuals he recalls an ancient great and moving saying intended for all which has remained hanging over all mankind as a sign and motto by which anyone shall perish who inscribes it on his banner too soon – by which Christianity perished. The time has, it seems, still not yet come when all men are to share the experience of those shepherds who saw the heavens brighten above them and heard the words: “On earth peace, good will toward men.” – It is still the age of the individual.

Anaximander, Levinas and the injustice of appropriation

Philosophy

It occurred to me this morning, the play of infinity and totality can be projected into  Anaximander’s single surviving fragment.

Simplicius transmitted the fragment as:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

 Nietzsche presented Anaximander’s maxim as:

Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.

 *

It seems to me that Gadamer’s idea of appropriation of tradition involves grasping older symbolic concretions in increasingly differentiated terms. (Did Anaximander himself think in phenomenological terms? Probably not. Does his thought expose a truth whose structure holds in the most rarefied phenomenological insight? Yes.) Is appropriation essentially an act of abstraction, projection and application, rather than recovery of the original idea?

Perhaps a true thought compels through its empirical fitness but persuades through manifesting universal structures which continue to apply to ever deeper empirical observations. (The universal structures are not formal rules of intelligibility, but truths revealed through application of those rules. What I am trying to do is differentiate the structures I have in mind from Kant’s tables and also from rules of logic.)

By “deeper” I mean greater intellectual dimension, downwardly into chthonic irruption, and upwardly into cultural epiphany. Depth is a function of apperceptions subsuming apperceptions. From what I’ve seen so far, it should be assumed that no apperception is ultimate. Every apperception is self-evidently ultimate until overtaken by higher apperception.

*

Every apperception unjustly calls itself ultimate until it is overtaken and illuminated by higher apperception; at which time it pays penance, returning to the apeiron from which all things are articulated.

Spiral

 

*

The pain of the truth of Levinas is that of the Dionysian insight, which is knowing the apeiron.

*

(Sensual overindulgence is what Dionysianism looks like from the outside, but Dionysianism seen from the outside is precisely what Dionysianism is not.)

Metaphysics

Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphysics – the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: representing medieval Latin metaphysica, based on Greek ta meta ta phusika ‘the things after the Physics,’ referring to the sequence of Aristotle’s works [crazy!]: the title came to denote the branch of study treated in the books, later interpreted as meaning the science of things transcending what is physical or natural.

Theophanic – of a visible manifestation to humankind of God or a god. ORIGIN Old English, via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek theophaneia, from theos ‘god’ + phainein ‘to show.’

Exophanic – of revelation of the fact of beyondness. ORIGIN Greek, from exo ‘outside’ + phainein ‘to show.’

Cataphatic –  of knowledge of God obtained through affirmation. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek kataphatikos ‘affirmative,’ from kataphasis ‘affirmation,’ from kata– (as an intensifier) + phanai ‘speak.’

Apophatic – of knowledge of God obtained through negation. ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek apophatikos ‘negative,’ from apophasis ‘denial,’ from apo– ‘other than’ + phanai ‘speak.’

Transcendent – beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience. ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French transcendre or Latin transcendere, from trans– ‘across’ + scandere ‘climb.’

*

My definition of metaphysics: The philosophy of that which is beyond direct experience.

Obviously, this is tricky territory. How does one think about that which is, by definition, unthinkable?  Not only is the “object” of metaphysics beyond the reach of thought (and therefore as nonsensical as sight without seeing). The possibility is raised of intellectual entities that thought cannot wrap its fingers around even the entity is sitting in the palm of its hand. The latter idea might seem complete nonsense to many… but not to the soul who has even once come to understand something initially unintelligible and subsequently discovered that not only this particular thing was illuminated with intelligibility, but the entire world has now opened out in a way inconceivable prior to the epiphany.

Until a person has undergone the epiphany of what I call practical transcendence – having an actual before and after experience of intelligibility – the tendency is to treat metaphysics strictly as thinking about objects that are beyond our knowledge. Every single metaphysical conception a thinker has is marked either with this awareness or its conspicuous absence. For all I know there are many other similar marks. This is the one I know.

Those who don’t know don’t know that they don’t know unless they actively work to discover it. Otherwise, everything you can think of is self-evidently knowable, and nothing if left over. “Give me one intelligible example of something that’s unintelligible. Just what I thought: you babble nonsense and cannot provide a single example. Why should I take this seriously?” That’s a good question!

*

Things would be very different if blindness and darkness were the same thing. Light-and-knowledge analogies break down at this point. Sight sees objects in presence of light and notices darkness in the absence of light. Blindness lacks sight. It is wrong to say blindness sees nothing. Blindness does not even see nothing. For a concrete demonstration of the difference try a blind spot experiment. Really try it. Don’t just read about it.

*

A cataphatic metaphysic (which posits specific knowledge of what is beyond the limits of our knowledge) and an apophatic metaphysic (which posits limits to our knowledge) is total. It separates religious dogmatism from other religious forms. Religious dogmatism is only bad when it becomes severed from a religious tradition rooted in something inconceivably deeper. A dogmatist excommunicated from a sustaining community with all its spiritual organs intact is in serious spiritual trouble. He is at risk of loving his dogma as a thing that he knows and possesses that closes him to the radical beyondness and protects him from dread.

An exophanic apophatic metaphysic and a transcendental apophatic metaphysic is also different. An expohanic metaphysic tries to acknowledge and relate all experiences that indicate beyondness, which means all perceptions, feelings, intuitions, explicit thoughts are given legitimacy as entities they are and are interrelated. An exophanic metaphysic is an ontology that sees the terminus of ontology as beyond the grasp of ontology itself.

What I am calling a transcendental metaphysic employs hermeneutic practice to find ways to expand the scope of ontology (what is often called “horizon”, not in order to demystify the beyond, but to intensify and deepen the mystery of the infinite beyond that always remains despite our human efforts. Pursuit of the infinite is divine futility.

*

Metaphysics is the philosophy of the Other.

We love only what is Other; what cannot be possessed. We can possess a dogma or an apple. We cannot possess the infinite which surrounds us.

Whether you are aware of it or not, belief in the future is metaphysical, and so is belief in the past. Belief in matter is metaphysical, and so is belief in the space that extends around you. Belief in who you may someday become is metaphysical, and so are your beliefs of who you were as a child. Most of all, however, each of us is to the other is metaphysical when we accept one another as soul, as Thou, as one who lives and thinks and feels and sees, to whom we make the gassho or say “Shalom” or “Namaste“. Every soul is the whole world – vast, unique and interlapping with our own world.

Each metaphysical belief is only a symbol of Other. The Other is not reducible to any symbol nor to every symbol, for that matter.

*

Thomas Kuhn, coiner that well-drained term “paradigm shift“:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

Truth is for the vulnerable

Philosophy, Synesis

The phenomenological concept of “intentionality” (that subjectivity is necessarily bound up with objects – that there’s no seeing without something seen, no thinking without thoughts, etc.) is a clue to a new path to self-understanding and other-understanding, which makes the world much more vast and uncanny. To authentically pursue understanding of another person (which necessarily an uncompletable pursuit) – the other must not be understood as an object of intentionality, but rather as a partner in intentionality, a co-subject with whom one involves oneself in participating in reality. One understands others by how the entire world changes through involvement with them in a shared world. The image of the other is part of the world, but cannot be primary. Behind the face of every other is a transcendental gate. Involved cosubjectivity of synesis is an opportunity for literal, practical, experienced transcendence. What you come to know through synesis is impossible to anticipate until it is undergone.

Synesis is philosophical friendship and it is also the essence of literature.

*

That old complaint of women: “He sees me like an object” is actually deeply insightful. (The cliche that all cliches are true is no less true for being a cliche.) It means “He won’t see with me, won’t androgize with me, won’t be involved with me, won’t realize he can participate in being that exceed him.” In other words, “He doesn’t know the possibility of marriage.” To make it worse, the man who takes the world as a world of objects cannot be appealed to because appeals presuppose intersubjectivity, which is precisely the realm of truth he’s closed to, and can never be brought to know unless he chooses to go there himself.

Intersubjective knowledge (direct experience of intersubjective world-transformation) requires receptivity. Receptivity is the domain of the vulnerable.

*

The qualities associated with the feminine should be differentiated from the qualities of the vulnerable and further from the qualities of weakness and passivity. This would not only benefit women, but all people disfavored by the current language, truth standards, “best practices”, values, ethical codes – our ethos.

*

Have you ever been in a situation that somehow made it impossible to say or do what you knew you ought to be able to say or do? Have you ever noticed you spontaneously become yourself around some people and become something you are not around others? And by “become something you are not” I do not mean you put on a mask of some kind and fake it. I mean you literally cannot be who you are, even inwardly.

Some people have never felt this way. Those people are of superior character. The whole ethos affirms it. They’ve never felt moved to question that fact. But, have some compassion: If you were in their place, would you question it? No – you would not question it, and you would be deeply irritated to see others questioning it.

The “analysis paralysis” myth

Philosophy

“What does the word ‘obstinate’ mean? – The shortest route is not the most direct but that upon which the most favorable winds swell our sails: thus do seafarers teach us. Not to follow this teaching is to be obstinate: firmness of character is here polluted by stupidity.” – Nietzsche

*

The premise of this post: a culture of deliberation only arises intentionally. Effective deliberation happens only when a group decides on deliberation as its principle and enforces that principle.

“Analysis paralysis” appears to be caused by analysis, but is in fact caused by resistance to reason, by those who think they can use means other than reason to get their way.

*

Those who appeal to urgency and the need for expedience to shut down deliberation and take immediate action rarely, following the logic of their argument, accept the course of action advised by their opponent. Nor do they realize or admit that resisting deliberation can take ten times longer than… simply deliberating in good faith.

The reason is obvious: in many cases the urgency is exaggerated or manufactured and expedience is only justification for coercion for people who simply prefer coercion, or who are averse to the discomfort of hearing out unfamiliar perspectives.

(This tactic has been highly effective and remains popular in politics. A party will exaggerate a threat in order to suppress dissent, and institute “emergency” measures, all in the name of urgency. Beware the politician in a hurry…)

*

If a group consists largely of submissive souls who are not inclined to demand respect and are not outraged having their perspectives disregarded, the most expedient path is to establish a hierarchy invested with coercive powers. A domineering soul leading an obedient group is highly efficient. What is can accomplish is limited but it will accomplish what it can very rapidly.

However, if a group is constituted of people who consider respect to be non-negotiable, the most expedient path is to make deliberation impossible to circumvent. If a domineering soul harbors even the slightest hope that he can force his will rather than engage in genuine deliberation he will waste hours or days arguing that there is no time to discuss matters. Or he will resort to whatever forms of intimidation he believes will be tolerated by the group.

A group has to decide as a group what behaviors it will tolerate and not tolerate. The real threat to progress is not endless deliberation over what to do, but an absence of clarity around how the group will come to a decision.

By making its principles clear a group can set rules for itself and follow them efficiently, whether those rules are a militaristic “I make the calls” ethic, or a more collaborative and empathic style of arriving at a common understanding. Clarity also helps weed out misfits. If a person cannot tolerate coercion (or deliberation), knowing ahead of time that he is entering an ethos where coercion (or deliberation) is tolerated he can avoid being subjected to what he finds unacceptable.

But having a laissez-faire attitude of “you two come to a decision yourselves” – this presupposes deliberation. When what is at issue is deliberation itself – when the argument comes down to one party arguing that he does not have time to understand the other – a laissez-faire attitude toward the dispute undermines deliberation.

Deliberation is much more fragile than coercion. Deliberation only arises when a group decides on it. Coercion is perfectly at home in the jungle, in the desert, in a breakdown of social order – anywhere an individual survives or perishes alone.

The strong and tough naturally love coercion, and they create conditions that favor their strength and toughness. The vulnerable need the protection of one another and need to understand the conditions under which they can flourish. Those conditions do not arise on their own, and they do not persist where they are not cultivated. Vulnerability is no argument against a thing.

Not a soldier

Philosophy

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

– Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*

I admire the virtues of a good soldier, but I am proud to be the opposite of a soldier.

*

A nation who doesn’t honor its soldiers is in trouble.

A nation whose highest ideal is the soldier is in trouble.

Brand Cramps

Biography, Brand

When people start listing great brands you can count on Apple being at the top, then Nike, then Starbucks, then usually Sony, etc.

To make my list more interesting and less credible I think I am going to start dropping the Cramps into the second or third spot.

*

The Cramps were my first and purest brand experience. They were my favorite band during my transitional years between high school and college, the years when I left my parents’ home and was airdropped into alien college territory. I loved the Cramps, but I only sort of liked their music. There was something inexplicably compelling about them but it had little to do with the sound. I didn’t know what to do with this discrepancy, so I just left it alone and assumed I actually did love their music, despite the fact that I listened to it only occasionally, primarily when I wanted to be existentially Cramped.

It took me years to realize: In the space of that discrepancy is the life of brand.

*

Looking back, the Cramps’ way – a rigorous logic founded on a strictly limited set of aesthetic premises (*see note 1 below) to create a world-view as consistent and coherent as it was irrational – was ideally suited to my own situation as an alienated, disoriented kid in chaos.

The Cramps’ modus operandi: Don’t look for order out there, because the world is mostly ridiculous and what isn’t ridiculous is boring and not worth the pain. Found your life on your own ridiculous enthusiasms. Then, with the diligence and discipline of a medieval scholar, build out a world of pure, crystalline nonsense. Finally, and most importantly, do not talk about it. Do not explain the punchline. Simply do it, and let the actions and the artifacts speak for themselves. Enjoy it when people get it, and enjoy it even more when they don’t.  This stance was pure first-wave New York punk (*see note 2 below).

The Cramps provided me a starting point for creating order founded on meaning, and gave me relief from disorientation, boredom and anxiety. This is what good brands do in our nutty post-modern world, where meaningful orientation and coherence are far from given.

Human beings cannot live without meaning. Even a tiny grain of authentic meaning (even something as insignificant as really digging your iPod) properly understood can eventually grow out into a robust life-sustaining vision. Brand is not enough, but it is a start. Learning what brand essentially is, can help us recover many other forgotten human truths.

R.I.P. Lux Interior.

*

Some examples of the vision:

* NOTE 1: The premises of the Cramps: 1. music fandom – rockabilly, surf and 60s garage punk – recorded by crazed geniuses stranded in obscurity, limited releases, collected by obsessed cultural packrats; 2. cheap horror flicks; 3. severe mental disturbances (psychosis, lycanthropy, adolescence, major inbreeding, etc.); 4. sexual perversion, conceived as something cartoonish and as innocent as Elvis.

* NOTE 2: Anyone who thinks punk rock was primarily a musical form or just a style has missed the point. Punk rock was a vision for a dignified existence in a undignified world.

Religion and political alienation

Philosophy

Alienation: The state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved. (ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin alienatio(n-), from the verb alienare ‘estrange,’ from alienus.)

*

From the review of Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age:

“The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it”, says Voegelin, “is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation”. The Ecumenic Age – the age when the great religions, especially Christianity, originated – denotes a period in the history of mankind that roughly extends from the rise of the Persian Empire to the fall of the Roman. “An epoch in history was marked indeed when the societies which had differentiated the truth of existence through revelation and philosophy succumbed, in pragmatic history, to new societies of the imperial type”.

*

A thought occurred to me this morning in spin class: If our modern conception of religion arose in conditions where remote and overwhelmingly powerful governments prevented citizens from taking responsibility for their own political fate and forced them instead to find meaning apart from the realm of political action, is it possible that religion (as we have come to conceive it) assumes and reinforces an essentially alienated stance toward government? That is, do Ecumenic religions by the way they frame collectivity and individuality encourage political non-involvement and passivity and treat political leadership as radically other?

*

Perhaps government that wishes to operate as an empire (with a distinct leadership class and a alienated and submissive citizenry) and Ecumenic Age religions (which treat government as an irresistible dominating force beneath which one’s best strategy is alienated parallel coexistance as an individual or a member of a counterculture) are symbiotic.

*

Was original Christianity just a form of Judaism giving up once and for all on Jewish political autonomy? Before Paul’s evangelical mission Christianity was a Jewish movement. But in its response to political alienation – radical political resignation paired with radical self-responsibility, and meaning rooted in the individual soul supported by a counterculture – Christianity’s appeal became so universally compelling its spread beyond the Jews was inevitable.

Who could be a more qualified incubator for this vision of religion than a people who struggled and survived repeated enslavement and liberation?

*

It is true that many Christians are fervent defenders of democracy, but it is not at all clear that what these Christians are electing is a president, a fellow citizen raised for a time to preside over our self-government by-the-people-for-the-people.

It appear what they wish to elect is something more like a temporary Emperor. Under this kind of order their Christian subculture continues to make sense. If they can’t have their Emperor, no problem. Now they can have something even more to their liking: a Big Government to oppress them and to provide material for innumerable lone voices crying in unison in the wilderness.

Whether they win and elect an Emperor or lose and find themselves oppressed by Big Government, the Ghost of the Roman Empire never fails to appear and to provide a reality-reinforcing antithesis to their Holy Ghost.

Two wolves and a lamb

Philosophy

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” – Benjamin Franklin

Weirdos are perpetually outvoted – especially in emergency situations, both necessary and manufactured, where there’s no time to make a case. In wartime soundbites win debates.

Susan and I have been watching the John Adams HBO miniseries, and Franklin was obviously one of history’s great weirdos. That series and this quote make me want to read him. I got Franklin’s collected writings during my last case of 24-hour patriotism.

Doubting doubt

Philosophy

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – Charles Sanders Peirce

This is one of those thoughts that will never leave you alone.

Anomalogues

Philosophy

History : Historicity

= Techne (technique, method) : Phronesis (practical wisdom)

= Euclidean : Fractal

See the pattern?

Objectivity, distance, linearity, predictability : Involvement, iterative feedback, non-linearity, unpredictability.

Both are ordered and rational. The sticking point: objectivity and rationality are fused, undifferentiated concepts. The pain of our time is the mitosis of reason. Reason is essentially subjective. Objectivity is one form our intentionality can take. Subject is another, and it requires a fundamentally different approach to reason – but it is not arbitrary.

Synesis

Philosophy, Synesis

Synesis is a word I have needed for a long time. I’ve groped toward this concept with an unusual use of sympathy (contrasted with empathy, a related form of truth, but one that is constructed, objective and removed) and an invented word seeing-with. Synesis represents another dimension of reality, the recognition that behind the face of every person in the world is another world inter-lapping our own, which, through dialogue, can open our own world in strange ways.

Bernstein, again.

What Gadamer tells us about freedom is complemented by what he says about solidarity. His understanding of solidarity also goes back to his interpretation of Greek philosophy and the primacy of the principle of friendship in Greek ethics and politics. We recall that when Gadamer examines Aristotle’s analysis of the distinction between phronesis and techne, he notes that the variant of phronesis which is called synesis requires friendship and solidarity.

Once again we discover that the person with understanding [synesis] does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unafected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

This theme, too, which Gadamer appropriates from Greek philosophy, is universalized. “Genuine solidarity, authentic community, should be realized.” In summarizing his answer to the question “What is practice?” he writes:

Practice is conducting oneself and acting in solidarity. Solidarity, however, is the decisive condition and basis of all social reason. There is a saying of Heraclitus, the “weeping” philosopher: The logos is common to all, but people behave as if each had a private reason. Does this have to remain this way?

One of the reasons why many modern thinkers have been so suspicious of phronesis, and more generally of the tradition of practical philosophy that was shaped by Aristotle, is because of the elitist connotations of this “intellectual virtue.” Aristotle himself did not think of it as a virtue that could be ascribed to every human being but only to those gifted individuals who had been properly educated. And it cannot be denied that many of those who have been drawn to this tradition in the modern age, especially insofar as they have opposed what they take to be the excesses and abstractness of the Enlightenment conception of reason, have not only been critical of political reform and revolution but have been attracted to the elitist quality of phronesis. But Gadamer softens this elitist aura by blending his discussion of phronesis with his analysis of a type of dialogue and conversation that presupposes mutual respect, recognition, and understanding. When all of this is integrated with the Hegelian “truth” — “the principle that all are free never again can be shaken” — then the radicalization of phronesis and praxis becomes manifest. There is an implicit telos here, not in the sense of what will work itself out in the course of history, but rather in the sense of what ought to be concretely realized.

*

It is a privilege to be a designer. We regularly participate in the mundane transcendence of collaboration.

“Whose idea was that?” is a question that has broken up many of the best bands, because the best bands are not aggregates of individuals, but is an intelligent being within whom the musicians synetically participate. This question never dogs an all-star aggregate: everyone has clearly labeled his own contribution.

To play a crucial part in something greater than individuality does not diminish one’s individuality, but actualizes it. Adulthood is learning the participant’s responsibility.)

*

No amount of competence can add up to greatness.

Primacy of dialogue

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

Bernstein:

… the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.”

 

When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement, and in the end plays them into each other.

A conversation or a dialogue is

a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on the subject.

In a genuine dialogue or conversation, what is to be understood guides the movement of the dialogue. The concept of dialogue is fundamental for grasping what is distinctive about hermeneutical understanding.

… Gadamer, in his analysis of dialogue and conversation, stresses not only the common bond and the genuine novelty that a turn in a conversation may take but the mutuality, the respect required, the genuine seeking to listen to and understand what the other is saying, the openness to risk and test our own opinions through such an encounter. In Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of practical philosophy, he blends this concept of dialogue, which he finds illustrated in the Platonic Dialogues, with his understanding of phronesis. But here, too, there are strong practical and political implications that Gadamer fails to pursue. For Gadamer’s entire corpus can be read as showing us that what we truly are, what is most characteristic of our humanity is that we are dialogical or conversational beings in whom “language is a reality.” According to Gadamer’s reading of the history of philosophy, this idea can be found at the very beginning of Western philosophy and is the most important lesson to be learned from this philosophic tradition in our own time.

But if we are really to appropriate this central idea to our historical situation, it will point us toward important practical and political tasks. It would be a gross distortion to imagine that we might conceive of the entire political realm organized on the principle of dialogue or conversation, considering the fragile conditions that are required for genuine dialogue and conversation. Nevertheless, if we think out what is required for such a dialogue based on mutual understanding, respect, a willingness to listen and risk one’s opinions and prejudices, a mutual seeking of the correctness of what is said, we will have defined a powerful regulative ideal that can orient our practical and political lives. If the quintessence of what we are is to be dialogical — and if this is not just the privilege of the few — then whatever the limitations of the practical realization of this ideal, it nevertheless can and should give practical orientation to our lives. We must ask what it is that blocks and prevents such dialogue, and what is to be done, “what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now” to make such genuine dialogue a concrete reality.

*

Buber:

The chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. I become aware of him, aware that he is different, essentially different from myself, in the definite, unique way which is peculiar to him, and I accept whom I thus see, so that in full earnestness I can direct what I say to him as the person he is. Perhaps from time to time I must offer strict opposition to his view about the subject of our conversation. But I accept this person, the personal bearer of a conviction, in his definite being out of which his conviction has grown — even though I must try to show, bit by bit, the wrongness of this very conviction. I affirm the person I struggle with: I struggle with him as his partner, I confirm him as creature and as creation, I confirm him who is opposed to me as him who is over against me. It is true that it now depends on the other whether genuine dialogue, mutuality in speech arises between us. But if I thus give to the other who confronts me his legitimate standing as a man with whom I am ready to enter into dialogue, then I may trust him and suppose him to be also ready to deal with me as his partner.

But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.

*

Intentionality, in the language of Husserl, is the fact that every sense has its object and exists in having an object. If you don’t see something, you aren’t seeing. If you are not thinking a thought, you are not thinking. The intentionality of a human being is world. The intentionality of a friendship is not one friend within the world of the other, but rather the shared world of the friends. The world is shared (by way of co-intentionality) developed through dialogue about the world – in coming to agreements about the contents of the world. This is “seeing-with”. This is the meaning of not treating another person as an object. We want and need to be treated by our fellow-subjects as fellow-subjects.

*

It in the union of the ancient Greek and Jewish traditions is the  recognition of the ultimacy of the word, from which the “material” world is articulated from the chaos of the phenomenal flux. That flux, whatever it really is, is much stranger than we know, and not in some hidden way, but right there in plain sight if we choose to see it.

I’ve thought many times that people add fantastic mystery to life, not because life is not mysterious enough for them, but to drape over life’s own mystery, which is not under our control, and is infinite in the very real sense that we can make no finite sense of it. Each of us is comfortable with what is his, less comfortable with what is ours, and filled with dread at what is nobody’s. Through dialogue, we can learn the pattern of angst and overcoming and learn deep trust in the face of dread.