Susan and I hosted a salon last week. We’ve been doing them sporadically for almost 25 years, but this was our first since covid. Almost immediately it became dramatically obvious: People need dialogue now more than ever before. I, personally, for many reasons, need to connect with people in this mode of being.
Category Archives: Biography
The ressentiment generator
I just said out loud a thought that has been gestating in me.
I posted it in response to Radical Radha‘s excellent Substack article, “Applying the Bhagavad-Gita to modern life”.
My danger is fury toward progressivism and its mind-boggling hypocrisy. Progressivism itself is blatantly guilty of everything it projects on patriarchy, whiteness, heteronormativity, etc. I’m constantly — obsessively, compulsively — trying to turn progressivism’s critique back on itself, trying to make progressivists acknowledge what they are really doing. I’ll say “Do a search and replace on DiAngelo, replacing ‘White’ with ‘Woke’ and you can see what’s really going on.” But it never works. They refuse to apply their principles to their own movement. They will never “do the work” when it threatens the real source of their privilege and power. Etc. Etc. Etc.
But in my better moments I suspect the problem has nothing to do with choice of target, and that the root problem is with the critical logic itself. Regardless of target — regardless of whether a real oppressor or some phony surrogate is in the critical cross-hairs — this philosophy itself is a ressentiment generator, and whoever uses it will radiate misery.
Beautiful instruments
I love beautiful instruments.
These are useful tools — like pens, bicycles, guitars, blades, bags, digital devices, user interfaces — designed so well that they disappear in use, becoming extensions of our own being. They are, in Heidegger’s words, ready-to-hand.
But when we shift our awareness to present-at-hand, and contemplate them as objects, we find them aesthetically resonant. They reinforce our sense of value and meaning.
I love beautiful instrumental language. The words are transparent in use, spontaneously conveying meaning without obtrusion, distraction, obfuscation or distortion. When we participate in reality, doing and speaking, the words are part of reality and participate in its realness.
But when we attend to the words themselves, hearing them, seeing them on a page, experiencing them objectively, they are beautiful. The form of the language reinforces our sense of value and meaning.
The words extend our subjectivity and become part of us, but they are also objects that help us feel who we are, and what we care about.
Words, like selves, have subjectivity and objectivity, concavity and convexity, are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand depending on how we let them be for us.
When I sit in my library, among my books, I feel profoundly at home.
I love when people visit and talk with me in this beloved space, lined with books filled with the words of people I love, people I have done my best to incarnate and make immortal through my own share of moral life.
Philosophy is useful poetry.
OK, Reboomers
When I was a young parent, I was repelled by the content of children’s media. What I saw on Nickelodeon and Disney was strange moral dramas starring spirited, plucky, sassy, perceptive children living in a world of ignorant, dull-witted, convention-bound adults.
The adults were in charge, but they were easily outwitted and manipulated by the children, who were not yet encumbered with adult formatting.
The children were rendered realistically, with real weaknesses and strengths, but the strengths always more than redeemed the weaknesses.
And the strengths were the virtues of romanticism — defiance, irreverence, curiosity, wit, compassion, enthusiasm, authenticity, etc.
The weaknesses were always the virtues valued by tradition — integrity, honesty, loyalty, respect, bravery, obedience, gratitude, etc.
In these moral dramas, the children would face some conflict or dilemma. They would be torn between behaving in a traditionally virtuous way or being a free spirit. They would behave contemptibly, telling a lie or betraying a friend. The clueless adults would bumble about, ineffectually trying to manage a situation they barely perceived. Then the contemptible child would get busted or collapse under their own conscience and come clean. Their abject contrition would be met with immediate forgiveness, because these weaknesses were no big deal, really. It was all easily forgiven as, you know, just human. The dumb adults would act like retarded Jesuses dispensing hugs and nonjudgments, and generally benevolating all over everyone. And next week everyone would repeat the same shitty behavior, the same sheepish qualms, the same washing away of responsibility.
It all made me want to throw up. Even in my youth, I realized that these dramas all had some pretty questionable morals.
- It trained children to feel superior to adults, and to see maturity as a degradation of, not an improvement to personhood.
- It encouraged children to feel contempt for traditional, pro-social virtues, and to to overvalue romantic, anti-social personality characteristics.
- It taught children to see rules and institutions as impediments to spirited living.
- It taught kids that traditional decency was too much to ask and that being a modern child full of sass and spirit more than made up for bad character.
In other words, 90s children’s media was how Boomers transmitted their youth-worshipping, maturity-avoiding ethos to the younger generations who passively consumed it.
That is why today’s young adults are all casually revolutionary and automatically (uncritically) critical of pretty much anything that permits a society to function. They spent their childhoods imbibing and internalizing vulgar and insipid pop-Romantic propaganda and now they are vulgar, insipid Romantics, just as previous generations were vulgar insipid traditionalists. They are little trained monkeys, raised to gratify Boomers.
And this is as true for hard-right children as hard-left. They are all pale shadows of Boomers — less full-bloodedly vicious and almost entirely unoriginal. They, however, believe they bring a fresh new perspective to the world, because they were trained to believe that is how young people automatically are. The young are always the ones who know better. Aren’t youth rebellions always justified in hindsight? Shouldn’t we automatically assume youth are right ad hominem, by virtue of their youth? Yeah, but this is not how youth who turned out to be right ever thought. This is more like brainless Jesus Camp youth, but with all values reversed.
It is not their fault that they are the way they are. But this is real life, not a Nickelodeon show. They don’t get to say “oh, my bad” and get their shittiness washed away with a baptism in understanding for free at the end of the episode.
They will have to actually question what they were trained to believe. No — not question what they were trained to question (authority, convention, capitalism, race, gender, history, science, morality). They will have to question that training itself, and then take responsibility for re-training themselves to be more than what they are.
Until then, all I have to say is this: OK, Reboomers.
Relationships
Some people in your life invest in relationship. You put something in, they put something in, and you become someone together with them. Both care about that relationship — your joint being, who they are with you — and they put effort into keeping it thriving over time, through calm and storm.
Some people are difficult to know. They are either reserved and protected, or imprisoned. Or are they or nonexistent?
Some people are just open for business. You give to them and they receive it as a transaction. They reciprocate. Transaction complete. Books balanced.
Some people are easy to connect with. You quickly develop rapport and camaraderie. But the relationship is ephemeral and swirls in and out of existence, depending on circumstance. They’re constantly swirling, dosey-doeing, forming, dissolving and haunting their grounds for the next impersonally intimate formation.
Some people just want another person around to distract them from themselves. You’ll do.
Other people view relationship-types as a formal status, which entitles them to certain rights and benefits. They assess the reality by an ideal to determine who is playing the role well and plays it poorly. A good friend would gladly do what you refuse to do.
Some people have only what Martin Buber called social relations. These are role-to-role, ethnomethodic performances, a playing of the game of a scene by the rules. Some people invent ethnomethodic games for people to play with them. Some people are so inventive this way that each relationship has its own game. It seems interpersonal, but make no mistake: it is intrapersonal.
It is entirely possible for the same person to participate in all the varieties of relationship described above. Even one relationship can shift from one kind to another. Some relationships are all of them at once.
Letting relationships leave and return — tending them when you can — saying goodbye with minimal bitterness, then saying goodbye to that bitterness when it leaves — seeing things clearly for what they are, not expecting anything to be what it is not, neither worse nor better — cultivating hoping without concrete expectation … sometimes I feel like a moment of sweeping awareness in someone else’s meditation.
The feeling of betrayal is physical if you allow yourself to recognize and observe it.
Grace cannot be earned or demanded, but it can certainly be driven away.
Totalitarianism is a social condition where betrayal is the norm, and loyalty is exceptional.
Confession to an aspiring headshrink
A friend of mine is training to be a Jungian psychologist. She’s practiced her therapeutic chops on me twice now, and she’s very talented. She’s sort of become my confessor. For the last week I’ve been reading Fritz Perls, and I was inspired by this to make a confession:
I think what makes design so painful now is what I used to love most about it. Design, at its best, renegotiates the social.
When the social was renegotiable, that was a real joy.
But for our younger generations, the social is now sacred turf, and nonnegotiable.
Society with the young is rigidly dogmatic, stilted, and phony, shot through with pious incuriosity, ethical fixations and taboos. Its that damn ideology in which every last one of them is indoctrinated. It is all they know. Anything outside it paralyzes their minds and seems to them just morally-suspicious nonsense.
All this makes it impossible to do the kind of design work that gives my life meaning. Morally-suspicious nonsense is where the inspiration is buried!
In times like these, it seems, no meaning is possible outside one-on-one dialogue.
And it seems dialogue may only be possible in a clinical setting.
Maybe I should just crawl off and be a psychologist.
My prepositions
New policy: If someone asks me to give my pronouns, I’ll explain that I don’t have pronouns — only prepositions.
My prepositions are with, from, toward, for.
Do not mis-preposition me by doing things to me or at me. Thank you.
People like me
I am trying to decide how to weather this dangerous time.
Do I try to understand it, critique it, describe what is happening? And if so — to what end? Do I try to use my understanding to change it? Or to navigate its hazards? To navigate it and change what little I can when the opportunity presents itself?
Or do I surrender to that part of me who wants to armor myself in cynicism?
My cynicism goes like this: Human beings are more social than rational or moral. Vanishingly few people interrogate themselves on what they actually experience as true or good. They, instead, assimilate themselves to the ideas of the people they identify as “people like me”. And if “people like me” invent a dogmatic schema of identities that in fact have nothing at all to do with who I actually experience as “people like me”, I’ll embrace the dogma and identify myself as whatever I’m supposed to.
To really know a person’s real, lived enacted identity — not the dogmatic identity, that, I will say again is a mere artifact of real, lived enacted identity — just ask that person what they know is good and true. And then ask them who is wrong about what is good and true, or who is against goodness and truth. That, and nothing else, is their true identity: good, true people like me, defined against bad, false people not like me.
Identity is something we subjectively do, not what we objectively claim. The medium of identity is the message. The content of identity is the intention object of this subjective identity-generating activity.
Identity is, for most people, entirely socially determined. And they’ll tell you this. They know theirs is determined, and from this, and from received dogma, they will insist that this is a universal fact. According to them, your identity is socially determined as well. Because they have still neglected to scrutinize what “people like me” believe, and therefore have never put their conviction to the test, a shift in identity remains entirely outside the limits of their personal experience. And until they do this, the logic of their lived, enacted identity will drive them along the same rails to the same conclusion, and will appear to them, to be their own independent “critical thought”. Our identities — our very selves — are socially determined.
I, however, have made scrutiny, self-interrogation, and consequent subjective self-modification the center of my life, and I have found that when I ask myself whether I really believe some conviction “people like me” are supposed to believe, and allow myself the space and freedom for a truly candid response, the answer is rarely an unqualified “yes”. And if I look yet closer at the matter — and I always do — and ask yet more questions the “yes” begins to deteriorate. It rarely deteriorates all the way into “no”. In fact, it turns out, what deteriorates is less convictions than tacit questions to which convictions are answers.
And the more this happens the further removed I find myself from my former identities. The remove, in fact, has opened into full alienation. Those who were once good, true people like me are now manifestly bad, false people, not at all like me. Those I used to mistake for “people like me” — I would be ashamed to be one of them, now. On every important point they the very opposite of who they collectively believe themselves to be.
And now the only “people like me” I can find anywhere are other people who have decided to be intellectually honest with themselves, and who signal that decision enough to be identified as who they are. Most of them are now dead, but they wrote books. I am grateful they chose to be who they are, and to preserve who they are in writing. I try to incarnate them and extend their lives in mine.
Regarding life in this time, I am not sure what I will do. I’ve tried numerous times to reach people I thought had intellectual conscience, or at least promise of developing it, but ultimately they had more loyalty to their identity than their unique personhood. They fear questioning the foundation of their social belonging. And they mistrust my intentions, for very good reason. I am an existential threat to who they believe they are. So, I am no longer optimistic critique can work. I also think others are better at critique than I am.
Maybe I need to stop thinking in terms of intellectual contributions. With the number of talented academics cranking citable content, making an intellectual contribution is like pouring a bucket of water into a lake. We don’t need more concepts. We don’t need more content. We are drowning in concepts, claims, images, songs…
What we need are personal testaments of people who identify only with others who share their dedication to working out what they, themselves, experience as true and good — even when this means excommunication from the conformist “people like me”.
Esoteric ranting at work
Since 2020, and expecially since October 7th, 2023, I have been feeling a level of betrayal and grief I’ve never experienced before. Something vast and horrible is happening, but those perpetrating it — as always — see themselves as saving the world.
I just had what I think is a pretty eloquent outburst on Slack, at least by Slack standards. It started as a conversation about brand and design materials, but immediately veered into dark depths. Obviously it is ridiculous to talk this way at work, but I do believe I have — and not for the first time — become careericidal and unconcerned with what happens to me.
Here’s the lightly edited and redacted transcript. I’m S, A is Arjun, P is Parc:
S: Brand is a phantom intentional object of an organization.
S: Everything we experience directly and indirectly causes an idea of some “thing” to congeal in people’s minds, with which we have some kind of relationship, now and potentially
S: The reason brand is so seductive and magical seeming is 1) they are ideas of something that transcends the person perceiving and conceiving it… but 2) the specific way we must think in order to make clear sense of brands is outside most people’s philosophical range
P: So the material of brand design is what? Ascribed meaning?
S: I love this question!
S: This is where it is so terribly important to be clear on (to use the popular formula) “when we talk about materials, what are we talking about”?
S: I’d say that intentional object — and ascribed meanings — is NOT the material of branding. It is an outcome of it.
S: The material is that which we directly shape in order to get to that meaning or intentional object
S: Intentional object is a phenomenological concept. Not sure if y’all are familiar with it, or not.
S: So, everything a person experiences has an object of that experience. When we see, there is what is seen: an object of sight. When we hear we hear a sound. Same with thought. We think thoughts, and the thoughts — the content — is the intentional object of the thinking.
S: To put it simply: there is no perception, conception, or experience that isn’t a perception, conception or experiece of something. That something is the intentional object.
S: People who finally “get” phenomenology sometimes report a deep disorientation, like a religious conversion. Husserl talks about this in his last book.
S: To actually inhabit life phenomenologically changes literally everything all at once.
S: People resist it.
A: I think there is overlap with Advaita.
S: It is the same
A: Oh then I am familiar. Swami Sarvapriyananda talked about when he was in ATL. I will share a good talk for others to hear an example from him.
S: That’s why I take religion so seriously.
S: Religious people understand the world phenomenologically.
S: So, to finish my TED talk here — our metaphysics is our ultimate intentional object — the object of all our experiences combined which gives us the world as we know it.
S: Common sense is our everyday life as the intentional object of our living.
S: Brands are the intentional object of an organization in the minds (and bodies) of those who encounter them.
S: And like all intentional objects, they don’t match what we experience when we inspect them close up. Nothing ever does.
S: Branding is an organization’s attempt to manage that intentional object.
S: Dig, daddy-o?
A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?
S: If you examine your ideas of things, they will not bear much scrutiny at all. The more distant the phenomenon, the more we ourselves fill in gaps and try to make them into other, more familiar things
S: Reality and phenomenon are nowhere near alike. Knowing this as mere fact does zero to help us overcome it.
S: To think you are no longer naive realist because you’re aware of naive realism makes you an even worse naive realist. To think you have overcome bias because you are aware of some of your biases and corrected for them leaves your deepest biases unchecked.
S: To be able to empathize with others only where your own group says empathy is needed, and to feel free to diagnose and condemn wherever your own group claims that’s a good thing to do — that is not empathy at all, but exercise of an ideology.
S: I believe the only thing that will help the world come out of its tribal prejudices and hate is not imposing ideological prescriptions (which are themselves tribal) but to go radically phenomenological
A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?
S: I know what you mean. But there is no absolute form. There are forms we all can align around more easily.
S: If we want to bring Advaita into it, we could frame this in terms of prakriti and purusha. In fact, I do. Prakriti and purusha are not really different in absolute terms. They are aspects of a single reality, unified beyond our usual conception of things. It is a relative dualism, not an absolute one. Am I getting this right? I’ve only read a few books on Advaita, by one author who was actually a Sufi.
S: And he was claiming a transcendent unity of all esoteric traditions, so that his sufism was an expression of the same inexpressible truth as advaita, taoism, kabbalah, christian mysticism, etc. He may have mangled or force-fit it
S: These universal “givens” of experience — those experiences we can assume to hold in common with all other people — those are what I tend to want to call materials.
S: Those things that we ourselves make of what we are given, our interpretations, our understandings, etc… those i want to separate from materials. Those are the experiential outcomes that we try, through materials, to inspire, induce, convey, etc.
S: Frankly, I only care about design because it is such a wonderful way to engage this kind of truth. When design does not put me in touch with it, I become bored, miserable and totally unmotivated.
S: So thanks for allowing me a few seconds of pleasure. They’re further and further apart all the time in this weird political climate of pervasive political and religious fundamentalism.
S: People confuse religion with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is what happens to religion when it falls under the control of people who cannot or will not understand phenomenologically. The blind lead the blind. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to extremes — it is extremism caused by an appropriation of religious symbols by people who confuse their own tribal beliefs for the Transcendent.
I bet your mother would know EXACTLY what I’m saying here and would agree with it.
S: Wisdom is awareness of what is unknown and unknowable and living in relation to it. But it takes time, horrible mistakes and pain to develop this awareness. It takes years and years, and up to that point, you are the smartest, most self-aware, most moral kind of person who ever existed. Afterwards, you’re none of these things, but at least you’re wiser. “Sadder and wiser.” They go together.
S: Please be sure to include that last bit in what you send to your mother.
Multistability
All my interests concern psychic multistabilities — gestalts of perceptual, conceptual (hermeneutic), relational and behavioral kinds. My whole life is a story of successive stabilities, punctuated with perplexity, anxiety and chaos. Somewhere along the way it became a story of finding durable stability through understanding multistability.
Design is about forming multistable arrangements between persons and nonpersons — “hybrid systems’, as Latour called them. In a stable hybrid system, nonpersons become extensions of personal being and persons are able to participate in an order that transcends their awareness and understanding. This involves interplay between conceptual and perceptual gestalts — and with advances in service design, social gestalts, concerning personal and organizational behavioral.
Philosophy — or at least the kinds of philosophy I enjoy — concern the dissolution and reformation of stable cognitive systems. An understanding is skillfully taken apart (refuted), enough that that it no longer possesses the intuitive stability of a given truth. Thus, loosened (analyzed) the elements of a possible truth are freed for new arrangements.
These freed elements can be logically connected and built up into cognitive or social constructions and asserted as truth. These constructed truths are experiences as true by all who can construe them, that is, retrace the construction and show the soundness of the connections. We may now explicate truth — untangle or unfold it — or explain truth — lay it flat, two-dimensionally, or better, in a one-dimensional straight line of thought, so it can be followed. All this is construal of constructions. It’s analytic stuff, and, at least for me, a preliminary for something vastly more important, which is experimenting with of constructions to find and exploring conceptual multistabilities. A concept is a cognitive gestalt, and the capacity to perceive, conceive or participate in a gestalt affords us givens — given entities, given truths, given situations. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the more given-rich our experience of reality. To understand multistability from a first-person perspective, means to modalize stabilities. A mood is a modal stability — or lack of stability, in the angst of perplexity. Between continents of solid, stabile ground lie vast expanses of watery welter and waste…
Anyway — some folks maintain a very limited repertoire of conceptual capacities, and rely heavily on construal. My strategy is the opposite. I try to stabilize a dense conceptual system that affords intuitive givenness of those realities that concern me most in life. I am grateful that scientists and engineers of various kinds inhabit a world tuned to physics, or chemistry, or whatever enables them to perform feats of technological magic. But I cannot live a life in full contact with their givens. I live in a world of truth-mediated relationships, where groups of people try to conceptually and practically align on problems and solve them together. Daily, I witness firsthand how clashing conceptualizations induce anxiety, and how premature attempts to annihilate anxiety. discomfort, tension and conflict only suppress and pressurize perplexity and make it more explosive, while also obstructing progress and necessitating domination — ironically often by folks who believe they are protecting us from domination.
In other words, my philosophy of multistability is derived from my direct personal experiences with design multistability, and this philosophy helps me navigate stabilities and de-stabilities without losing my head — or at least not irrecoverably losing my head. I maintain a philosophical self above my practical self, and this transcending self acts as guardian angel over my hazardous pursuits.
Finally…
Religion — religion is the practice of maintaining one’s finite self within an infinitely multistable reality, in full skin-on-skin relation to its infinitude. The very infinitude of not only its quantitative extent in time and space (or whatever other dimensions physicists discover-invent-instaurate for us) is the least of it, because infinity is essentially qualitative. Infinity presents us with a limitless number of limitlessly countable things. Each time we re-stabilize, we notice new givens and we stop seeing relevance in old givens. We are inclined to focus on and count very different givens. Those who have destabilized once often feel elevated and awakened to truth. The scales of the old stability fall from their eyes. Now they know the true Truth. If they have power, they’ll set to work propagating and enforcing it, and no amount of argument can pop them out of their crusade — not even that they are latter-day crusaders. No, they are different, special and unique according to their own criteria, and in this, they are exactly the same as every crusader who ever lived, all of whom were benevolent, insightful and brave champions of whatever floats their boats. It is a tragicomedy of epic proportions that our most hopelessly naive and biased naive realists run around preaching against cognitive bias and naive realism, believing that this objective knowing about is a cure for an incurable subjective condition. I call this metanaivety. It is as old as religion itself. It is the fundamentalist dementia that commits the category mistake of treating subjectivity knowing as objective knowledge. God is not an existent nor nonexistent object, and until an intelligent fundamentalist overcomes the fundamentalist fetter, decency demands atheism.
To be religious is to know the stabilities are unending and that our relationships with one another within this infinitely multistable reality call for destabilization and restabilization, death and rebirth.
Religion is the practice of taking active responsibility for our choice of psychic stability, so we live in awareness of one another within God.
Block
I’m really struggling. I have a sprawling multi-volume book in my mind and I can’t get it out. It’s that genre and voice problem again. It took me almost two decades years to get nine pages into an acceptable form. But I have 991 pages still jammed up in there.
Susan suggested that maybe I write what I have to say as chapbooks, maybe they’ll coagulate into an actual book. Or maybe they’ll expand into respectable-length essays that could be published as a collection.
I do find it inspiring, though, to think of what I’m doing as making pretty books — physical artifacts made out of ideas, words, letters, layouts, paper, ink and thread. I love the object-quality of books.
Three chapbooks I could get out are:
- Exnihilist Manifesto
- Shells and Pearls
- Enworldment
Half-knowns
My way of understanding the world is a two-edged sword. On one hand, what I understand, I understand deeply, clearly and practically. But, on the other hand, that which I do not understand with depth, clarity and practicality, I am unable to deal with at all.
And since most of what goes on in the practical world ranges between one-quarter and three-quarters nonsense, much of what goes on around me leaves me baffled, anxious and paralyzed.
In these cases, my only hope is to investigate whatever reality it is that people are semi-comprehending and to uncover the kinds of intuitive meaning participants in these realities are making of it. These varying intuitive meanings are what animate (literally) the measurable behaviors that distant data-mongers scrupulously gather and unscrupulously interpret into that soup of industry wisdom, consisting tough objective facts floating in a germy broth of subjective nonsense.
Until I do design research and root what I know in actuality, I know pretty much nothing.
Most people I know consider something half-known known. They can say words and move their faces and bodies in ways that suggest they understand. I’d do this, too, if I had more talent for playacting. But I don’t, so I denigrate it.
Vocabulary
From Emerson’s essay, “The American Scholar”:
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town; in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
If I hadn’t worked as a designer, and suffered and overcome so many perplexities in an effort to both do my design work, and to intuitively understand what I am doing, and hardest of all, to articulate my intuitive understanding, my philosophical work never would have traveled this trajectory and taken me where I now am.
If design hadn’t become so collaborative, and therefore so social, and therefore so political I never would have needed to philosophize about design. I could have just absorbed myself in wordless dialogue with my materials — in craft. But when your materials include people — as it turns out all design does, when understood properly — there is no way to avoid wordful dialogue.
And, my God! — when multiple dozens of people are directly involved in the process of collaboration, as they are in service design, you will find yourself in highly wordful meta-dialogue about dialogue (for instance the meaning of what research participants said in an interview, or whether multiple different interview participants were saying the same thing, and if so, in what sense was it the same, and why…). With each meta-level of conversations about conversations, of understandings of understandings, things get weirder and harder to navigate. This shadowy hades region — this Sartrean Hell that is other people thinking about other people thinking about other people — is the terrain I’ve learned to navigate. I’m a professional Hell sherpa.
Most people I know do not care to think about this region. If only they would suspend speculating on it, too. Because when I hear people talk about their own loves and hopes and commitments they all seem reasonable. But when they start talking about their enemies who oppose, obstruct or interfere with these good things, they sound like angry, egocentric children. And this is especially true of altruists whose loves and hopes and commitments are all about others they wish to help, who cannot imagine that these moral fantasies could ever be egocentric.
So for me “mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions” would be a final vocabulary useful for navigating the terrain of personal and social perplexity and to emerge on the other side with better enworldments.
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Please don’t disassemble my philosophy
I got curious about how many times on this site I’ve repeated my favorite Wittgenstein quote “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’” The answer is: a lot.
Too many times I’ve called this quote my favorite definition of philosophy, or my favorite articulation of philosophy’s purpose. But this is only true if we take philosophy to be the solving of philosophical problems. And while a lot of what we call philosophy is precisely this, I think it is not the best way to understand philosophy. The best philosophies are completely unproblematic and render our experiences of the world and our beliefs about the world unproblematic.
Wilfrid Sellars definition is much closer: “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” When our philosophy fails to perform this function, we then have a philosophical problem, and no longer know our way about. Then we “do philosophy” in order to reestablish a persuasive understanding of how things hang together.
But it must be persuasive. For this, it is necessary that it be logically compelling, but this alone is not sufficient. It must somehow link up with out intuitions of the world, most of which are purely practical and tacit and derived from myriad interactions with the myriad beings of the world– people, things, environments, experiences, ideas — some successful, some unsuccessful. We know more than we know, and our persuasion is subject to these unknown knowns of that swarm of unknown knowers who are the citizens of our soul.
This background of practical activity, of response, of intuitive belief is what I call faith. Our faith is not static. It responds to the world and changes in response to what it undergoes and overcomes.
Each person’s faith responds to different things to different degrees. Some of us respond most to relationships. Some respond most to emotions. Some respond most to beauty. Some respond most to mystery. Some respond most to participation in rituals. Some respond most to practical problems. Some of us respond most to ideas.
Those of us who respond strongly to ideas find philosophy fascinating, inspiring and sometimes life-changing.
Many others want philosophy to work unobtrusively, like a household utility. If it is already working, they aren’t too happy to see someone try to fix what isn’t broken. I don’t know about you but if a neighbor comes over to my house and starts disassembling my old, rattly, but mostly-still-functioning air conditioner to see if he can get it to work better, I’m kicking him off my property.
It is more than reasonable to not want to examine our own beliefs. When time travel is invented, I’ll be heading back to 2003 to explain truth this to my self.
I’ll also tell myself to avoid the company of people who don’t know or don’t care about the verdicts of faith — only what can be argued or defended. Our faiths deserve respect, and we show respect by taking persuasion seriously, and not just hectoring faith with argument. Arguments should be offered, not imposed.
Annual disorientation
Every year around this time I lose my curriculum. I pick up books and abandon them.
This year I’ve picked up and dropped several books about the formation of worldviews. I started at Worldview and Mind by Eugene Webb. Then I switched over to Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. Then I spent a few days in Cassirer revivalist Sebastian Luft’s The Space of Culture. Now I am tentatively rereading Bruno Latour’s weird and semi-neglected magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence.
All this came after a half-year dive into hermeticist literature, focusing on Kabbalah and Tarot, and approached from my own heretically practical angle.
Susan has booked a mountain cabin for a week-long writing retreat in early spring. I’ve noticed that everything I am doing is now preparation for that week.
My project is the same as it has been for the last decade, and both the hermeticist and the worldview investigations are components of it, and, of course, design remains at the heart of it as well. The project is enworldment. If we are displeased with the world as we experience it, what do we have at our disposal to change our experience of the world — by materially changing the world, by changing own being-in-the-world, by changing our own social participation? My prescription is to approach things as a designer — always as a designer — and most of all when we think we should approach them as a political or “ethical” actor.
Two ways to be irreverent
We can be irreverent because we see nothing as sacred.
Or we can be irreverent because we deny piety the right to confuse non-sacred and sacred things.
It is easy to confuse the latter with the former, and that is a deep mistake.
1-4-3-1
Susan and I were trying to find a simple way to explain reconciliation among equals.
“When conflict breaks out, we are shaken out of unity, and fall into the four-sidedness of conflict. There is [1] what I believe, there is [2] what you believe, there is [3] what I think you believe and there is [4] what you think I believe.
(Naive egocentricity, of course, sees only two sides: what I believe and what I know you believe. Until one overcomes naive egocentricity and learns to see conflict as four-sided, progress is impossible.)
To begin reconciliation we try to go from four-sided conflict to three-sided disagreement, where there is [1] what I believe, and there is [2] what you believe and there is [3] our shared understanding of our disagreement.
But sometimes when we reach a shared understanding of the disagreement we realize that this shared understanding has transcended and absorbed our old conflicting beliefs. This new understanding is no longer an agreement about a disagreement, but [1] a new shared belief. The three-sided disagreement is now a more expansive and accommodating unity.
So it’s one to four to three and then back to one. Repeat, ad infinitum.”
At this point Susan reached over and picked up a book from a pile of hermetic books next to her chair. “What is this?”
Cracked
Here are two Facebook posts I decided to suppress.
1.
I’ve cracked. I am done.
I am not longer pretending that progressivism is a respectable ideology.
I reject progressivism as a principled liberal.
Progressivism is not, as many confused people believe, liberalism gone too far, but rather abortive liberalism. It is a fundamentalist perversion of my liberal faith, far worse than straightforward rejection.
For the last ten years I’ve watched my formerly liberal allies degrade into craven identitarians. I don’t respect it and I can no longer pretend to respect it.
When you attach that inane preface “speaking as a…” I hear you speaking as a conformist to a contemptible ideology.
When you dole out different portions of dignity to different persons based on how you and your likeminded dittoheads categorize them, I witness the actions of an arrogant bigot, who doesn’t even know what equity even is.
And if you are among those who actually believe “the personal is political” you are no friend of mine. This is not because I reject you and your beliefs, but because anyone vacuous enough to operate under this principle is incapable of friendship. Listen: anyone with functioning intuition feels it viscerally when a person approaches them, not as a person, but as an instance of a category. It doesn’t matter one bit if that category is a good category or a bad one — it is dehumanizing.
I have no time for dehumanizing ideological operants. Be a fellow human, treat me as a fellow human, or go away.
This is where I stand on things. It is not negotiable. If you don’t like it, do us both a favor and speak up so we can stop wasting each other’s time and energy.
2.
Progressivists are constantly approaching me as a fellow progressivist. Of course, being a decent person, obviously I must be a progressivist.
On the contrary: because I am a decent person I am not a progressivist.
I am a liberal, and that is the very furthest thing from progressivist.
I do not admire or even respect progressivist activism. It is not compassionate and it is not countercultural. It is grotesque, callous and cowardly conformism. It cares only about its own ideological flourishing, not about human beings. If you are Jewish, this should be overwhelmingly obvious to you after the last three weeks.
If you happen to be a Progressivist, we can still be friends, as long as you can handle the fact that I cannot help but notice your family resemblance to other totalitarianisms. You’re no hero of history. Quite the opposite.
The wrestling ritual
A few times a year Susan and I do a silly wrestling ritual.
To understand the ritual, it is important to know that Susan is a physical person. She strength trains most days of the week. For a woman, her strength is well above average, and she often outperforms women in their twenties. I am not a physical person. My exercise consists of cycling and walking. For a man, I am pretty damn weak. But, still, my masculine physique makes me stronger, and so far I have always managed to subdue her.
Or almost subdue her. The ritual goes as follows: Susan announces that, thanks to her new training regimen, she is now stronger than I am, and proceeds to attack me. We grapple until I gain the advantage. Just as I get her pinned and begin the count, she yells out “No fair! You can’t use strength.” At this point, I am required to loosen up my muscles. I use my longer reach to gain leverage. “No fair! You can’t use your size.” So then I just drape myself over her hold her down with my weight. “No fair! You can’t use your weight.” And “You can’t use your rough beard hair.” “You can’t use your disgustingness.”
Eventually, with enough equity adjustments, she ends up winning.
Whoever controls the terms of fairness controls all.
You wanna know what I think about Israel?
Yesterday, a Jewish friend asked me what I think about the Israeli-Gazan conflict.
I began with my general go-to principle that international conflict is normally evil-versus-evil, and best conceived in terms of conformity or deviance from that norm. I’m perfectly fine choosing sides amorally, based on my own preferred nonmoral outcome. The compulsion to moralize politics is vulgar.
But morality is actually relevant in this conflict.
Hamas is unusually evil. We can debate why this is the case, but it doesn’t change the facts of the present. Hamas’s explicitly stated goal is to eliminate the state of Israel. To this end, not only has it intentionally committed atrocities against Israeli civilians, it has brutalized and terrorized Gazans. It is illiberal to the extreme, and anti-progressive, and relies on fear and violence as its primary political instruments. Hamas is vile. Anyone who affords it legitimacy lacks capacity for moral reasoning.
Morally, Israel is better than average. This, however, is actually not all that relevant. If you accept the premise that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state — and this is absolutely core to this issue — Israel has an obligation to prevent Hamas from pursuing its goal of eliminating Israel. That Israel attempts to do so humanely, making things much harder on itself in order to minimize civilian casualties, is to its credit. Of course, some of this effort is purely pragmatic, avoiding anything that can fuel hostility from the Arab world. But given that the Arab world refuses to credit to Israel for these efforts, and will turn just about any event into an occasion for rage, at least some small portion of the humanity can be assumed to be principled.
I’ve been listening to and reading Benny Morris on the history of Israel. He is famously unflinching in his criticisms of Israel’s conduct over the short course of its history. But he is also loyal to his nation, and able to maintain that loyalty despite refusing to divert of soft-focusing his critical gaze. He admits the many injustices committed against the Israeli Arabs, and worse, sees the necessity of this injustice in order to preserve and safeguard Israel as a Jewish state. It is a grim reality, and its unfolding in the past, present and future is necessarily tragic.
The reality is dissonant to liberal ears (including mine). Israel established a Jewish ethnostate. To survive as such it must preserve a Jewish majority. It absolutely lacks liberal latitude enjoyed by a philosophically-founded nation like the United States. It must and cannot avoid imposing ethnic double-standards, at least at the level of the collective, however much it tries to preserve individual civil liberties and equality before the law. These are things that would inspire me to light a torch and grab a pitchfork were they to be imposed in the United States. But studying Jewish history has persuaded me of the necessity of Zionism. Watching the reaction of our progressivist fringe and hearing creepy comments from right-wingers insinuating that surely there must be some valid reason why Jews have always been persecuted in Christian and Muslim nations… all this only reinforces the need to have some place for Jews to go when their host nation goes collectively insane and solipsistic and, inevitably, consequently, once again develops an autoimmune reaction toward its Jewish population. I would love it if by some liberal miracle a dynamic emerged where Jews could just naturally enjoy a majority in Israel without requiring any discriminatory demo-manipulation, but reality just isn’t that way. It is ugly. So be it.
So I see Hamas as 93%+ evil, and Israel as maybe 32% evil, and that is about as close to a good-versus-evil struggle as political reality ever produces.
If people disagree with me, I’m ok with it… as long as that opinion is actually informed, which it rarely is, or if the opinion is lightly held. I’m not going to yell at you for ignoring the news or not investing time to formulate an opinion.
But if you come at me with ignorant proggo passion — the overheated sentimenality toward identities, especially toward oppressed or colonized people — I may not be able to be polite to you. I despise this narcissistic and ignorant ideology and I won’t suffer it.