Arendt’s quote on politics and plurality is one of my key intellectual landmarks:

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

Having immersed myself in Actor-Network Theory for the last several years Arendt’s characterization of action as “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” seems a little quaintly 20th Century — but her assertion that “plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life” changed my vision of politics, and few days pass without my recalling this quote.

Prior to this understanding, I saw politics as an essentially coercive activity, done by one gang of people to another (that is, to me).

But this ignores the fact that gangs must cultivate relationships before they can become gangs, and even more importantly, it misses the crucial insight that operating as a gangs is only one possibility of alliance, and thankfully not necessarily the most common one. Certainly alliances can be a means to coercive action, but alliances can also be a end in itself, and if you think about it, one of the most fully satisfactory ends a person can accomplish. It could even be argued that goal of coercive force might actually be a means to an us-versus-them feeling of alliance, which could help explain the strange euphoria so many people feel in the face of an enemy.

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To put it in terms of a professional dichotomy I’ve been entertaining/obsessing over, the idea of politics as essentially pluralistic changes the nature of a political problem from what is conceived as an engineering problem (active agents working on a “hard” system of passive/unfree parts) to a design problem (active agents working on or within a “soft” system composed at least in part of active/free participants).

If you see politics as social engineering, obviously you’ll want as little of it as possible. You’d be crazy not to. Social engineering is a horror (whether the social system is a governed public or a privately managed company) because it requires people to play set roles in a system and minimizes variance among parts for the same reason factories adopt Six Sigma: smooth and efficient functioning.

But if you understand politics as a participatory forming of alliances, its meaning changes from social engineering to social design: the belief that we are empowered to take collective action to change situations for the better (which pragmatists call meliorism and what innovation professionals call “design intervention”). Social design makes the system responsive to the people who constitute it, who in turn respond to the system by choosing to perform as participants — or by changing the system for more satisfactory participation.

Friendship is the parallax of two people’s existence in one shared reality.

Friendship is difference of perspective reconciled in depth.

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Friendships are tested and actualized by fighting.

The first test is whether one fights. A second test is how one fights.

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Friendships can end in irreconcilable difference; but conciliatory indifference can cause a friendship to never begin.

Irreconcilable difference can kill a friendship, but conciliatory indifference keeps it dead.

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Like every reality, friendship exists in the “double-bind of resistant availability.”

Two eyes reconciling independent perspectives gains depth of vision. Two ears hearing slightly different emphases hears a stereo space. A memory that recalls and compares past and present dwells in historic depth. A mind that can grasp details while maintaining awareness of the meaningful totality that provides it significance can be said to have intellectual depth.

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To understand the effects of parallax, we can cover the left eye and look through the right, then cover the right and look through the left. To understand stereo we can try listening through one ear alone and then the other. Philosophical hermeneutics attempts to repeat this basic operation with history and thinking.

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Whatever remains perfectly constant barely registers as existent. A changing world is a bigger world, and a changing person is a bigger person.

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Plato’s allegory of the cave begins with “And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: — Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.”

This quote has become important to me: “What is love but understanding and rejoicing at the fact that another lives, feels and acts in a way different from and opposite to ours?”

Does this mean we follow Rilke’s advice to maintain distance in order to get a better view? If difference were exhaustible, that might be the best strategy.

However, no matter how much we try, difference always eludes our attempts at familiarization. There is always more difference — if we want it.

Adam Miller says the real is an irreducible “resistant availability.” Love wants the real.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were not and never claimed to be Old Testament prophets. They were smart Enlightenment Age men, finite, fallible, time-bound and 100% lacking divine magical powers to foretell the future and to lay down eternally valid algorithmic laws of conduct.

So, let’s stop turning our Founding Fathers into cheap copies of Moses, Isaiah and Ezekiel. This sort of nationalistic piety is specially inexcusable among “objectivist” libertarians who claim to be atheists, or at least hard-nosed secularists, but who run around like holy-rollers spewing Jefferson and Franklin.

I imagine the Founding Fathers would have seen all this patriotic fundamentalism as a symptom of decadence and a warning sign of decline. But to put it more patriotically (in a specifically American sense of the word): according to my own perceptions and judgment this appears to be the case, and to further intensify this patriotic performance, I invite your opinion on this matter — because perhaps you disagree with me, and we have something to learn from one another by duking it out. Conflicts are opportunities to deliberate and actualize our nation.

If Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington were alive I’d love to get them involved, too, but they’re dead. Further, having been dead and out of the loop for centuries, they are all woefully uninformed on what’s going on in our times, and entirely unable to comment on what to do in a world where a single suitcase bomb can take out half a city, where electronic surveillance makes it more and more possible to efficiently spy on billions of individuals, where a single well-placed disturbance can collapse a fragile electronically-mediated global economy, where people do business with people on the other side of the Earth everyday, often anonymously or in vast aggregate, where an identity can be stolen and used… etc., etc., etc.

It is up to those of us who are still alive to follow the example of those who came before to take responsibility for shaping our future. And also to not follow them. We should always be re-founding. While we’re at it, I think we could benefit from some Founding Mothers. (I nominate Elizabeth Warren.)

To summarize: The USA not a cult. We’re a tradition founded on reason and sustained by the exercise of individual judgment.

Without thwarted lusts and transmuted animosities even the most powerful men would remain mere gods.

A corollary (added July 2): To the degree a man gains the capacity to lust and despise without constraint, he is free to devolve into a god.

[Note of explanation: I just finished reading a book on paganism written by a right-wing European thinker. This aphorism is a dig at him and his vigorous and stunted religiosity. These day, I’m trying to purge my vocabulary of romantic words like “gods”, “wisdom”, “spirit”, etc., out of loyalty to the realities they fail to represent. Please excuse this lapse.]

To use Levinas’s distinction, ontology is inquiry into being within a totality; metaphysics is inquiry into the being of infinity.

The two inquiries can be seen as “containing” one another in different senses, the former subjectively, the latter objectively. Ontology contains metaphysics within its subject — its manner of inquiring — because metaphysics can be seen as a category of being, but one that is understood to “overflows” or stands beyond contact (and certainly the grasp) of the mind. The “object” of metaphysics contains the object of ontology, in that every entity treated within ontology is also treated within metaphysics as a subset of some kind — an effect, manifestation, superstructure, etc. of metaphysics’s more primordial categories of being.

The enlarged wan is made of exactly 10,000 pixels.

The slippery slope argument is the slipperiest slope of all.

Applying it in a disagreement is like spraying the conversation with Teflon^®. Now it’s a question of which agreement is better, not where the right balance is…

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The slippery element in a slippery slope argument is the notion that political practices are governed solely by algorithmic mechanisms, and that human prudence is powerless to guide where the mechanisms take us or to control how fast and how far they go.

The very belief that prudence cannot exercise an effect means that it is factored out of discussions and is denied the ability to exercise its effect in deliberation.

We end up treating human affairs as engineering problems rather than the design problems they truly are.

Linear equations are geometric heuristics that approximate the outcomes of non-linear algorithms. I think.

Without ever meaning to, I’ve managed to collect a fairly large number of theoretical books with “method” in their titles: After Method, Beyond Method, Against Method, For and Against Method, Truth and Method.

What is interesting about all these books is that they equate method with algorithmic techniques for capturing, analyzing and evaluating data. And they seem to either ignore or underplay the non-algorithmic principles of practice. They seem to be in battle with vestiges of a modernism that has lost much of its predominance in the last decade. They’re all beginning to feel as historically situated as they almost unanimously admit they are.

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Having just been through a project with too little method, I have to admit that I prefer having a little too much method to having not enough.

But I’m becoming sensitive to the fact that this is not a uni-dimensional continuum. Method is a complex set of practices of different kinds. “Too much” usually means imposition of unhelpful algorithms, where “too little” means having insufficient heuristic guidance (to use Roger Martin’s deeply flawed but nevertheless hugely useful “knowledge funnel” framework. And the flaw is assuming 1) the knowledge autonomously “evolves” from heuristic to algorithm, when in fact these are separate dimensions of practice, and 2) that algorithm is always, or even usually, more desirable than heuristic.)

Some ways to anticipate the future:

• Identifying the salient facts and dynamics of the present and modeling their development.
• Diagnosing the present in terms of a stage of development in a predictable cycle.
• Intuiting how things are going and where they are heading.
• Being the first to experience and articulate something that others will soon experience.
• Being the first to acknowledge and articulate something everyone is experiencing but cannot or will not speak about.

Calculations, heruristics, hunches, sensitivity and courageous self-reflection all give us different kinds of access to the future.

Phil Spector did not mask his monstrous nature with romantic sweetness; we just don’t know what a monster’s face looks like.

Rationalism versus irrationalism is beside the point. What really matters is this: what is the scope of what can be achieved with rational thought?

Today, every reasonable person accepts that we cannot reason out what nature is and how it ought to behave and expect nature to conform to our conclusions. (However, through various combinations of skillful manipulation grounded in understanding and force we can compel nature to conform to our wishes.)

A smaller but still significant number of people accept that we cannot reason out what human beings are and how they ought to behave and expect actual human beings to conform to our conclusions. (However, as with nature, through various combinations of skillful manipulation grounded in understanding and force we can compel people to conform to our wishes.)

But these days I am having trouble believing even that reason alone can bring groups of people to agree on any important matter.

This is not to say that reason is dispensable. On the contrary, it is completely crucial. However, reason alone is not sufficient. To resolve important matters we cannot just speak knowledgeably about the matters in question (let alone speculate on them!), but involve the matter itself in our dialogue and give it a voice and interact with it. This is true of predominantly material questions, predominantly subjective questions, and questions involving combinations of material and subjective factors, which are far and away the most common and most important questions we face.

We must experiment together in collaboration with the very realities that are in question. To put it in business slang, we must “keep the reality in the loop.”

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Maybe dialogue is at its height when it comes to agreement not on truth itself, but on experiments that ought to be performed to determine an as-yet-undetermined truth.

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For many years we all thought experimentation was a cure for the disease of delusion, when in fact experimentation is a fitness regimen to grow and maintain agreement.

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Two forms of tyranny: rule of algorithm and rule of intuitive whim. The former reduces human beings to tools; the latter, toys.

This is not a condemnation of algorithms or of whims. It is a condemnation of either dominating the other. Freedom consists of interplay of algorithms and whims.

The world is overflowing with erudite loners with unique access to truth. They draw considerable strength from the tradition of disdaining tradition. Without this tradition they would be as solitary as they pretend to be, and would suffer the true consequences of isolation, which no human being can want.

Contexts exist where it is ethically required to adopt a positivist stance, epistemologically and methodologically — but never ontologically.

When he looked back on his disagreement, he no longer agreed with himself. But did he reverse his position? No: he agreed with his adversary still less.

Looking back on his disagreement, he no longer thought it was important. Does this mean he should have let it go? No: disagreement matters only when agreement has value.

Some apologies demand apology, but they must be eaten.

When you look at an eye you do not see its sight; to know what a thinker thinks is not the same as knowing his thought.