Category Archives: Biography

Pamphleteerism

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Over the last year I’ve been equipping myself to make pamphlets. I’ve purchased several reams of beautiful French Paper in cover and heavy text weights, waxed linen bookbinder thread, needles, and awls and a bone folder. I’ve figured out how to use Adobe InDesign with my printer (which prints 2-sided) to create booklets in signature format ready for binding. I’ve practiced and refined my booklet sewing technique constructing and revising Shabbat prayer booklets.

I think I am going to force myself to work differently in the coming months. I think I’m going to steal from the product development industry (my greatest, most beloved, most intensely detested frenemy, who has nourished me with so many unavoidable crises, who has dragged me through so much dark despair into so many enlightenments). What I intend to steal comes directly from the single most painful trend of the last decade. I intend to force myself to work in “sprints”.

Working in pamphlet sprints, I will write with the intention of always creating a printed pamphlet by the end of the session. I am also going to get rid of this notion of getting everything I’ve learned into a single book. I’m going to get it all out in microcosmic bursts of various genre.

Here are the pamphlets I have planned so far:

  • Geometric Parables. This is a book of diagrams I’ve been drawing and redrawing, interpreting and reinterpreting over the last 15 years. These images guide my best thoughts. When I think, often I am just growing the consequences of particular problems onto these frameworks, as if they were trellises. This will be an obscure little book, consisting of diagrams and meditations in compact verse. Its purpose is not explanation, and it is unlikely to make sense by itself. Its purpose is prayer: recollecting what memory cannot grasp. I will be flirting with idolatry making this pamphlet the way I want it made.
  • The Ten-Thousand Everythings. This could end up being a book that explains Geometric Parables. I’ve accumulated a large number of aphoristic scraps that fit together into a cohesive philosophical perspective. I want to attempt to demonstrate my way of thinking by exploring some key domains, especially ethics, ontology and religion. This will be my idea dump. I’m going to try to force myself to be more relaxed and prosaic writing and rewriting it.
  • Syllabus Listicalis. This idea came to life yesterday, when I just started listing out the most consequential points where I disagree with conventional wisdom. Few people understand the extent to which my thinking has diverged from the norms of everyday thinking, especially at the most crucial life-shaping points. This has left me in a place where at best I agree with others on details, but not for the reasons people tend to assume, which cannot be explained within contemporary customs of polite conversation. I doubt I’ll try to explain anything in Syllabus Listicalis. It will be a bare list of instructive disagreements, maybe a negative image of The Ten-Thousand Everythings.
  • Interface: This will be a more or less explicit book about the myriad lessons I’ve learned oscillating between human-centered design and philosophical reflection, and how these insights have constellated around what I think is an important new way of thinking about reality. I believe many designers have intuited the importance of this new perspective as they have developed and applied its methods to an expanding sphere of problems. But so far, I have seen no attempt to articulate the perspective itself and  account for its importance.

In addition, I may start typesetting my better blog posts. Maybe I’ll make a series called Anomalogues. But first, I’m going to make some editions of the pamphlets I’ve listed above.

Muffled by novelty

Biography

If you wish to say something truly novel, you’ll need to choose between 1) stating it in familiar terms so that people misunderstand what you say and at best accept a banal misunderstanding as true, or 2) to state it in unfamiliar terms so that people at least understand that they do not understand, but at the cost that they will regard you as confused, pedantically technical, impractically abstract or a charlatan.

Only those who stay very close to established truth get listened to as a peer — a peer who has something valid to impart.

Those who stray too far from established truth are shunned and silenced by being despised or exalted or, by some weird combination of the two, diagnosed as clinically eccentric.

 

Mikvah

Biography, Judaism

Today is my mikvah.

Sometime around 10:45-11:15am EST other Jews will know me as a fellow Jew.

I cannot explain why this matters so much to me, but it does. And I understand why many people cannot understand how much this matters to me or why it matters, but I hope those who love me can respect where their understanding fails.

Hiddennesses

Biography, Philosophy

A solved problem.
A defined problem believed to have a solution.
A defined problem whose solution may be impossible.
A defined problem believed to have no possible solution.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty believed to contain a definable problem.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty which might contain a definable problem.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty believed to be essential to existence.
An unacknowledged felt difficulty.
An unfelt difficulty: a non-problem.
A solved problem?

Light: unobstructed perception.
Shadow: darkness in light, obstructed perceiving.
Darkness: obstructed perception, nonperception in perception.
Blindness in darkness: obvious obscurity, perceived nonperception.
Blindness in light: nonobvious obscurity, blindspots, unperceived nonperception.
Light: unobstructed perception?

My 500-word spiritual autobiography

Biography, Judaism

As part of my conversion process I’ve been asked to write a 500-word spiritual autobiography, and to pick out a Hebrew name. I thought I would choose Israel or Yisrael, but then I found Nachshon, and it is perfect for me.

Reading back over my own autobiography, I feel a need to thank and apologize to everyone who has known me too much, especially my poor Mom.

Here’s the final version, 72 words over the limit, but OKed by my rabbi.

 

I was born into a religious vacuum. The worldview I inherited had no space for religion. My first memory of religion is my 4-year-old self sitting on the potty asking my mother what God is. Her answer: “God is love.” I became an atheist.

Once I could read I gorged on mythology and Mark Twain. This antithetical pair of threads drawn from my earliest reading — a strand of constellated meanings twisted around a nasty strand of critique — has run through my life and connected my various interests and activities.

When I was ten my family moved to a town with a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. I was made to attend Sunday services. I’d rant all the way home. According to adolescent me, UU was vapid! insular! a parody religion! a detox program for religion addicts! But when I charged UUism with hypocrisy, it backfired: attacking UUism with UU values, I internalized them, and infected myself with faith in reason, tolerance, self-criticism, pluralism, and dialogue.

My atheism ended after I met my future wife, Susan. She crushed me in an argument on the foundations of my morality, which resulted in 1) self-demotion to agnosticism and 2) love.

Before we were married, Susan joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. I went with her to liturgies, and that was my first exposure to Judeo-Christian scripture. I tried to get inside the perspective but I was unable to connect with the doctrines or practices. My wife and two daughters were enmeshed in a community who regarded me as blind, ignorant and possibly wicked. My devout agnosticism appeared to most people in my life as a blotch of nothing to be disregarded. I think this is why I embraced Vipassana meditation. I appreciated its focus on practice and its deemphasis of doctrine, and it dignified my outlook with a name. Plus, it made me nicer, and the insights gained in meditation have helped me understand mysticism.

Late 1999 we moved to Atlanta. I stopped meditating, got consumed with work and became depressed. I learned a lot from this. Coming out of it I re-centered my thinking on lived experience, rather than abstract ideas.

Then I was transferred to Toronto. I started reading Nietzsche — initially to understand the “slave morality” in my workplace, but it was soon obvious the critique applied to me. I interrogated my moral, philosophical, and religious conceptions until they dissolved. What remained was a new and odd mode of thinking. I found myself unable to convey what I was learning without resorting to symbols and metaphors. Religious writing now made immediate sense to me. My agnosticism became irrelevant. It was exhilarating but painfully isolating.

The urgent need to explain — and later, to exit — this state of mind, and to reintegrate with humanity drove me into phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and eventually to Judaism.  I kept noticing that Jewish thinkers like Richard J. Bernstein and Martin Buber were especially, distinctively helpful. The values I kept finding in Jewish thinking resonated — especially around the religious significance of intersubjectivity. As I continued, I came to see Judaism at the root of everything I care about — the values contracted from my childhood harangues. I felt room in the pluralism of Judaism for religious life as I know it. I am a contrarian, but that doesn’t mean I do not need a home; it just means I can’t live most places. Coming here, I feel home.

Memories of oblivion

Biography, Fables, myths & parables

I’ve been asked to write a 500 word spiritual autobiographical essay, and this has me thinking about my experiences with Vipassana meditation. I only have room for a line or two on meditation in the essay, so I’m venting my verbosity into this post.

For me, the most surprising aspect of meditation was that “I” did not control my thoughts. Thinking would think, and something corresponding to “me” had emerged from this process.

Sometimes, if I managed to settle my mind down I could hear the stream of babble from which thoughts pop into my head. It sounded something like a murmuring crowd from another country. Some of the murmur was also visual, but all of it was a piece. Occasionally some random bit of murmur would spark recognition of some word. A word would sometimes spark a notion, and the notions would sometimes collect into an idea. An idea would occur, and then some stretch of time later — seconds, minutes or even multiple quarter-hours — it would come to my attention that “I” had stopped meditating… except there was no I who did the stopping. The I who had been posted there to do the meditating had gone non-existent, yet something had continued without it (recording memories) and something resumed my I-activities (my I-ing) once awareness came back. Part of that I-ing was gluing together all those memories to create the illusion that I had been there.

Consciousness is anything but continuous. It would be more accurate to say that consciousness is an effervescence of back-story and anticipation.

Or maybe it would be most accurate of all to say that I am a lousy meditator.

Meditation is only one of my go-to sources for insights into the workings of nothingness. Ocular migraines are another rich source.

I’ve been trying to write a prayer to my migraine wisdom. I think it might still suck in that way psychedelic stuff always sucks, but here it is:

You move from everything to everything, flashing across expanses of nullity.

Landing, standing on firm ground of  unruly particularity, blindness still clings to your heels. The shadow you cast is perfect: nothing there, nothing missing.

Then you leave, again, closing time behind you with a seal of oblivion. Wherever you go, after you depart you will always have been there, and will never have been absent.

Only those who move with you can detect your before or after, so I am attempting to trace your movements.

As we travel, please help me skim the churning chrome, and to not sink in it and drown. Please help me slip through scotomas and not collide with their nonexistence. Please face me forward, and guard my eyes from looking right or left, toward light or toward darkness, or glancing backwards into entangling comforts lurking in the familiar dappled shade.

Lead me to where my doubt fails.

Maybe I could call my kind of migraine o(ra)cular migraines. My migraines have taught me to notice the signs of blindness, which is the closest we can get to seeing blindness, which is not the cheap psychedelic paradox it might seem to be. You can detect blindness, but only indirectly and longitudinally, comparing moments with varying capacities to perceive (in the case of migraines) or capacities to conceive (in the case of Vipassana). But to do this, it is crucially important to not map these strange experiences to our old familiar distinctions. We will explain them away, extinguish them, sink them back into blindness, like how we forget our inconceivable dreams by crushing them into plotlines. The goal is to develop new distinctions that permit more kinds of reality to exist to us.

*

Maybe I should set myself the goal of reinventing the psychedelic aesthetic, in a more substantial and durable mode?

Bonus: a portrait of me with migraine.

Jewish

Biography, Judaism

When people used to ask me what my religious beliefs were I gave a complicated answer: I have a Taoist metaphysic and a Judeo-Christian ethic.

Now, after taking six months of Judaism classes at a Reform synagogue, participating in Torah study, reading from Kabbalah and attending Kabbalah lectures, my answer is much simpler: My beliefs are Jewish.

I have found that Kabbalah contains the entirety of Taoist metaphysics as I understand it, and that Jewish ethics contains all of what I embraced in Christian ethics, excluding precisely those parts of Christianity I was never able to accept.

Now I have to put my Jewish beliefs into action and become Jewish so I can be recognized as Jewish by my fellow Jews. It happens to be a core Jewish belief that Jewish beliefs are only one part of being Jewish.

“God Is Not Dead”

Anthropology, Biography, Ethics

A church in my neighborhood put a flyer in my mailbox inviting me to a screening of “God Is Not Dead.” I decided to go and see it and to meet the people at the church.

The film was interesting, but the church was even more interesting. The people there were extremely nice, both to me and to each other. People of different races sat together, with no trace of self-segregation. It was surprising how surprising this was to see. The children were exceptionally polite, but without any evidence of brokenness. They seemed very happy and alive. The service was moving. Everything centered around love. God loves every one of us. The world is underpinned and saturated with love. We are called to love each other.

The only major problem I had with any of it was the image they had of their non-Christian neighbors. I saw this image both in the film and in how they spoke about the wicked people in the world that make life difficult for everyone — themselves most of all, but also believers. The characters in the film were alarmingly flat and unbelievable. It was nearly as bad as reading Ayn Rand. They had some kind of horrific aversion to God and could not accept his love for various reasons, despite on some level feeling the truth. It made them lash out at God and Jesus and his faithful worshipers.

If I lived in the world with angry, irrational, evil people like that, and especially if I had children, I would take drastic measures to stop them. But they don’t live in a world full of people like that. These unbelievers were imagined characters — moral straw men. When I tried to tell them how they were getting their neighbors wrong, they were uninterested in discussing it. Eventually they stopped answering my emails.

It makes me wonder if we don’t store our own most vicious, hateful and violent impulses in the imputed inner-lives of our enemies.

I hear “God Is Not Dead 2” is coming out soon. Maybe they’ll screen that, too. It might be a good excuse to resume the conversation.

 

A Jew trapped in a Gentile’s biography

Biography, Fructivism, Judaism

Two details from a passage in Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man have stayed with me over the years.

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by that unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and more than merely stimulating share in the building of a steadfast world of peace only in its own community and not in scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way, to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you” — so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone,” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.

The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled. Opinions were gone, in a bodily way the factual took place.

The first striking detail is the indication of a palpable shift of relationship that both parties feel with immediacy. “It is gone.” I believe this kind of shift is not just an experience, but an experience of something real: the essential reality of all sacred being. Without this immediate mutual knowing, there is no marriage, no friendship, no conversation, no reconciliation, no sacrament.

The second striking detail is bothersome to me. It is the claim that “Jews know Jesus from within, in the impulse and stirrings of his Jewish being,” in a way that is “inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him.” At first glance, this appears to be an essentialist (congenialist?) “it takes one to know one” argument.  I have a strong aversion to this kind of thinking.

But rereading it, the point can be interpreted in a non-essentialist way. The point is less about being non-Jewish, than with having a submissive relationship to Jesus, which would be an un-Jewish attitude — a distancing, dehumanizing and objectifying I-it mode. To relate to Jesus in a more mutual and intimate fellow-person I-Thou mode invites Buber’s impulses and stirrings of Jewish being to stir and impel.

Precisely this impulse toward I-Thou is what I feel in my own being when I read my Jewish heroes, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Richard J. Bernstein, Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Haidt and even the great aspie Ludwig Wittgenstein. And Jesus of Nazareth, too, of course.

It is this feeling that makes me say that “I am a Jew trapped in a Gentile’s biography.”

This and the fact that I look so Jewish that nearly everyone who meets me assumes I am Jewish, especially other Jews.

And another clue: when my mother and uncle told me that they found evidence that we have Jewish ancestry, and that it appeared to go straight up the matrilineal line I lost my mind with happiness.

This is obviously far too important a matter to leave to my Great Great Great Grandmother Anna Maria Scheidegger’s mother (Elisabeth Sigerist?) and her mother’s mother back in Switzerland or Alsace.

Pluritarian Pluriversalism

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.

Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.

Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world.  After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.

Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.

Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.

Britt

Biography

One observation I’m glad I was able to share with Britt while he was here: I never saw him just tell a joke. Britt required himself to invent an entirely new genre of humor, and then to present an example of that new genre as a joke — or as a relentless multi-month program of connected jokes, or a comedic world populated by co-conspirators and shanghai-ed foils.

This morning I realized Britt did something similar with friendships. He was never just friends with someone. He invented an entirely new form of friendship for every person he knew.

I think this is why so many of us are left with such precisely cut (as Harris said) “Britt-shaped holes”. It is also why nobody could know him entirely: There was just too much Britt to know. He streamed out too far and too weirdly into too many other people, and he never stopped inventing and changing long enough for anyone to comprehend it.

Here’s a selection of Britt humor:

Britt Harrißon ßergman 2015-02-23 17-34-36 Britt Harrißon ßergman 2015-02-23 17-31-44

Private liberty and political freedom

Biography, Brand, Politics

I am currently reading Chantal Mouffe’s Democratic Paradox, which explores a fundamental tension inherent in all liberal-democratic societies, which can be summarized by Marvin Simkin’s famous formulation: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.”

…with modern democracy, we are dealing with a new political form of society whose specificity comes from the articulation between two different traditions. On one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation.

…it is vital for democratic politics to understand that liberal democracy results from the articulation of two logics which are incompatible in the last instance and that there is no way in which they could be perfectly reconciled. Or, to put it in a Wittgensteinian way, that there is a constitutive tension between their corresponding ‘grammars’, a tension that can never be overcome but only negotiated in different ways. This is why the liberal-democratic regime has constantly been the locus of struggles which have provided the driving force of historical political developments. The tension between its two components can only be temporarily stabilized through pragmatic negotiations between political forces which always establish the hegemony of one of them.

One of the problems dogging discourse in the United States (though, honestly, probably not in the top 1000 problems) is that we lack precise language for distinguishing between an individual’s rights against majority views (a negative conception of liberty), and the rights of communities to provide themselves support to maintain themselves (a positive political freedom to shape one’s society).

When I think about it this way, it becomes clear to me that the primary value of the free market is not, in fact, to provide the maximum individual private liberty, but rather to establish conditions favorable to political freedom of autonomous communities, that is, companies.

It is for this reason that I have become interested in the free market. It is not enough anymore for me to have my own individual liberty. I want to do things to the world, with other people, in a community with specific values, hopes and goals. I want to belong to a branded company.

But if you think this means I’m becoming an advocate for de-regulation, you’d better think again. Just as powerless individuals ought to be protected from other stronger individuals, if we believe in corporate personhood (and why not?) then let’s go all the way and grant it to corporate persons of all sizes. Wouldn’t this mean protecting small corporate persons from being anti-competitively bullied by bigger corporate persons?

And while we are at it, if entrepreneurship is the fullest realization of American freedom, doesn’t that set a new goal? Are we not morally obligated to provide all Americans equal access to not only to individual liberty but also to true political freedom? This does not mean all risk is removed, but it should mean that there is not a gross difference in consequences of failure. As things stand where a rich man who fails will certainly be crestfallen and have to cut back on some luxuries, a poor person who fails faces loss of healthcare for her/his family, long-term credit destruction (which extends far beyond denial of credit), to an environment that is physically safe and to adequate education for her/his children. There’s a point where freedom becomes a merely theoretical possibility.

This region of thought is pretty new to me, so I’m guessing none of this is very new, but it sure is exciting.

 

Do you consider yourself ‘broken’?

Biography, Ethics

From the Asphodel blog:

Question: “Do you consider yourself ‘broken’? What does broken mean to you?”

Response:

Until March of this year, I did. I was.

Until May, in fact, I was still in deep torpor of pain from it, but, looking back I can see where the cries became something more like “this hurts so much” than “I just want to die fuck me fuck you fuck life kill it all drown it in the boiling shit it loves so much”……

My will was broken – I was ready to accept antidepressants and keeping my head down as a new way of life – I wanted nothing more than to disappear into bed and sigh away the rest of my life thinking about how unfair and wretched people are, what liars they are, what a waste human flesh is. My capacity to love was broken, had been for a year or so.

I can’t really be certain what changed, precisely, but I healed. I’m scarred. It’s stronger and my emotions, though still extreme and dynamic, are smarter for it.

In my lexicon, a broken person is traumatized past the point of being productive (pleasing and useful to one’s self; CF below) and has given up on being pleased by living. Failure does it – the failure of love, personal failure, professional / artistic failure of the essential mode of existence that gives purpose to human existence can break us. Some recover, some do not.

Someone who has not ventured a great attempt is not broken, though.

Strength is a bizarre thing; it can’t be assessed from a distant vantage. Human strength, spiritual / emotional / personal strength, is subtly different from ‘fortitude’ (endurance of suffering or loss) and ‘power’ (the ability to effect change) yet it incorporates those qualities – and strength can certainly come from having been broken. In any case, no one can be certain of their strength until the threat of being broken has been faced. It’s far worse than anything I’ve experienced otherwise. My back broke in 2005; that causes me sometimes excruciating pain and it certainly takes a great deal of my strength to cope with it every day, but I do, and the awareness that I can makes me aware of what I’m capable of, and shows me why I was successful at this&that endeavor as a younger person: it wasn’t just drive, or charisma, or natural ability that made things happen; it was centrally and most importantly the willingness to risk being broken that made good things occur in my life.

Far worse than my back breaking was the surprise divorce sprung on me by a woman I trusted, cherished, and adored. It would be an even longer response to go into much detail there, but I was so devastated that I – a moody and occasionally very dark person to begin with – reached a new low of personal strength. My spine breaking was truly nothing compared to the horror and pain that gave me.

That, too, scarred me deeply. The scars are stronger than the unbroken heart was, and there’s no question that I lost something bright and vital then – but maybe it’s something I needed to lose. My heart is smarter now. My core is not nearly as likely to be threatened, and so my usefulness and my ability to please others (thus myself) is not as weak, not as ephemeral as it was before.

So much I want to relate. I’ll have to think about it. For days, most likely.

I thank you deeply for the question, because answering it makes me consciously aware of it and more comfortable with it. I feel more able to take on the rest of the risks I’m facing, now, in the understanding that if I become broken again I won’t be as likely to just crumble and moan over it, wasting precious life on misery spent obsessed with ugliness and loss. I’ll remind myself to keep aware of this response and to live up to it.

Generative thoughts

Biography, Hermeneutics

My favorite books are nearly impossible to read, because they cause me to have so many of my own thoughts.

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An insight is a generative thought: an idea that produces ideas.

An insight is impossible to speak about directly. It can only be observed, but not empirically in the usual sense. What is observed is intellectual behavior. This kind of observation takes the form of following a thought. It is an intellectual participatory observation.

*

A very strange reading experience:

  1. At the beginning of the book the author sets a painful and apparently irresolvable problem.
  2. Then the author shifts his attention to a second, different problem. He approaches it from several angles, and resolves it several ways. Each angle sets off an explosion of original thoughts. It is hard for the reader to get through the book. (And some of the explosions reverberate into the reader’s own past and future, and change the meanings of things in unexpectable ways.)
  3. Then toward the end of the book the author shifts back to the original problem. The reader is shocked to find himself reading the very thoughts he’d conceived earlier, sometimes worded almost identically. It is as if the author made the reader think his thoughts (and in profound cases, even feel his feelings).

What is going on here? My explanation:

The author has presented a problem the reader does not know how to think out. His mind lacks the movements necessary to resolve it, and it leaves him with a sort of knot in the mind.

Through the explorations of the second problem, his mind learns to produce the necessary movements. (“The dance.”) Once the reader has acquired the means to resolve the first problem himself, the resolvability somehow causes the mind to recall and solve the problems almost effortlessly. This causes the eruption of thoughts.

Then the author “winks” and indicates what has happened by showing his own resolutions by the same method. This phenomenon is itself theoretically, practically and ethically problematic, and it has been the obsession of many fine minds.

The company is the polis

Biography

I’ve finished re-reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I didn’t want to finish it. I’d love to keep reading and stay this state of mind forever.

Here’s the last paragraph of Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:

Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach, especially his claim that “man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice,” is a fitting conclusion to this study. We can no longer share Marx’s theoretical certainty or revolutionary self-confidence. There is no guarantee, there is no necessity, no “logic of history” that must inevitably lead to dialogical communities that embrace all of humanity and in which reciprocal judgment, practical discourse, and rational persuasion flourish. If anything, we have or should have learned how much the contemporary world conspires against it and undermines it. And yet it is still a telos, a telos deeply rooted in our human project. As Marx cautions us, it is not sufficient to try to come up with some new variations of arguments that will show, once and for all, what is wrong with objectivism and relativism, or even to open up a way of thinking that can move us beyond objectivism and relativism; such a movement gains “reality and power” only if we dedicate ourselves to the practical task of furthering the type of solidarity, participation, and mutual recognition that is founded in dialogical communities.

*

Re-reading this book has helped me remember why I left my little isolated garden paradise of a thoroughly undemanding non-profit life, where I had the freedom to work on philosophical problems with minimal interference, to return to the commercial world. I came back for genuine dialogical, synetic collaboration. There is nothing in the world more fascinating, precious and rare than dialogue, authentic community, real intersubjective absorption in shared problems.

One of my nutty beliefs: In our time the company is the polis. The commercial world is our ecumene. So then: What governs the life of a company? What is its power structure? What are its principles? Is a company necessarily a pure plutocracy? Is democracy possible? If so, what are the tradoffs? What guides a company’s business practice? Pure business techne? Phronsis? Synesis? How does a power structure preserve itself in its practices and its principles?

*

Business is a huge practical-philosophical laboratory. Every project is a political petri dish.

The “analysis paralysis” argument as filibuster

Biography

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

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

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

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

*

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

After all, has deliberation gotten us anywhere?

*

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

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

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

See? Sneaky!

*

Subtle distinctions with important consequences:

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

—-

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

Empathy + Alignment + Realism

Biography, Brand, Design, Philosophy, Synesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

Empathic understanding is the deepest form of respect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Cramps

Biography, Brand

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

R.I.P. Lux Interior.

*

Some examples of the vision:

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

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

Not a textbook

Biography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

I cannot believe how much I am enjoying rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. I have a couple of exciting new leads: Paul Feyerabend – who is certain to be a terrible influence on me (consider the title of his main work: Against Method) – and Clifford Geertz, a cultural anthropologist. The last time I read this book was in early 2006, and the two leads of that reading were Kuhn (paradigms) and Gadamer (fusion of horizons), so anyone who has spoken with me at any length at all will immediately understand the impact Bernstein has already had on me.

(I’m gradually acquiring the entire bibliography of  Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and my library is becoming even more home-like.)

What’s fascinating about Bernstein is that his books appear at first glance to be closer to textbooks than original philosophical works, but that is not the case. He does original philosophy in the medium of comparative discussions of other people’s thinking. His philosophy is deeply social, but this does not mean he places the locus of his philosophy outside of his own understandings or his own experience. (It is understandable why someone unfamiliar with his mode of thought might see it that way. This is actually one of the issues he addresses in his writing.)

I buy lots and lots of books for my friends. I’ve given more copies of this book away than any other book.

The books of my life

Biography

I had another amazing morning reading Bernstein. As I’ve said before, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism triggered a major turning point in my intellectual life. Rereading it, I’ll also say it is one of the clearest, most insightful and most useful books I’ve ever read. I meant to post some excerpts from what I read this morning, but now I want to make a list of the books that have changed me.

1987: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The idea paraphrased by my ethics professor, “A good man has learned to love what is good,” has dominated my ethical thought since I heard it. A taste for virtue is cultivated through habit.

1993: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
This was my first glimpse of the purpose of education, beyond mere training and credentialing. I read this right after I graduated from college, and I’ve ached over wasting my time in school ever since. I don’t think this is an especially great book, but it did inspire me to educate myself and it dislodged me from my shallow “liberalism”.

1995: Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones
This was my first genuinely literary experience – a story meant less as narrative than an existential demonstration – and my first exposure to someone I recognized as experiencing the world in a distinctive way that was similar to my own experience. I didn’t fully realize how unusual my experience of the world was until I found myself feeling at home in Borges’s stories and essays.

1995: Carl Jung’s Psychological Types
Learning that I was a particular type, and not completely unique, that other recognizable types existed (very differently from me) around me, and that I could relate to them better by understanding their typological perspective were earth-shattering discoveries. I was obsessed with personality type for a decade.

1996: Houston Smith’s The World’s Religions
Smith’s chapter on Buddhism persuaded me to study and practice Theravada Buddhism. This was the point when I became serious about spiritual knowledge. The experience of meditation showed me a number of my fundamental truths: the composite nature of being, the ephemerality of consciousness, the autonomy of thoughts. This was also the first time the nations of the world made sense to me and had cultural reality: nations were characterized by the religions that formed their character.

2001: Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language
This book grounded my professional activities (design) in my spiritual interests, and triggered an ecstatic psychosis that lasted five years.

2003: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche intensified my ecstatic psychosis – and iteratively destroyed my conceptions of life and forced me to reconstitute them. Under his influence I re-grounded myself in something akin to philosophical idealism/existentialism/phenomenology and began to understand poetry and religious texts in an immediate way. The experience of reading Nietzsche was something I struggled to describe. Even the insights I had reading him defied language, and the need to communicate became increasingly painful over time.

2006: Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism
Bernstein showed me that philosophy, despite its apparent individualist character, is in fact rooted in the social. Bernstein gave me language for my experiences with Nietzsche. At first, I thought the value of Bernstein and those he inspired me to read (Gadamer and Heidegger) was merely the capacity to describe the hermeneutic process, but over the years the substance of Bernstein’s philosophy has become as important to me as Nietzsche’s.

2008: Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man
Buber opened the transcendent dimension of the inter-human and social for me – the Thou – the “where two or more are gathered in my name” – and caused me to reconsider morality and the ethics of many forms of existential philosophy and spirituality. In fact, many philosophies are attempts to persuade the thinker to practical solipsism (I’ve called it “artificial autism”) – a self-protective insulation from genuine inter-human experience. The existentialist ideal is to live in subjectively inert parallelism, each subject surrounded by objects enclosed in the thinker’s own autonomous subjectivity. The ethic of the existentialist is this: I will behave as an object within your sole subjectivity if you will return the favor to me. The existentialist is alergic to the idea of shared subjectivity: the subject is essentialy individual.