Category Archives: Philosophy

Alive to craft

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Religion

Most of our making is construction. We build systems of meaningful units, glued together with logic and causality.

We do precious little craft.

In fact, we do not even know what craft means.

We are dead to craft.

Because we are dead to craft, the material world is dead to us.

We are cursed with a midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to word. On contact with our skin, words to turn to more words — words about words — entire universes of words — packing inward, denser and denser, within our word stuffed suits.

We cannot touch the world. We cannot feel anything against our skin, except the texture of text. Words have woven themselves around us, webs, cobwebs, soul mummies, whited cocoons.

We can speak fluently about galaxy clusters, theories of relativity, subatomic particles, but we have to sit down with a computer to figure out what love is. We understand how things happen in supercolliders, distant laboratories, radio telescopes, but our own kitchen table, and the things sitting on and around it? It is all inscrutable epiphenomena.

Walter Benjamin quoting Stanley Eddington, made this same point:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

Bruno Latour, crypomarian ethnographer of Sciencestan, said this:

When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-fulfilling, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as being local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.

…

Religion does not even attempt to race to know the beyond, but attempts at breaking all habits of thoughts that direct our attention to the far away, to the absent, to the overworld, in order to bring attention back to the incarnate, to the renewed presence of what was before misunderstood, distorted and deadly, of what is said to be “what was, what is, what shall be,” toward those words that carry salvation. Science does not directly grasp anything accurately, but slowly gains its accuracy, its validity, its truth-condition by the long, risky, and painful detour through the mediations of experiments not experience, laboratories not common sense, theories not visibility, and if she is able to obtain truth it is at the price of mind-boggling transformations from one media into the next.

What is it to be alive to craft?

How does the world feel on our fingertips when we remove the thick mittens that control our hand movements?

We feel what material suggests. We are medium. We, our instruments, the being coming are fused in medium.

My eye, my hand, the pencil in my hand, the vibration of pencil tip against paper tooth, that trace of graphite my pencil leaves, the form on the paper, the urge for a line here, a shading there, my eye and my heart — they are inseparable. Words, memories, stray emotions drift about discreetly. They know not to get in the way. Something comes into being through the work, among the converging materials, borne on media.

An unknown goal draws the present toward its desire. This is how it is to craft.

In craft we are alive to reality. In this state, we receive reality, take it in, incorporate it, grateful for what is given. We finally know that we do not need much, only a handful, but this handful makes us and the world real. Without that, there is nobody present to possess a retirement fund the size of the entire S&P.

Do you feel the unreality of what you take for life? Do you suspect you are living in a simulation? Entertain the reality that it is true. You are living a simulation — and this lingering suspicion is your last tenuous contact with reality.

Our being streams out into the world around us. Every soul is nebula-shaped and its ethereal arms radiate to the ends of the cosmos. The world streams into us, and its tendrils convey light and life from oblivion, the benevolent mask of infinitude. The streams crisscross, interweave, and each brightly knotted nexus is someone.

A Service is not a tree

Design, Philosophy, Pluricentrism

Reading Christoper Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree” I am realizing the extent to which a service, also, is not a tree, — and the extent to which we, service designers try to force them into tree-structures.

Alexander’s signature move, dating from his earliest work, is what I would characterize as polycentralizing design: identifying the multiple centers and fields of activity, noting where the fields overlap and interact, and how these overlapping fields are embodied and changed — most notably, vivified, strengthened, weakened or killed — by physical form.

Alexander’s eternal enemy is orders that abstract and simplify the complexity of life, and design structures reflecting this simplified abstraction, that are intended only to support this partial understanding, and end up severing vital connections that allow built environments to live.

Why is it that so many designers have conceived cities as trees when the natural structure is in every case a semilattice? Have they done so deliberately, in the belief that a tree structure will serve the people of the city better? Or have they done it because they cannot help it, because they are trapped by a mental habit, perhaps even trapped by the way the mind works — because they cannot encompass the complexity of a semilattice in any convenient mental form, because the mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception?

I shall try to convince you that it is for this second reason that trees are being proposed and built as cities — that is, because designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act.

More to come…

Math weirdness

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy

I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.

It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.

I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)

I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.

It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.

The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.

My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.

An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:

James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.

When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.

All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.

I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.

For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.

In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.

Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.

There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.

I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.

I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.

I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.

ASCII sigil

Esoterism, Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil, Wheel

The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.

+O(

  1. Plus sign: The four directions. Earth.
  2. Letter O: Cyclical life. Man.
  3. Open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.

The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!

It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.

This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.

Intellectual sacrifice

Everso, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:

Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.

My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.

In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.

Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.

Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.

Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)

But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.

In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”

Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.

Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.

Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.

I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.

I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.

I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.

If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.

The fruit is restored to its orchard.

Returning to some enworldment design themes

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Extended Self

I’ve said it before, but why not say it again? Take this as attention sustained for decades — as evidence of an enduring soul…

A better distinction than technology (or artifice / artificiality) versus natural is what we experience as natural versus what we experience as unnatural. That turns it into a matter of design quality. What artifice lends itself to second-naturalness, and what stays unnatural? We’ve used fire and language for so long they seem like part of nature to us. What other artifices can we add to the world to make the addition — and the world — and ourselves feel natural?

This standard, by the way, pushes Liz Sanders’s classic useful / useable / desirable framework to new levels of aspiration.

Useful is not only just having needs met. Useful means reducing or eliminating unnatural-feeling tasks required to meet our needs, or to change tasks into more natural and meaningful ones. “Do it for me, or allow me to do it myself in a less painful, more meaningful way.”

Usability is not just a matter or reducing frustrations, but also the need to figure things out at all. The goal is to make natural extensions of our thinking, our perceiving and our doing. “Afford me direct intuitive connect with the world.”

Desirability is not merely about aesthetics or entertainment, but about affirming what makes us love the world and our own lives together. “Inspire me to feel more value and more gratitude for our life.”

Intro to a philosophy of design of philosophy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

Premise:

Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change.

But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest to protect. This is intrinsic to philosophical work.

This inability to explain and protect — even to gain personal clarity on what is happening — prevents designers from securing the conditions needed to do design’s most important work. And it impedes design’s expansive development into new fertile regions.

“What?” you might say at this point, “I don’t recall doing philosophy at work.”

Most have some notion of what a philosophy is. According to Wilfred Sellars, “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.” Let us adopt this as our definition of philosophy, as thing, as noun.

But far fewer of us understand philosophizing as an activity. We understand it so little — or worse, misunderstand it so much — that we do not recognize what is happening when we find ourselves in a philosophical problem. We imagine that doing philosophy is like arguing or constructing a theory or indulging in abstract speculation. These, however, are merely using a philosophy to do thinking — to produce complex thought systems. Any designer knows, using a tool and making a tool are different matters.

Philosophy means immersing in a philosophical problem, of the form, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it “I don’t know my way about.” Which is to say it is not even yet a problem and what it lacks is precisely form. That is, it is an aporia, a perplexity, also known in the field of design as a wicked problem.

But simply naming it is not the same as knowing it. It locates it on a map, but it does not convey how it is to be in the place depicted on the map. It presents it objectively, in a comfortable third-person perspective. But philosophical problems a subjective crises, experienced from inside it, from the first-person. And this experience is not merely uncomfortable or ambiguous. They are often uncanny, unnerving, infuriating and excruciating. And not when the process is going wrong. They are this way precisely when they are going right.

But people hate this feeling. They feel hellish heat, and if they are in a position to do so, shut down the kitchen.

Design is hard to do because philosophy is hard to do, and we lack norms to help us discern healthy pain (like morning sickness, labor pains, growing pains) from unhealthy pain (infection, malnutrition, organ failure, death pangs). As soon as any pain happens, out comes the anesthesia, anti-anxiety medicine, quarantine, scalpels — whatever makes it go away. And as with many ill-chosen medical interventions, the pain is not alleviated; it is exchanged for some variety of numbness, and often some future health failure. It is not dealt with, head-on and directed toward recovery of health, much less growth and flourishing.

Promise:

By understanding the role philosophy does play and can play in design, design can escape the tyranny of misnorms (application of the wrong set of norms to a situation, which prevent the situation from developing toward improvement), and work more effectively in its current spheres of activity, and, better, expand this its domain to areas where other ways of working have failed to produce positive change, or even failed catastrophically and made matters worse.

Anatomy of a shattered soul

Philosophy

Show me a calendar with each day bricked up solid with hour and half-hour meetings, and I will show you a vivisected soul.

Our souls are made out of attention. That attention has scope, density and duration, and these grow together, shrink together, deteriorate together, shatter together.

A person who is unable to sustain attention longer than 30 minutes, who is forced to shift focus dozens of times a day, cannot maintain a self.

That person will slip between selves each day and each week, and year over year it will self-estrange. By the time it has become a perfect stranger to itself, it will lack the enduring presence to notice.

Anomalogy, vertiphor, symbol

Philosophy

To what may we compare infinitude? To what can we, within the all-inclusive exteriorless One, make comparison with One?

An analogy compares two like things, side by side. “This is like that, in this specific way.” It is metaphoric.

An anomalogy compares someness to Allness. “This is both of, but exceeded by This, in an inconceivably universal way.” It is vertiphoric. It is a species of symbol.

I object!

Philosophy

I object to the idea that absolute truth is objective.

I refuse to be subjected to this unacceptable and arbitrary constraint!

I am vexed by the unconscious prejudice  that knowledge is a system of defined convex entities locally and causally connected with one another, like words in a sentence, or parts in a machine.

I will not cave on this point!

(I’m a granddad. Suffer and like it.)