All posts by anomalogue

Chastening to come

Biography, Politics

From 2001 to 2005, the neocons seemed unstoppable. They enjoyed widespread support for all their foreign aggression and all the domestic speech suppression and privacy violation allegedly required to “support our troops” and “protect our freedoms” from terrorists. Apparently, voicing concerns about any of this was ill-timed, unpatriotic, and, according to Bill O’Reilly and other dittohead types, put our troops in harm’s way. We were risking lives with our irresponsible speech, which, perhaps should be coercively restricted if people refuse voluntarily to use their liberty responsibly.

At the time, I tried to explain to any fake conservative willing to argue with me that these civil liberty infringements would eventually be used against them. I tried to scare them with the prospect of a Hillary Clinton White House inheriting the expanded executive powers conservatives apparently believed on principle that Presidents ought to wield and the domestic spying PATRIOT act enabled.

But they were not scared by that. They had the power and could not imagine the tables turning and ever needing any of the protections they were busily destroying as fast as they could.

Fast forward a generation. The fake conservatives are out of fashion, and pseudo-leftist progressivists are running the show. Their social class is in firm control, and is doing everything it can to permanently institutionalize its class supremacy. Their class ideology is so overwhelmingly dominant that it is dangerous to criticize it, despite the fact that nobody dumb enough to believe it understands it, and nobody smart enough to understand it believes it. This, of course, is pure comedy gold — which is why comedy is closely policed, now, because ridiculous people are ridiculously bothered by ridicule. In my lifetime, I have never witnessed a time quite this embarrassing, and I’ve lived through some pretty dumb decades. The oblivious self-confidence of today’s ideals will make the excesses of the 70s, 80s and 90s look dignified in comparison, and the resulting taste infractions will astonish and delight future parodists.

I know better, but I’ll just go ahead and waste my time pointing the same stuff out to the progressivists that I tried to tell neocons. The tables are totally going to turn, and turn hard. And you renounced liberalism when you were in a position to strengthen it, so you cannot make liberal arguments for your own rights to free speech or private decisions once you are out of power.

Because, let’s be honest: very, very few people really are liberal. There are weak people who need it, until they feel strong enough to dispense with it. And there are those who have been so painfully chastened by historical events that they know liberalism’s value by virtue of liberalism being absent for a time. But their children will barely inherit it, their grandchildren will forget it and their great-grandchildren will attack it and create the next great chastening.

It’s gonna happen again. I’ll have told you so.

You fucking idiots.

Objective reuleaux

Philosophy, Trefoil

The overlapping region of the trefoil venn diagram of what-is/how-can/why-ought (from my chapbook) forms a reuleau — a confluence of intuitions where people are most likely to feel an urgent need to establish public, objective truth.

In this objective rouleau, we feel that a matter is important, that we can and should respond to it practically, and that, in order to do so, we will need to clearly understand it — to conceptualize, speak, reason and argue about what it is, how it functions, how we can respond to it, why it is important, and so on.

This intuiting, responding, articulating, valuing activity creates the kind of densely tangled, knotted and enmeshed reflextive activity that tends to solidify our ideas (like the knitting of bone cells) and makes them not only seem true but to become socially true through being performed as true, and act-ual.

(For all you reckless flakes, I woke up from a dream last night with this thought in my head. Woo-oo-oo!)

Interactive turn?

Philosophy

In Ken Burn’s documentary The Vietnam War, James Willbanks deadpans a striking insight : “The problem with the war, as it often is, are the metrics. It is a situation where if you can’t count what is important, you make what you can count important.”

Of course, any person who has had mid-managerial responsibilities will recognize the truth of this quote. In any complex organization quantification is so important that, for a variety of good and bad reasons, anything that resists or defies quantification is taken as less real than things that are readily quantified.

To the degree control is imposed from a distance, quantitative considerations will predominate.

*

In my experience, Willbanks’s principle pertains just as much to qualitative explication. If we can’t talk about what is important, we make what we can talk about important.

We see it in how consumers make purchasing decisions, especially when they are thinking about a purchase at a distance, out of contact with the thing under consideration. When we directly encounter a designed thing and interact with it, we experience it differently, know it differently and think about it in different terms than when we look at pictures of it, read about it and compare specifications. As with management it is a matter of proximity. Distance abstracts, and what tends to get abstracted out most are precisely the unique je ne sais quoi qualities that belong to the best design. I believe the fetishization of digital devices — the obsessive looking at, reading about and spec-comparison of objects — over the direct perceiving of, trying out of, interaction with them has corrupted marketing and caused companies to abandon designing wonderful experiences, and instead to create photogenic eye-candy with impressive specifications.

We also see it in our relationships with people. Whether we like them or dislike them, people we interact with every day, are experienced differently from people we know only distantly. As we distance ourselves, spatially or relationally, we know them more and more abstractly, and they become more identical to others of their identity. We know a person we meet, or better, are close to. We only know stereotypes of identities we read about, talk about and look at from a distance. The more we only read about people or events, or present ourselves to be read about or looked at, instead of participating in real relationships with real people the less we know them — and about the diversity of human nature in general. We lose our feel for humanity outside our narrow circle.

The same goes for situations. If we only know other places, other conditions, or other types of situations by reading about them, instead of at immersing in them and participating in them we gain a strange kind of abstracted account of what does go on, or what we imagine (based on what we’ve experienced) what probably must be going on there. We have no sense at all what it is like to be there, which is not primarily what can be said about it, especially by others we are most inclined to interact with, namely people who have similar experiences and use the same abstractions we habitually use. Reading too much news and directly experiencing too few of the realities the news reports on or opines about, mis-trains our feel for human events. Conversely, participating in events on the rough ground of reality in the fog of unfolding events, forming our own understanding of what is happening, and then reading how others interpret and abstract them can restore some reality to our sense of truth.

These are some reasons I’ve come to prefer an epistemologies of direct interaction over epistemologies of sensing from a distance, or worse, epistemologies of talking-about. I guess I’m advocating an interactive turn.

*

In philosophy, if our beliefs can be stated clearly and argued cogently, we tend to take them for true, regardless of whether these beliefs link up with real actions and experiences. And conversely, when clear speech and cogent argument is difficult, we will sometimes abandon more tacit intuitions of truth or ignore problems we feel, but cannot pose. If we cannot explicate it, prove it or defend it, we prefer to ignore its possibility.

I have a suspicion that a strong drive to explicate an explicable world accounts for much of the aversion to metaphysics and its fixation on language we find in certain strains of contemporary philosophy. “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.” Must? According to…?

And I think the ignoring of these tacit intuitions (rather than accepting them as real and attempting to articulate them) has reduced philosophy to formalism and argument and made philosophy abandon its social purpose — making the not-yet-conceivable conceivable — and expanding our intellectual repertoires so we can talk about what is most important for us to share: those apprehensions we cannot yet comprehend. When we limit ourselves to speaking clearly about things we can speak clearly about, and we prohibit speech in places where “here I do not know how to move around”, we doom philosophy to irrelevance and humanity to philistine constriction.

Faith and belief

Fructivism, Judaism, Star, Taoism

Belief is the content of comprehension, those ideas our mind can grasp.

Faith is an attitude toward pure apprehension, encounters with that which our mind can touch, barely touch, fleetingly, but not grasp.

These incomprehensible apprehensions, which fill us with apprehension that something beyond our minds exists — something within which we subsist in our own existence — challenges the mundane world of our comprehension.

If our faith is one that condemns, ignores or demphasizes apprehension, we will have a faith in and of belief, and are at risk of succumbing to ideo-idolatry.

Thus-musty

Philosophy

Thinkers who believe arguments can do more than I think they can — that we can argue how reality must necessarily be, therefore it is that — bring an insult to mind: “scholastic”. Too many thusses, musts and therefores, or when a syllogism stretches past three pages and I start feeling antsy, that thinker risks being dismissed as scholastic.

Meillassoux!

Philosophy

Lately Nick Gall has been speaking approvingly of Quentin Meillassoux, and I decided to just take a peek at After Finitude, just to see what’s going on there. Meillassoux has been lumped with the Object-Oriented Ontology folks, who I’ve derided pretty savagely, albeit nervously — but (from what I’m gathering) he is slightly outside OOO and elevated slightly above them, a peer-guru in the mold of Wittgenstein’s relationship to the Vienna Circle, maybe. So, Meillassoux is a thinker I’ve been casually intending to investigate for quite a while, and I’ve had his book sitting on my shelf for ten years, looking at me, and insinuating that I might have a book hoarding problem.

So — so far, AF is thrilling, as, well, af. When I reported this to Nick, he advised me to read a paper Meillassoux delivered in 2012 before continuing AF, in order to benefit from some clarifications to ideas some critics found confusing in the book.

This paper is also thrilling, and it inspired me to pose some questions to Nick. I occurred to me that our conversation might be interesting to the other reader of this blog, (Nick is at least half my readership, and often all of it.) so I’m posting the email here:

Yeah, you are right, this paper is incredible. Meillassoux is a miracle of clarity. He is totally accounting for how I think to my own satisfaction, so I’m electrified imagining how he intends to tear it down! This is philosophy at its very best. 

It is all inducing some exciting questions:

Is our Taoist metaphysical stance a subjectalism? I’m speculating nothing at all about the absolute apart from its capacity to surprise, as well, of course, as its capacity to fall into sufficient regularity as to permit intelligibility. I’m leaving indeterminate its nature-in-itself, assuming our general categories of ideality/materiality/temporality/extensivity are as much products of human thought as their particulars.

Also, is Whitehead a subjectalist?

Infining metaphysics

Biography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I was just looking for a good name for my metaphysics, and I was entertaining the idea of an “infinite metaphysics” (infinity, of course, defined in its metaphysical qualitative sense of absolute undefinability, as opposed to the more common quantitative mathematical sense of interminability). I became curious if anyone has already used this term, which led me to Google, and then to Wikipedia, where I, once again encountered Levinas, whose metaphysics profoundly influenced my own.* (see note below.)

In this article on infinity, Levinas is quoted:

…infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other, and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of infinity is enacted…

The idea of infinity is not an incidental notion forged by a subjectivity to reflect the case of an entity encountering on the outside nothing that limits it, overflowing every limit, and thereby infinite. The production of the infinite entity is inseparable from the idea of infinity, for it is precisely in the disproportion between the idea of infinity and the infinity of which it is the idea that this exceeding of limits is produced. The idea of infinity is the mode of being, the infinition, of infinity… All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently non-adequation.

I realized I’d accidentally stolen Levinas’s term infinition, forgetting where I got it, and went on a search for where I’ve used it without attribution. That led me to this article from 2010, where I laid out my metaphysics — perhaps better than I have since.

I will likely lift this (sans the brand crap) for the book I am absolutely going to start writing — formally, as a book — by years end.

*

Since 2010, much of my effort has been diverted away from uncompromising development of my own personal philosophy, and toward getting along with and making clearer sense to the people around me. I’ve dedicated my professional life to applying my philosophy in design research, with the goal of understanding other people’s implicit philosophies, both in their convergence (alignment), divergence (misalignment), and conflict (incommensurability) and learning to synthesize incommensurable conceptions into new philosophies, designed for groups to adopt so they become able to communicate and collaborate.

I’ve gotten better at explaining what I do, and why I do it (guided by the example of that master of philosophical accessibility, Marty Neumeier), but sometimes I worry that I blunted my best personal thinking in the effort to gain influence among my design peers. I must confess, I read my 2010 article with a substantial amount of envy of my past self, and with dread that I have passed my peak.

  • Note on Levinas’s ethics: Unfortunately, along with his metaphysics, I contracted an infection of Levinas’s ethics, which Levinas saw as the very essence of his philosophy — but which I see as a key component of the current resentment revolution that threatens the future of Western civilization. I hypothesize that Levinas’s is an unbalanced ethic that ignores the finite nature and responsibility of persons. It is perhaps best described in Kabbalistic terms, as Chesed (love) untempered by Gevurah (judgment, aggression, limits). Without such tempering, Chesed leads a person into moral hubris where mortals — not just I but all — are pridefully expected to exhaust themselves like gods with infinite responsibility for myriad beings. This responsibility is discharged in outbursts of unrestrained, impatient, irritable Netzah-infused revolutionary sentiment, with no awareness, much less respect for the good is craves to guillotine. I know this feeling from the inside, and I reject it, not as as an unrealistic, idealistic excess, but as a titanic impulse, an isolated drive taken out of its divine society and set loose — in other words, an evil. Our culture has a strong prejudice that views Gevurah as evil, and deserving of eradication, even in micro-doses, and Chesed as essentially good, so unrestrained, limitless Chesed is the ideal good. The more love we can heap up, and the more we remove limits and let it flood the world, the better that love is. Kabbalists are wiser, and know that good is in the balance among divine virtues, and that vice is virtue out of balance.

Philosophy as polycentric design

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

Peter Gordon’s electrifying introduction Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: has sparked some insights. I’ll quote the core passage, with comments and responses:

History has not been kind to Cassirer, but we should ask ourselves if his criticism was so wide of the mark. It was Cassirer, after all, who grasped the philosophical implications of the natural sciences and especially modern mathematics and physics, whereas Heidegger betrayed the superfciality of his thinking on all such matters when he declared that “science does not think.” Today when so many of our contemporary problems confront us with the need to move beyond the unfortunate divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, Cassirer’s philosophy may offer greater promise. All the same, Heidegger may have been right to suggest that the old dogma of transcendental humanism could not be sustained without a covert appeal to metaphysics. Cassirer occasionally reads as if he meant to give up on metaphysics to develop a kind of phenomenology without foundationalism. But most of these gestures are only half-convincing. The urgent point of dispute at Davos remained unsolved: can there be objectivity without metaphysics?

This compulsion to overcome metaphysics has, for me, become problematic. How was this collective decision to reject metaphysics made? Was it even argued, or was it just collectively decided as a fashion?

What tradeoffs have we been making for collectively adopting this stance?

One solution was developed by philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who delivered a lecture in Hamburg in 1995 on the dual occasion of the rededication of the Warburg Library and the fiftieth anniversary of Cassirer’s death. Habermas expressed in his lecture great admiration for Cassirer and extoled him as a champion of democracy and Enlightenment at a moment in German history when such champions were all too few. But he also suggested that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms did not succeed in liberating itself from the conventional paradigm of a “philosophy of consciousness.” For Habermas, the philosophy of consciousness is the name for any philosophical doctrine that describes meaning from the isolated perspective of a transcendental subject who comes to know the world primarily through representations. Over the course of the twentieth century, many philosophers have come to see this paradigm as antiquated and indefensible, chie!y because it relies on a crypto-metaphysical conception of a transcendental subject who stands beyond its own field of operation.

Full disclosure: I believe my own philosophy, despite being antifoundationalist and concerned as much (or more) with immediate, preverbal interpretations and interactions as it is with representations, is, essentially, a “philosophy of consciousness”, but that not only is this not undesirable, I think it is good and important, given the purpose of my thinking, which is the systematic design of conception systems.

It serves as the grounds of meaning but can give no account of its own genesis. Habermas tries to resolve this dilemma without following the path of metaphysical skeptics such as Heidegger and Foucault.

Good! The academic canonization of these two deeply illiberal men has been ruinous. I will even argue that the youthful judges of the Davos debate were, themselves, caught up in the same illiberal mood that plunged Germany and the USSR into totalitarianism, and judged the debate by this same illiberal logic. The world, including its intellectuals were in an illiberal mood, and it was that mood, not reason, that judged the debate.

Instead, he understands objective meaning as the shared creation of an irreducible plurality of subjects who build up the world through intersubjective communication and praxis. This solution helps to secure the objectivity of our language and our moral-political commitments even though it is an objectivity that has dispensed with the need for metaphysical grounds. This ideal of an intersubjectively validated objectivity derives originally from the German idealists, but one can glimpse in Cassirer’s thinking a certain anticipation of Habermas’ solution.

This! We are having exactly this same debate in the world of service design. In fact we were debating it as my company just last week: Is service design (SD) a flavor of human-centered design (HCD), or is HCD a sub-discipline of SD?

My argument is that HCD is evolving from an essentially monocentric discipline focusing on the experiences of isolated individuals to a polycentric discipline, focusing on interactions among multiple actors, each of whom is having an experience. (Services are only one species of polycentric experience, and I think treating services as the overarching category is reductive and unhelpful.)

Much of what I do as a service designer is design philosophies that can support collaboration among interacting collaborators from varying discipline and responsibility levels within organizations. And it is precisely in this space among intellectually diverse people that philosophical (hermeneutical, dialectical) abilities are needed.

Thinking of philosophy not only as a design discipline but as a polycentric design discipline feels explosively fruitful.

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is an ambivalent work that sits at the boundary between two epochs in the history of philosophy. It points in the direction of a post-metaphysical theory of the symbolic without wholly liberating itself from the older paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. We can occasionally glimpse its author as he struggles to overcome his own philosophical inheritance, even if its authority remains too strong. This may help to explain the strange feeling of untimeliness that seems to emanate from the pages of this unusual work. Cassirer himself was a man between epochs, a contemporary of Einstein who could effortlessly call to mind lines of poetry from Schiller and Goethe. Though unashamed of his origins, he was indifferent to the claims of nation and tribe; he saw in Judaism only one source for the rational universalism that was the common inheritance of all cultures. A humanist philosopher in an age of extremes, he was in many ways the supreme representative of a world in eclipse.

Although he was fortunate enough to escape the European catastrophe, he did not live long enough to see the new world that would emerge from the ruins. Whether he could have felt at home in this new age of specialization is doubtful. Erudition today is a rare commodity, and it has become just one commodity among others. For good or for ill, philosophers these days no longer have the habit of quoting Goethe. But if we look past these marks of old-world erudition, we may yet find that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can come alive with new insights that even its author may never have anticipated. No genuine work of philosophy belongs only to the past.

Of course, I myself feel situated at a moment in history where liberalism is colliding with a collective illiberal mood, so Cassirer is becoming a heroic figure for me.

Two conceptions of transcendence

Philosophy

At points in the past I’ve divided the concept of transcendence into two poles, subscendent and superscendent, to designate those realities that we encounter as they emerge from within our own self, as if from behind or beneath, and those realities we encounter as they approach us and interact with us, as if from without or beyond.

Transcendence is the beneath and beyond of encounter. Encounter is the point of contact of what erupts from within and what irrupts from without.

Connecting this with Kantian language, the transcendental a priori categories that condition all knowledge are subscendent. The noumena are superscendent.

This conception differs from traditional and popular conceptions of transcendence, which view the material world as mundane and transcendence as super-mundane. The conception of transcendence presented here views only current understandings and experiences fully formatted by established conceptions as mundane, and the realities beyond these experiences, shaping these experiences, as transcendent.

Euracism

Ethics, Politics

What so many progressivists seem to miss is that all categorical reduction (conceiving individuals as examples of categories) is dehumanizing — and it is dehumanizing, whether that reduction is judged negatively or positively. It is not the value judgment that is the problem; it is the act of allowing the general category to eclipse the particularity of the real person.

Categorial reduction is a failure to transcend one’s own mind and its contents, in order to experience the particular, unique, surprising qualities of the person: their personhood.

*

I am doing to start talking about racism in terms of disracism and euracism. Similarly, sexism can be divided into dissexism and eusexism.

I need a general term for this entire tendency to stop at the category and to react to a person only as a type. Typism? Eutypism, distypism? Eubigotry?

*

An example of euracism: Yascha Mounk left Germany because Germans were forever falling over themselves to affirm him as a Jew, and this made him realize he would never be just a person, a German among Germans. He came to America to escape this.

Euracism is not “antiracism” at all. It is a racism that merely reverses judgment, while continuing to exempt itself from encountering the personhood of the person.

Genuine antiracism is just as opposed to euracism as disracism.

Genuine antiracism is pro-person.

Genuine antiracism is liberalism.

OOOh…!

Philosophy

Is it possible that object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are popular for no other reason than that they lift the modern prohibition on metaphysics? That finally, there is a credible school of thought that isn’t entirely hostile to transcendence, so one can breathe a little beyondness without being sneered at?

Sure, it’s an imagined beyond, an immanent image that is entirely a product of self — but maybe it is a baby step toward relationship with beyond-as-such? (Or is it a defense against beyondness?)

In this it is similar to identitarianism which acknowledges an “other”, but one which is a figment of one’s own conceptualizing mind, a bit of one’s own self standing in for the real. But maybe it is a baby step toward real relationship with alterity? (Or is it a defense against alterity?)

Is an idol a baby step toward God? Or is it a defense against God? Is fundamentalism a baby step toward real religion? Or is it a defense against real religion?

These are just paraphrasings of the same question: fundamentalism is ideo-idolatry. Identitarianism is ideo-alterity. And OOO might fit in this series as ideo-realism. But my notion of OOO is likely only my own ideo-OOO, so I’m probably wrong about it.

You are spiritual and religious

Philosophy

Religion happens in communities; spirituality occurs in individuals.

Obnoxious speculation: There is no “spiritual, but not religious.” In such cases, the spiritual nonbeliever is simply unaware that they belong to a religious community, because the community anthropologically sees religion as the irrational faith systems that other people — uncivilized primitives and savages — believe.

Human beings cannot bear to be alone in their faith. We must share faith with others, or we suffer a kind of spiritual solitary confinement. Even the toughest individualist battle-hardened soldiers crack in solitary confinement.

Further that faith must invest existence with meaning. It must provide a sustaining why and life-shaping oughts, or indifference and depressed nihilism (as opposed to a nihilism of joyous destruction) will result.

The faith need not affirm any supernatural being to be a faith, if by “supernatural” we mean magical. But it must affirm reality beyond the individual’s comprehension* — it must have a transcendent vector, whether it is a transcendence of future knowledge, of experiences others have or will have that are inaccessible to us in this time, place or state, or of some Kantian/OOO in-itself noumena.

My assertion is that where our shared sense of transcendence is, there our religion is. We can call that transcendence God, or we can call it by some other name, Tao, Ein Sof, the Absolute, Ultimate Reality — but there must be some cleft between what we know and what really is on the other side of knowledge, lest we succumb to solipsism.**

The salient question is how effective the religion is in providing why and ought, not whether the religion exists or not. For most secular folks, scientific truths and future scientific discoveries perform the religious function — the foundational ethics and metaphysics upon which life is erected. Even when metaphysics are rejected in theory, in practice, physics still underpins and serves as the ground of all other truths. This is entirely legitimate, as is an unavoidable impulse to privilege this mode of description. I just happen to see this very privileging as religion caught in the act, not as any overcoming of religion. It is a good thing, made even better with self-awareness of itself.

  • Note: Ambiguity in our use of the concept of truth, might be a function of whether we treat the word truth as “truth as we know it now” or truth as the asymptotic ideal of knowledge as it conforms ever closer with to reality. Pragmatists reject not only the possibility of truth finally conforming to reality, but that there even is such a point of approach. The purpose of truth is not exclusively, and perhaps not even primarily, to mentally duplicate or model reality.

** Note: We should not, however, say with Bertrand Russell, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” It is a category mistake to call God a hypothesis. God is a designation for that which transcends but involves us, and unless one is a solipsist, this is no hypothesis, but a fundamental orientation. If I were not in a community of faith with my family within the Jewish tradition, I would choose a different word with fewer misleading connotations. But the name God links me to numerous people who share some, but not most of my basic conceptions. When I say “God” with them, and worship God with them, in the most important, most truth-transcending, ultimate sense, I mean exactly what they mean.

I share faith with many people with whom I share few beliefs.

Perennialism redescribed

Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Religious symbols are “boundary objects” that permit community across a set of otherwise incommensurable philosophies. The symbol system is multistable and accommodates numerous coherent, effective, inspiring interpretations which mutually reinforce within the religion’s tradition.

Another account of design instrumentalism

Biography, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Fructivism, Philosophy

I unofficially call the kind of thinking I do “design instrumentalism” after Dewey’s flavor of pragmatism, “instrumentalism”.

Crudely, “instrumentalism” means approaching ideas as tools used for understanding.

My spin on it is: ok, cool, if our philosophies are our tools for understanding, let’s be smart in how we construct and select these tools. Let’s use the best practices available to us, namely design methods. Let’s approach our philosophizing as designers. And as designers, let’s ask what functional and experiential needs we are addressing for the users of these tools.

*

For all our po-mo’ing, I think few of us realize just how fundamentally our philosophies shape our experience, and even how we assess our experiences. We still sort of slide an essential “me” beneath the experiencing, thinking, feeling and judging. We still identify ourselves with the thoughts we have about the thoughts and feelings we have about the thoughts and feelings we have. Even when we buddhistically rebuke ourselves for being mired in concepts and identifying with our thoughts, we’re still doing so as our concept-dominated selves.

The most self-congratulatory eastern-religion types I know, who scoff at concepts and dismiss philosophy as a silly waste of effort are precisely the ones most dominated and oppressed by concepts. As they apply the concept of transcending concept to the part of their conceptualizing mind they want to bully out of existence, they imagine themselves operating outside the realm of concept.

The same thing goes for the newest flavor of “enlightenment”, wokeness. The woke are deeply mistrustful of thinking and of the testimony of experience — but elevates above scrutiny the concepts and experiences active in making these judgments about other thoughts and experiences. This is how it is able to “project” its own self-delusion, its own oppressive aspirations, its own deployment of institutional and cultural prejudice on its enemies, without any consciousness that it is the very exemplar of what it hates. And it is only able to accomplish this where it holds near absolute institutional power and is able to bake its own class supremacist ideologies into institutional structures.

In both cases, we detach a bit of conceptualizing and elevate it above criticisms of conceptualizing and exempt it from principles generally applied to concept. But it is precisely this detached set of concept that always dominates our minds and shapes our sense of reality most totally. This operation is the furthest thing from  liberation from concepts. It is tyranny by a select set of privileged concepts over all other concepts.

It is only when these tyrannizing, consciousness-shaping conceptions are deposed and other conceptions are liberated to participate in enworldment that philosophizing begins to transform the self, to reshape experience and to transfigure the world even before it is materially changed. At this depth, philosophy resembles religion. Before that, “philosophy” is just speculation and syllogism on the surface of an inert soul: philosophy as superficial thinkers think they know it.

*

In my own experimental tinkering with my own conceptions, I’ve found that things change drastically when we reequip ourselves with new ideas. I don’t just recite syllogisms to myself and replace my spontaneous beliefs with newer, better ones.

If I manage find a conception I can truly adopt and use, the conception reconceptualizes my experience and radically changes it before I even think about it. And when I go to assess the new experience, I assess it with the very new concepts that reshaped the experience we judge.

Philosophies have innate prejudices toward themselves, and can only judge themselves. Trying to judge a philosophy from another philosophy is bootless.

Philosophies must be experientially compared.

To compare philosophies, I have to induce a mind shift analogous to seeing a autostereogram or making yourself see the spinning dancer illusion change from a clockwise to counterclockwise rotation.

I find redescription — a kind of philosophical method acting — to be the most efficient way to effect these shifts.

We must somehow compare philosophical experiences across time without access to both at the same time, somewhat in the back-and-forth manner of comparing fragrances…

*

In this self-hacking process, what I took for “I” or “me” was radically challenged by new philosophies. Essential characteristics of my personality turned out to be contingent and mutable.

And reflecting on the experience of before and after challenged my understanding of reality. Universal characteristics of reality turned out to be contingent and mutable.

My own philosophy was forced to expand to accommodate not only these profound surprises I’ve already experienced, but to resign itself to a reality that can profoundly surprise me at any moment, in inconceivable ways — to a qualitative infinity.

We do not have to hope for perpetual novelty. We have to learn to accept it and want it, because novelty is inevitable to an essentially limited being confronting limitless possibilities on all sides at all times. An even greater miracle is getting non-novelties to happen reliably. Slowing and modulating change without stopping it is the greater challenge. The gods of change and conservation need each other’s agonistic respectful challenge; without each other they become titans of mere chaos and petrification.

*

Getting back to the practicalities of design instrumentalism:

If we are having a shitty experience living as people in some of the most humane and prosperous conditions our species has ever seen — maybe we are miserable for reasons other than these conditions.

Maybe the problem is how we are conceptualizing our experience, and that is producing an experience of non-desirability (nihilism), and it also might be causing us to feel confused and burdened by our theories and unable to apply them (non-usability) and ultimately incapable of explaining what we experience and paralyzed (non-useful).

Because we are despondent, but lack intellectual capacity to account for why or to respond in any way that improves it, we take a naive realist approach and think an oppressive world must be what oppresses us! And this belief itself forecloses all further questions and instructs us to chase our tails even faster, to find the source of oppression.

I want us to see the possibility of designing ourselves better philosophies, and just that realization that this is something we can do and ought to do — is itself a better philosophy!

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I’m adding something to this article that might seem arrogant to some people and silly to the rest: I see the kind of philosophy I do as performing many of the functions of religion, but without many of the magical notions most folks associate with religion. It certainly sits inside the same mystical “foundations” as many esoteric variety of religions, sharing a view of the human condition that situates human finitude within an infinite reality. But the stance I take is non-magical.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I believe our base-layer philosophies are the advanced technology religions have interpreted magically.

Transcendence and fruitionism

Fructivism, Philosophy

To live on terms with reality is to live on terms with transcendence.

What separates transcendent reality from immanent truth is conceivability.

If we can conceive what we encounter, we do conceive it, automatically and unconsciously. We spontaneously perceive what we encounter as something; we recognize it as something; we understand it by incorporating it into the conceptual system we use use to relate present experience to remembered and anticipated experiences. This conceptual system that interprets, interconnects and responds to experience is our philosophy. Using whatever philosophy we’ve developed or passively absorbed, we encounter transcendent reality and transform it into immanent truth.

With all useful things, the better it works, the less we notice it. To us, the world seems intrinsically intelligible, until something important comes along that isn’t intelligible.

When we encounter something real and important but unintelligible, it seems uncanny. It feels otherworldly, and often, dreadful. We feel apprehensive, because while we can apprehend our experience with the tips of our minds’ fingers, we cannot hold a form in our minds and comprehend it.

We must either comprehend it as intrinsically incomprehensible, and dismiss it as a literally otherworldly, as a mystery not for human minds to grasp, as something to which we non-relate as a purely transcendent otherness — or we must find some new way to conceive it, to enable us to relate to it in our human, knowing way.

To allow something (usually someone), transcendent (to us) to be become immanent (to us), we must extend philosophical hospitality, and invite the inconceivable into our midst.

But when we do this, when we acquire new conceptions for the sake of understanding some new particular thing, we frequently experience what religious people call transfiguration — the world as a whole is reconceived to accommodate this new understanding, and miraculously transforms in ways that are, in the most literal sense, inconceivable until it happens.

After it happens, radically new thoughts and perceptions irrupt into the world, half spontaneously, half actively.

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This is why commitment to radical novelty and commitment to transcendence are one and the same.

 

Apprehend, comprehend, suprehend

Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics, Philosophy

To apprehend is to know-that.

To comprehend is to know-what.

When know-that stubbornly resists know-what, when we touch with the tips of our fingers something that cannot be grasped by the hand of our thought, we feel ourselves situated within something incomprehensible. We comprehend the fact that we are comprehended by something incomprehensible. The relation we take to that which comprehends us cannot be comprehension, but the eversion of comprehension, something which might be called suprehension.

When suprehending, we must situate ourselves and everything we comprehend and apprehend within a more-than-everything we will know primarily by radical surprise — by the irruptions into the little cognitive bubbles inside which we float within infinity, that can flood us with dread, love or both at any moment.

To suprehend is to know-why.

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Wisdom is suprehension.

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Each everything is a universe-size, lifetime-long oyster.

Outside the oyster’s outer shell is an infinite sea of water, salt and particles. The ocean knows the oyster as one of its myriad objects, one of its innumerable everythings — a convexity in an unbounded concavity.

The convex object in the ocean is, seen from the inside by the oyster, a concave habitat. Everything it knows, it knows from the inside of its shell.

The world the oyster knows is pearly lucre, a substance the oyster excretes so naturally it often is not aware of its origin. Anything from the ocean that enters the shell is either digested, or expelled or coated with lucre, so it cannot irritate the oyster’s delicate flesh.

The oyster’s inner-shell is also lucre.

It is essentially a mother-of-pearl bubble which the oyster has painted around its own space. It has coated the ocean itself with lucre, and this lucre bubble is now its universe — or at least that part of the universe it can apprehend.

Anything from the outside, anything indigestible that gets inside, is also painted with lucre, and is transformed into pearls.

The oyster is enworlded in pearl.

Above and around the oyster is a pearly dome, and inside the dome are scattered pearls of various size and luster. The oyster senses these pearls are of the same substance as its heaven.

The oyster continuously anoints its pearls and its dome with fresh lucre, to make the surfaces iridesce and glow, and to protect and honor something it loves and fears, its source and home, the very surrounding ground of existence.

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I’ve written and rewritten this same idea for years, compulsively.

I need to sit down with everything I’ve secreted on this topic and change perspectives. I need to stop looking from the oyster’s perspective and start seeing it like a jeweler.

I want this idea to irridesce and glow.

This could be a pretty book, if I can get the language under control. It would be a chapbook, with a coarse, dark gray board outer cover, and a light pearlescent flyleaf, and  pulpy cream paper for the content.

As a 5w4…

Biography, Philosophy

To me, thought is intensely personal.

It is most personal where it is worst-equipped, where I lack symbols to aid my efforts to conceptualize my experiences, where I encounter incomprehensible singularities.

If I wish to understand one of these singularities, I am thrown back on my intuitions to conceive new ways to think, new fingers for comprehending what will otherwise slip away.

(Or I might contemplate it as an experience, inconceivable but distinct, and try to retain the impression so I can reimagine and reexperience it later.)

(Or I might merely apprehend it, and allow the experience to leave like a dream, leaving only a faint footprint in my memory. A scent, tone, color, texture or feeling might bring it back, and I might say “there it is again.” Otherwise, it is gone forever.)

(Or it might flow into oblivion, joining the unnoticed mass of my life, and be as if it never happened. It did happen, though. It was real, though, and remains real as something that was, an indelible bit of eternity.)

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But back to what I do manage to comprehend, and the intellectual equipment by which I understand:

The curated accumulation of conceptions, my soul’s equipment, might not be my essential self, but they are more me than my body, or my relationships, or my home, or my belongings — but they are all me.

If someone receives one of these conceptions from me and accepts it as a gift — and this might mean the gift of a good problem or something worth fighting — this is everything to me, because this allows me to be who I am in the world, to the world, to feel that I exist.

No, I am not my ideas, but they are from me, of me, and they are that by which I am known.

If a person refuses my conceptions without understanding, or if receives them impersonally as something obvious, a truth that was just there all along to take, it makes me feel nonexistent, like I’ve never been born.

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Hearing my ideas, hearing them as from me, is, for me, relationship.

*

Our souls stream out into the world and, there, weave together, in knots of enworldment. My own soul streams as new ways to think.

Philosophy is a hybrid system

ANT, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

Design produces hybrid systems — systems composed of interacting human and nonhuman elements.

If you remove the human elements, what remains is an engineered system.

The hybrid systems that philosophy produces are composed of interacting humans and symbols. The philosophy is not complete until it is used for understanding.