Category Archives: Hermeneutics

Chord: Love as hermeneutic device

Chord, Hermeneutics

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human:

Love as artifice. — Whoever wants really to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, or a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to avert his eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that he finds inimical, objectionable, or false. So, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start, and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new thing, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Once we have got that far, reason then sets its limits; that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, was just a device to entice the soul of a matter out into the open.

Rorty, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature”:

When I attribute inspirational value to works of literature, I mean that these works make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined. … Inspirational value is typically not produced by the operations of a method, a science, a discipline, or a profession. It is produced by the individual brush strokes of unprofessional prophets and demiurges. You cannot, for example, find inspirational value in a text at the same time that you are viewing it as the product of a mechanism of cultural production. To view a work in this way gives understanding but not hope, knowledge but not self-transformation. For knowledge is a matter of putting a work in a familiar context — relating it to things already known. … If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontexualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. Just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on — when first love has been replaced by marriage — you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation.

 

 

An autobibliobiography

ANT, Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Well, I tried to write about my books and how I want to prune my library, and ended up writing a history of my interests. I know there are loose ends, but I am tired of writing, so blat, here it is:

I used to have strict criteria for book purchases. To earn a place on my shelf (singular) a book had to be either a reference or a landmark. In other words, I had to see it as persistently valuable in my future, or it had to be valuable in my past as something that influenced me. My library was personal.

Somewhere along the way my library became more general. References grew to include whatever I imagined to be the basic texts of whatever subject I cared about. Landmarks expanded to include any book that housed some striking quote that I wanted to bottle up and keep. How did this happen?

When Susan met me, I owned one book, Chaos, by James Gleick. This book is the landmark of landmarks. Reading it was a major life event for me. It introduced me to two of the most crucial concepts in my repertoire. 1) nonlinear processes, and 2) Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions. I loved the philosophical fairytale of Benoit Mandelbrot discovering a radical new way of thinking, and then skipping from discipline to disciple, tossing out elegantly simple solutions to their their thorniest, nastiest, most intractable problems, simply by glancing at them through his magic intellectual lens. He’d give them the spoiler (“look at it like this, and you’ll probably discover this…”) and then leave the experts to do the tedious work of figuring out that he was exactly right. And I loved it that the simplest algorithmic processes can, if ouroborosed into a feedback loop, can produce utterly unpredictable outcomes. We can know the dynamic perfectly, and we can know the inputs feeding into the dynamic perfectly — but we are locked out of the outputs until the process is complete. And then factor in the truth that numbers, however precise, are only approximate templates overlaid upon phenomena! Nothing outside of a mathematician’s imagination is a rational quantity. And in nonlinear systems, every approximation, however minute, rapidly amplifies into total difference. I’d go into ecstasies intuiting a world of irrational quantities interacting in the most rational, orderly ways, producing infinite overlapping interfering butterfly effects, intimating a simultaneously knowable-in-principle, pristinely inaccessible-in-fact reality separated by a sheer membrane of truth-reality noncorrespondance. I used to sit with girls and spin out this vision of truth for them, serene in the belief I was seducing them. Because if this can’t make a girl fall in love, what can? I still hold it against womenkind that so few girls ever lost their minds over one of my rhapsodies. They were into other stuff, like being mistaken for a person capable of losing her mind over the beauty of a thought, or being someone who enchants nerds and compels them to rhapsodize seductively. There’s a reason for all of this, and it might be the most important reason in the world, though I must admit, it remains pristinely inaccessible to me and an inexhaustible source of dread-saturated fascination. (If you think this is misogyny, you don’t understand my religion. “Supposing truth is a woman — what then…?”)

After I got married, my book collection expanded, reflecting some new interests and enthusiasms: Buddhism, Borges, and stuff related to personality theory, which became my central obsession. Somewhere around 2001 or 2002 I also became a fan of Christopher Alexander’s psychology of architecture, and I had my first inklings of the importance of design. Incidentally, one of the books I acquired in this period was a bio of Alexander, characterizing his approach to architecture as a paradigm shift. This was my second brush with Kuhn.) Until 2003 my book collection still fit on a single shelf.

In the winter of 2003 in Toronto, Nietzsche happened to me. Reading him, fighting with him, and being destroyed by him, I experienced intellectual events that had properties of thought, but which could not be spoken about directly. It wasn’t like an ineffable emotion or something that couldn’t quite be captured in words. These were huge, simple but entirely unsayable truths. I needed concrete anchors — concepts, language, parables, myths, images, exemplars — anything that could collect, formalize, stabilize, contain or convey what I “knew”. This is when books became life-and-death emergencies for me, and sources of extreme pleasure. I couldn’t believe you could buy a copy of Chuang Tzu’s sayings for less than the cost of a new car. From 2003 to 2006 my shelf grew into a library. I accumulated any book that helped reinforced my intense but disturbingly incommunicable sense of truth — what I eventually realized was a faith.

But then the question of this inexplicable state of mind and its contents became a problem to me. What exactly is known? How is it known? Why think of it in terms of knowledge? If it cannot even be said, then how can it be called knowledge? And the isolation was unbearable. I was in a state I called “solitary confinement in plain sight” with in an overwhelming feeling of having something of infinite importance to get across, but I couldn’t get anyone to understand what was going on or to consider it important enough to look into. I got lots of excuses, arguments, rebuffs, cuttings-down-to-size, ridicule and promises to listen in some infinitely receding later, but I could not find any real company at all, anywhere. This was a problem I desperately needed to solve.

Richard J. Bernstein’s hermeneutic Pragmatism is what hoisted me out of this void and gave me back a habitable inhabited world, with his lauded but still-underrated classic Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Equipped with the language of pragmatism, hermeneutics, phenomenology and post-empiricism (Kuhn, again) I could account for my own experiences and link them to other people’s analogous experiences. Not only that — he began my reconnection with design, which had become a meaningless but necessary source of rent, food and book money. I was able to reengage practical life. But Bernstein’s method was intensely interpersonal, an almost talmudic commentary on commentaries ringing a missing central common text.

Richard J. Bernstein’s bibliography, however, was the flashpoint for my out-of-control library. Each author became a new collection. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and then eventually Latour, and then Harman and now Morton… etc. Geertz seeded an anthropology and sociology shelf, which is now a near-bursting book case. Hanna Arendt is a whole shelf, and spawned my collection of political books and my “CDC vault” of toxic ideologies. Gadamer and Heidegger were another space-consuming branch. Dewey, James and Peirce fill about three shelves. And Bernstein’s line of thinking led me directly to Buber, who also breathed fire into my interest in the research side of Human Centered Design (another half a case of books) and sparked a long process of conversion to Judaism (yet another half-case, and growing).

A bunch of these threads, or maybe all of them together drove me into Bruno Latour’s philosophy. Latour inflicted upon me a painful (and expensive) insight: Everything Is Important. Statistics, accounting, technologies, laws, bacteria, materials, roads. Therefore I must get books on everything, apparently. With this we finally ran out of room in my bookcases, them my library room, then our house. We had to get a storage space to cycle my out-of-season books into and out of again when I realize I must read that book right now. Susan just got a second space. I have books stacked up everywhere. I am a hoarder.

I am considering putting all these books back under review, and keeping only the books that fit those two original criteria. Is it a landmark for me? Is it a reference that I know I will use?

I cannot be everything, and I need to stop trying. I need things that help me stay me, and I need to shed the rest. Good design demands economy, tradeoffs, clarity of intent. I have a bad case of intellectual scope-creep. It is time to decide what is essential, and to prune away nonessentials so the rest can grow in a fuller way.

I have another half-written post I think I’ll finish now.

Drawing on every side of the brain

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

In high school, all my art teachers taught us to draw and paint the shapes our eyes “really” saw. We were discouraged from drawing the things we believed we were depicting — eyes, noses, vases, cow skulls, gourds, drapes — and encouraged instead to draw the shapes that were said to precede our objective interpretations. We did zillions of blind contour drawings. We drew and painted shapes instead of trying to model the dimensional forms we believed were there. It was an interesting experience. I learned to shift into a trancelike consciousness that made the visual world hyper-vivid, and disabled speech.

Toward the end of college I met a prickly teacher who demanded a different style from her class. Now we were to observe, analyze and model forms. She taught us methods for rendering various three-dimensional effects on flat plains, so we could translate the forms in space we learned to understand to what charcoal and paper could convey. It was an incredibly difficult shift, which I experienced as an undoing of years of skill development.

In the years after I did some other visual thinking development, but they were all remote from figurative drawing. I learned to compose pages and screens to aid in comprehending complex information. Shortly after college, I experimented with translating musical compositions into visual ones via the language of mathematical ratios. Most importantly, though, I developed an ability to collapse complexity into simple visual diagrams, which are tools for conceptualizing information, not only existing data, but for framing incoming data on an ongoing basis. They are visual hermeneutic tools. I philosophize visually first, and even when I translate the visuals into words, I keep wanting to retain the visual qualities, which might be why I’m tempted toward prosody. Not for the sake of sounds (or not primarily), but for the sake of structure. I want important thoughts to be expressed in linguistic crystals.

Now my job has me doing figurative drawing again, but in a style going driving me back further into those left-brained natural habits of seeing and drawing I worked so hard to break and replace in my teen years. Now I am sketching ideas with the goal of communicating complex ideas as simply as possible. It is somewhere between cartooning and writing in pictograms.

My life as a visualizer-thinker has led my on a tour through my brain and shown me how many ways we can bilateralize what we see and know.

Four sides to every conflict

Ethics, Hermeneutics, History, Judaism, Philosophy

In conflicts, there are four sides to every story: there is my side, there is your side, there is what I think your side is, and there is what you think my side is.

If you want to know a person’s soul, don’t be distracted by how that person represents himself in a conflict. You’ll learn far more about who he is listening to what he has to say about his enemy.

If you hear dark and incredible tales of depravity and deviousness, take extreme care. Being on the side of good, facing such enemies, the righteous man might be forced to do evil things to defend himself and his people. If he has foresight and strong resolve he might even take preemptive action in order to avert an inevitable catastrophe.

 

 

Why our ideas diverge

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

What are the personal differences that produce pluralism? Here’s a list off the top of my head:

  1. What is our stock of life experiences, which serve as points of reference and call for explanation?
  2. What is our schema of relevance (which determines what draws our attention and what remains unperceived)?
  3. What is our conceptual repertoire (which limits the questions we know how to ask, the answers we can conceive, and which ideas are inconceivable)?
  4. What are our prior conceptual commitments (which limit the range of philosophically acceptable answers to the questions we ask)?
  5. What questions do we habitually ask?
  6. When faced with competing criteria of theory choice, which are given relative precedence?
  7. What is our perplexity tolerance (which limits our appetite for novel questions and philosophically unacceptable answers)?
  8. How do we approach the unanswerable questions of metaphysics?

 

Slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions of interpersonal being

Anthropology, Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, History, Philosophy, Politics

Wow, this post really sprawled out. It hits a lot of my enduring interests. I’m not sure it is suitable for reading. It might just be a personal journal entry written to myself. Feel free to eavesdrop if you wish, but I cannot promise it will make sense or yield any value.

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I listened to a fascinating Radio Open Source podcast on Hannah Arendt’s conception of evil, which ended with a wonderful discussion on empathy.

Jerome Kohn: Empathy is a fancy word or fancy theory that she argued passionately against. First of all she thought it was an impossible notion in the sense that it really means feeling what someone else feels. Sympathy, fellow feeling, is another thing. But empathy is the claim that you can actually feel what someone else is feeling. And for that Arendt found no evidence whatsoever. One could say it’s even the opposite of her notion of thinking from another person’s point of view. What you have to be able to do is to see a given issue from different points of view, to make it real. And then through those different points of view, with your own eyes, you don’t feel what the other person is feeling, you see what he is seeing through your own eyes, and then you can make a judgement. The more people you can take into consideration in this enlarged mentality, that actually is the foundation of reality for Arendt, the more valid your judgement will be.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Jerry’s exactly right. Hannah Arendt was always opposed to these slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notions about what binds people to each other. And she felt very keenly that what really binds one person to another is a commitment to try to see the world from that person’s point of view with your own eyes. Not to subscribe to their point of view or to merge with their point of view, but to be able to walk around and see what the world looks like from where they’re standing. But looking at it with your own eyes, so that you can then, as it were, discuss it with them. Not merge with them in some way, but discuss it with them. She was all about discussion. Not empathy in that sentimental way.

Christopher Lydon (host): And yet, well, there are distinctions without huge differences in some way. To put oneself in another’s mind is the beginning of something important.

EYB: To think that you can put yourself in another’s mind in the beginning of a terrible arrogance which has tremendous consequences. It’s a difference with great consequences. People who think they that they can know what another person thinks or feel what another person feels are narcissistic.

CL: Well, ok, I don’t want to make a philosophical or an endless argument about it. Isn’t it the incapacity and the lack of interest in that perspective precisely what she found at the core of Eichmann’s banality and Eichmann’s evil, really?

JK: Well, no, it was his thoughtlessness, his inability to think from any other point of view but his own.

EYB: Exactly. And these are very important distinctions.

This exchange is especially interesting to me for three reasons.

First: as a Human Centered Design researcher/strategist/designer, I am constantly telling people that I am in the “empathy business.” However, I have long been uncomfortable with the characterization of what I do as “empathy”. To characterize understanding another person subjectively as primarily a matter of experiencing how they feel misses the mark in a very modernistic way. (em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’). While feelings are important to what I do, they are not the primary focus. I would prefer to characterize my work as concrete hermeneutics, but words like that do not fly in the flatlands of business where thinking lags a minimum of three philosophical generations. So, I’ve adopted “empathy” and accepted the inevitable misconceptions that go with it, because that’s what it takes to be understood even appoximately by most people.

It is hardly surprising that I see things similarly to to Young-Bruehl and Kohn, because I belong to their tradition. Heidegger taught Arendt and Gadamer who both taught my favorite thinker Richard J. Bernstein. A Clifford Geertz quote from Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism has stayed with me as an anchor for my understanding of what a good human centered designer does.

Second, I think that when we see things this way, we tend to treat emotionally-oriented people who are very sensitive and sentimentally responsive to people around them as having some kind of monopoly on human understanding. In my experience, there are multiple stages of coming to understanding of another person, and a talent for sensing and responding does not always correspond with a talent for intuiting other people’s worldviews, nor an ability to think, speak and create from or into another worldview. It takes a fairly vast range of talents to act pluralistically with any degree of effectiveness.

I think a lot of the political problems we are experiencing today result from shoddy and retrogressive philosophical conceptions of alterity (“otherness”), which still see understanding of other people as very literally empathic, as a matter of emotions. According to this view, to know what is going on with another person, we must ourselves have had the experiences and emotions that other person has had. In an effort to understand and to demonstrate our understanding we must induce emotions similar to theirs. Two consequences follow: 1) The one who understands must try to produce the right emotions, and this production of emotion is the demonstration of understanding, which leads to some fairly repulsive public displays of political sentimentality. 2) The one who is understood is put in a position of judging the authenticity of those emotional displays, which is more or less being given the role of arbitrary judge. And if the feelings of the understood is viewed as the central datum or a special kind of insight (being “woke”) into a political situation (typically gauging the degree of prejudicial unfairness, its impact on those victimized by that prejudice and what is required to rectify that unfairness) this amounts to extreme epistemological privilege. Only the victim of prejudice has access to the reality of the situation, and those who are not the victims are incapable of perceiving how they participate in the perpetration, so to use the charming the formulation of today’s hyper-just youngsters, it is their job to STFU and to accept the truth dictated to them. It never occurs to anyone within the power hierarchy of wokeness that there’s anything superior to all this illiberal mess to awaken to. There are philosophical worldviews that are more thorough, more comprehensive and more expansive than the dwarfish ideology of the popular left, but for all the reasons they are eager to point out to anyone who defies them, they are entirely incapable of seeing beyond the motivated reasoning of their own class interests. (This does not mean I think the popular right is any better. It is not. We are in a Weimaresque situation of resentful evil left idiocy vs paranoid evil right idiocy, with the reasonable voices shoved to the margins.)

Third, I’ve found myself misunderstood by many close friends on how I view relationships, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl did a great job of capturing how people think I see them: a “slurpy, mergy, touchy-feely notion about what binds people to each other.” I think the misunderstanding is rooted in this same conception of human understanding being primarily an emotional phenomenon. When my own ideal of marriage or of friendship is strained through the filter of today’s left worldview, it looks like a mystical merging of souls that arouses (and should arouse!) suspicions of domination and anxieties around loss of self. But any attempt I make to try to explain the difference between what I have in mind looks like, well, an attempt at philosophical domination and a threat to the selfhood of whoever is foolish enough to take it seriously. Who am I to tell someone something they don’t already know? And anyway, it smells very cultish to listen to someone claiming to know better than the public what is true and right. So, by the circular logic of the popular worldview of the left, it is superior to form one’s own individual opinion (never mind that this opinion on opinions is a product of an unexamined and manifestly broken worldview.)

Obviously, this means extreme alienation for anyone who adopts a sharply differing worldview that affirms the importance of collaboratively developing shared understandings with those around them. In an environment of extreme ideological conformity (with brutal social consequences for infractions) that exalts above all the importance of intellectual independence — but strictly within its own confined philosophical horizon — a philosophy of interdependence, of collaborative development of the very concepts one uses to form one’s opinions, and exalting a togetherness in shared worldview is marked for expulsion.

Anyway, what I really have in mind when I imagine ideal personal connections is, once again, that ideal sketched out by Bernstein, captured so well by Geertz, which I will now go ahead and re-re-quote.

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

And now I will quote myself:

“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

The kind of merging I have in mind is just sharing a worldview and using it together to live together, what Husserl (Heidegger’s teacher) called a “lifeworld“. I’ve called the process “enworldment”.

The merging aspect of this ideal enters the stage through my belief (shared, I believe by Process Theology) that souls are universe-sized. The pragmatic consequence of what one means when one says “everything” is the scope and density of one’s soul. To enworld* with another is to bring two “everythings” into harmonious relationship, and to begin to function more like a culture than two isolated individuals within this isolating milieu so many of us, without ever choosing, without even knowing we had a choice, inhabit as prisoners of our own destitute freedom.

(Note: that “enworld” link above is a pretty old post, and I’m not sure right now how much of it I still agree with. It makes me want to engage my old self in dialogue and try to discover how much common ground we have. How enworlded am I with my 9-years-ago self?)

Ancestors and siblings of process thought

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Extended Self, Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism, Symbols and diagrams

While I’m scanning passages from C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, here are two more that inspired me.

The first passage appeals to my designer consciousness:

Descartes was wrong in his basic dualism. The world is not composed of substances or of two kinds of substances. There is, however, what David Ray Griffin calls an “organizational duality.” Descartes was correct that rocks and chairs and other large physical objects do not have minds, while humans do. In Whiteheadian terms, rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them. In living organisms, however, there can be varying degrees to which the organism is structured to give rise to a single series of feelings that can function to direct the organism as a whole. We can see fairly clearly that at least higher animals like chimps and dogs have a psyche (mind or soul) chat is in many ways like our own. This psyche draws experience from the whole body (with varying degrees of directness and clarity), often crossing a threshold into some degree of consciousness, and is able in turn to use that awareness to direct the organism toward actions that help it to survive and achieve some enjoyment of life. The self, or soul, then is not something separate from the body. It arises out of the life of the body, especially the brain.

The mind/soul/psyche is the flow of the body’s experience. Yet your body produces a unique mind that is also able to have experiences reaching beyond those derived directly from the body. We can think about philosophy, love, mathematics, or death in abstract conceptual ways that are not merely physical perceptions. Without the body, there would be no such flow of experience, but with a properly organized body, there can be a flow of experience that moves beyond purely bodily sensation. Furthermore, your mind can clearly interact with your body so that you can move, play, eat, hug, and work. There is a kind of dualism here in that the mind is not only the body but it is, in Griffin’s phrase, a hierarchical dualism rather than a metaphysical one. There are not two kinds of substances — minds and bodies. There is one kind of reality — experience. But experience has both its physical and mental aspects.

To my ears, this is a beautiful dovetail joint waiting to be fitted to extended cognition. “Rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them” but if a human organizes those rocks in particular ways, for instance drilling and shaping them into abacus beads, or melting them down to manufacture silicon chips, those rocks can be channeled into extended cognitive systems which in a very real way become extensions of our individual and collective minds. It is ironic to me that even at this exact instance, in typing out this sentence, a thought is forming before my eyes with the help of rocks reorganized as silicon chips which are participating in the “having” of this very thought. And if anyone is reading this and understanding it, my thought, multi-encoded, transmitted, decoded and interpreted by your own intelligence — rocks have helped organize this event of understanding! Humans help organize more and more of the “inanimate” world into participants of experience.

And now we are wading out into the territory developed by Actor-Network Theory, which asks, expecting intricately branching detailed answers: How do humans and non-humans assemble themselves into societies? I think the commonality within these harmoniously similar thought programs is their common rootedness in Pragmatism. It is no accident that Richard J. Bernstein saw pragmatism as a constructive way out of  the unbridled skeptical deconstruction of post-modernism, and that Whitehead, who acknowledged a debt to Pragmatism, is said to offer a constructive postmodernism.

The second passage appeals to my newly Jewish hermeneutic consciousness. This is a quote by Whitehead:

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

This, of course, is a description of the hermeneutic circle, the concept that we understand parts in terms of the concepts by which we understand them, but that our concepts are often modified (or replaced) in the effort to subsume recalcitrant parts. We tack between focusing on the details and (to the degree we are reflective) revisiting how we are conceptualizing those details. These are the two altitudes Whitehead mentions: an on-the-ground investigation of detail and a sky-view survey of how all those details fit together.

This is an ancient analogy. The Egyptians made the ibis, an animal with a head like a snake (the lowest animal) and the body of a bird (the highest animal) the animal of Thoth, their god of writing, the Egyptian analogue to Hermes. Nietzsche also used this image in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and that is where I first encountered it.

An eagle soared through the sky in wide circles, and on him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a friend: for she kept herself wound around his neck. “These are my animals,” said Zarathustra and was happy in his heart. “The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun — they have gone out on a search. They want to determine whether Zarathustra is still alive. Verily, do I still live? I found life more dangerous among men than among animals; on dangerous paths walks Zarathustra. May my animals lead me!” When Zarathustra had said this he recalled the words of the saint in the forest, sighed, and spoke thus to his heart: “That I might be wiser! That I might be wise through and through like my serpent! But there I ask the impossible: so I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day — alas, it loves to fly away — let my pride then fly with my folly.”

And I have seen the Star of David as an image of the synthesis of atomistic ground-up and holistic sky-down understandings. And this is one reason I chose Nachshon (“snakebird”) as my Hebrew name when I converted to Judaism.

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(Eventually, I’ll have to try to connect process thought with my extremely simplistic and possibly distorted understanding of chaos theory. Eventually.)

Process Theology

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pragmatism

I’ve been poking around in several books on Process Philosophy/Theology to see if my own homegrown theology isn’t in fact some version of Process Theology. So far I’m finding some closely matching concepts. (Two big ones: Panentheism and “the lure”.) That is not surprising: it turns out Whitehead was influenced by Pragmatism (which not long ago I considered my religion). Process Theology appears to me to be the religious implication of Pragmatism.

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For awhile I’ve speculated that Fundamentalism is actually a religion of its own: a distinctive way to interpret scripture and to practice religion. Fundamentalisms are more like one another than they are to other denominations within the same religion. I’ve come to see Mysticism and Humanism as similarly connected. (Note Oct. 3: and the book I’m reading reminded me, also Scholasticism.) There is considerable similarity across Mysticisms and Humanisms (that is, attempts to fit religion inside the Enlightenment framework).  I’ve been calling them “lateral traditions”. I’m sure this is not a new concept, and when I find the language others are using to talk about this idea I’ll adopt it.

I believe Process Theology represents another lateral tradition.

Reading together

Hermeneutics, Judaism

Intimacy is made possible by shared experience.

Some tangible forms of shared experience are: shared language, shared history, shared spaces, shared relationships, shared institutions, shared customs, shared beliefs.

Less tangible, but perhaps even more crucial forms of shared experience are: shared understandings, shared interpretations, shared tastes, shared expectations.

One of the finest ways to achieve these latter shared understandings is the supremely inter-revelatory act of reading together.

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In Torah Study, the personalities gathered in the room sparkle against the ground of the text. Insight by insight, the flat black sky deepens into limitless space as it fills up with stars.

Secular mystic

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I told a rabbi that I am a “secular mystic”.

What do I mean by that? I see the transcendent realm as inexhaustibly understandable. The act of understanding incomprehensible phenomena increases our capacity to understand. The very increase that makes the understanding possible makes us aware of new incomprehensible phenomena (and with it, the limits of our understanding), re-arousing the need to understand.

I am most interested in the experience of these limits. This problem could probably be called “hermeneutical liminality” but these days I’m trying to find clearer, prettier and more pregnant language to express this kind of idea, which is precisely why I’m interested in religion. But I find that most people are so misaligned on what religion is and does that use of religious (or “spiritual”) vocabulary leads to instant misunderstanding. “Threshold” is pretty. Limbo? Border or boundary? For now, I’ll just call them “boundary experiences”.

What are boundary experiences like when we encounter them? How do we recognize them? What are their characteristics? What are our natural responses, and are other, better responses available to us? In other words, what are the ethical implications of boundary experiences? When do we keep going, and when do we stop? When and how do we involve others in boundary-crossings?

And then: where have boundary experiences been misunderstood? And what does that look like?

My hostility toward magic is bound up with this last question: what do misunderstandings of boundary experiences look like? What artifacts of such misunderstandings remain in our culture? My attitude toward magic has nothing to do with how it conflicts with science’s current view of the world (about which I am grossly under-informed, anyway) and everything to do with the functioning of religion. Magic forecloses religious questions, and removes intellectual tensions required for religious insight.

Again, Arthur C. Clarke’s famous maxim comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Or so it all appears to me right now, as I stand at the the threshold of Judaism. And one thing I’ve learned about thresholds is that something unexpected is always waiting in ambush — some unnoticed detail that changes everything.

Pluritarian Pluriversalism

Anthropology, Autobiography, 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.

Symmetrical egalitarianism

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Synesis

Can egalitarianism be disrespectful?

In some social contexts strict egalitarianism is the very embodiment of respect. An example of such a context is a gathering of equal peers deliberating on a shared problem. Each is understood by the others to hold an opinion of equal validity to his own. Each peer is entitled the same level of attention, the same time to speak and to be heard out and to be believed and also to be questioned. Of course, each participant has a personal opinion regarding the rightness and wrongness of opinions stated, but any expectation that others will give one’s own opinion more weight than any another’s undermines the equal peer relationship. Let’s call this symmetrical egalitarianism. 

In other social contexts, however, strict egalitarianism can be disrespectful. An example of this kind of context is a group of people gathered to discuss a specialized topic, where some members of the group have invested significant time, energy and resources to continually improve the quality of their beliefs in this area, where other members have not made the same level investment. The former have worked to become authorities on the topic at hand and the latter have not. (Imagine an accomplished physicist in conversation with a group of less experienced scientists, or even scientists who are accomplished in fields outside the one being discussed). In such situations, giving equal weight to each person’s opinion would insult the authority’s hard-won expertise. For one reason or another his work has failed to accomplish its goal of improving his understanding — that is, elevating his initial opinion to informed belief, reflective practice,  cultivated knowledge and refined judgment.

Why would an expert’s expertise be denied or ignored? Perhaps his field is not one where genuine knowledge is possible, and can never be more than a matter of opinion, where one person’s opinion is as good as another’s no matter how much work is invested in cultivating knowledge. Or perhaps the alleged expert has taken a bad approach, and has wasted years of effort following the wrong path further from the truth. Or perhaps the would-be expert has some personal flaw or limitation that has prevented him from acquiring real knowledge or has led him to aquire delusional opinions that only appear to him to be knowledge. Or perhaps the laypeople are convinced that genuine knowledge in the field necessarily and automatically leads an expert to an egaliarian attitude toward his own opinion: the superiority of his view consists in its paradoxical refusal to regard itself as superior, and any hint of judgment is a symptom of inferior knowledge.

This latter view actually has some validity. The world is stuffed with authoritarian experts who flash their credentials and demand submission to their authority. This ought to be resisted. No expert should require non-experts to obey without being persuaded by reason. This is non-egaliarian tyranny of experts. 

But what true experts ask for is not unconditional obedience or uncritical belief. What they ask for from others is patience and effort The expert needs time not only to express their views, but also to impart enough expertise that others have the context needed to understand and fairly assess the expert’s ideas. Let’s call this asymmertical egalitarianism — an egalitarianism that acknowledges equality of reason and judgment, but also acknowledges the realities of expertise and permits it conditions needed to be heard and understood.  

It is these conditions that symmetrical egalitarianism denies. From the point of view of symmetrical egalitarianism, the time and attention an expert requires to convey the background of his factual opinions is experienced as an unfair domination of a conversation. Each person is doled out the same quantity of time as everyone else, and this self-regarded expert is trying to take more than his share. 

But from the point of view of expertise, this symmetry creates an unfair asymmetry of means to convey meaning. The laypeople are given what they need to fully communicate their views, but experts — the very ones best informed on the topic at hand — are forced to provide their views without context, which means their views will seem obscure, pedantic or nonsensical compared to the down-to-earth practicality and plain speech of the regular guy, or they try to provide context and get cut off before their point is made. Symmetrical egalitarianism guarantees the common sense status quo view always prevails, and those in the room with genuinely unique and deeply considered views will be subjected to a Bed of Procrustes truncation that allows them to talk but denies them the means to be understood.

*

Incidentally, this symmetrical and asymmetrical egalitarian concept can be applied to other fields. For instance, in education symmetries of fairness are sometimes established on the basis of allocated resources, the right to reach some standard level of acheivement or to maintain some pace of improvement. These symmetries are often enforced at the expense  of subtler forms of fairness, such as the ability to actualize one’s own potential. Obviously, this creates deep problems, including problems of measurement and objectivity, but the depth of such problems does not warrant ignoring these problems as essentially insoluble, or worse (and most commonly) denying the problem’s existence altogether. 

Life on the complex plane

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics

IMG_0302

The image of the Mandelbrot set is a map — a 3rd person perspective survey — of Julia sets. But each image of the Julia Set is a 1st person perspective on the same space as that described by the image of the Mandelbrot set.

And each neighboring point in the Mandelbrot set describes the whole differently, sometimes subtly but sometimes drastically. This difference is unpredictable but somehow in retrospect unfailingly intuitively perfect.

Each Julia set is a subjective impression of the whole, processed according to an accident of birthplace, which resembles the whole to some degree, contains the whole, overlaps with it, but fails to trace it out with reliable accuracy.

What is the space in which the Julia and Mandelbrot sets are situated? It is called “the complex plane” — a two-dimensional space, with a continuum of real numbers extending horizontally, and a continuum imaginary numbers extending vertically.

The heart of the process that generates both sets is Zn+1=Zn2+C — with C being a real plus imaginary coordinates of the point in question. So, if the starting point is 0.1011 on the horizontal axis (the real numbers) and 0.9563 on the vertical axis (the imaginary numbers), C would be 0.1011+0.9563i.

In the generation of the Julia set, the Z jumps all over the complex plane painting a whole like a skillful painter developing a composition. In the generation of the Mandelbrot set, the image proceeds systematically, point by point —  a sociologist doing a study on how long painters take to complete their respective work. The plotter of the Mandelbrot set walks from painter to neighboring painter (from C to C, for instance from 0.1011+0.9563i to 0.1011+0.95630000001i ), stopwatch in hand, timing how long it takes for the painter to walk away from his canvas dripping paint into the infinite corners of the universe-heaven complex, or, alternatively descends into apparently interminable frittering refinement.

Depending on where the process starts, not roughly but infinitely precisely, the picture of the whole is potentially radically divergent, and it impossible to know where it will go and how it will conclude except by patiently tracing it out, much as it is impossible to know how we will be changed from an experience of learning except by living it out.

I’ve been thinking this thought for more than a decade, and occasionally saying bits of it here and there, but today I just needed to get it out.

Beyond fundamentalism and mysticism

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Fundamentalism is not religious extremism. It is not religion gone too far.

Fundamentalism is religion failing to happen. It is relationship to transcendent reality reduced to a set of defined things: facts, techniques, emblems, objects and social groups.

Of course, different denominations of Fundamentalism adhere to different things, but they all believe that religious “faith” consists of adherence to things, and they can’t see of what else a religion could possibly consist.

Religion begins when the limit of this vision is overcome, and then the limit of the consequent mystical vision is also overcome, and one plainly sees why love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. And maybe it starts beyond that, too, and if that is true, neighbor, your vision penetrates further than mine, and we need to talk.

The intrinsic conservatism of language

Hermeneutics

I starred the hell out of this footnote from Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Such unconscious sleight-of-hand, when practiced by men of Descartes’s boldness of imagination, is an occasion for gratitude rather than censure. No great philosopher has avoided it, and no intellectual revolution could succeed without it. In “Kuhnian” terminology, no revolution can succeed which employs a vocabulary commensurable with the old, and thus none can succeed by employing arguments which make unequivocal use of terms shared with the traditional wisdom. So bad arguments for brilliant hunches must necessarily precede the normalization of a new vocabulary which incorporates the hunch. Given that new vocabulary, better arguments become possible, although these will always be found question-begging by the revolution’s victims.

Hermeneutical/rhetorical bow

Design, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Symbols and diagrams

This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.

hr-bow

The intolerable span

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

If something is lacking in an organization, the deficit rarely persists from simple unavailability of whatever is missing. More often the deficit is actively maintained, either from a direct allergy or an indirect displacement.

*

People and organizations selectively include and exclude people, ideas, practices — this is how they preserve themselves as the being they are.

When something is introduced that cannot be simply subsumed or appended to what already is there — if a new entity requires deep change of political structure, of conceptual framing, of habits — the organization will repel that thing as a threat to its existence.

This is why organizational change is so hard. Organizations want to persist — to survive and grow and thrive in its own way, just like every individual biological organism wants to survive and grow and thrive.

And this is also how it is with individual souls. A soul knows in a wordlessly certain way that deep change is death. A soul can detect even the faintest trace of deep change in an idea.

*

A soul can find many ways to excuse itself. We lead very busy lives. The more important I am, the busier I am, and the more brusque I am permitted to be. The important man is allowed more and more to fend off anything new. This is why the weak get smarter and the powerful become more… conservative.

*

Of course, deep change is also ground-clearing for rebirth, but it is impossible to believe in such things: only faith suffices.

*

If you think you know something that another person needs to know, please understand: there is probably a good reason this person does not yet know.

If you think you have a talent or skill some other organization needs but does not have, please understand: there is probably a good reason this organization does not have this capability.

And if you have discovered a disruptive insight, do not be fooled into believing that people will be grateful for it. Do not be fooled into thinking that it is mere aversion to risk that makes people resist. Do not be fooled by any functionalist explanation: the aversion is instinctive fear of death: dread.

*

A bit from the book I am writing, The Ten-Thousand Everythings:

We resist deep change, not because we love the old or hate the new, but because of the intolerable span of dread that separates the old from the new.

*

Do you know it when you are confronting the dread of a truly new thing?

Do you know your way across the intolerable span?

Can you want to cross it?

3rd-place-mercury

 

Rethinking totalities

Hermeneutics

The problem with totalities is not that they are total — it is that totalities are so often reductive or aggressive.

*

The worst totalities are excessively inclusionary and exclusionary at the same time: kill and eat it, or get far, far away from it. Fight or flight, and nothing in-between.

*

Perhaps if we were to entertain totalities as subtotals, or treat horizons as something that can fall in a range between accidental and insubstantial artifact of standpoint and an impregnable wall we must faithfully tend and defend, we could enjoy some relative stability of identity with minimal aggression. Perhaps it is a matter of material — a permeable membrane or a transparent shell — or shape — a spiral or a circle with a mouth.

*

But actually — more and more I resist conceptualizing understanding in terms of horizons. Horizons are seen, and entities are seen against horizons and put in perspective through a vision. This whole family of analogues promotes an ocular notion of knowledge.

Some knowledge is of things known at a distance, but much of knowledge is kinesthetic and/or participatory. As much as eye-awareness dominates hearing-awareness, both positively obliterate touch-awareness, scent- and taste-awareness, and these obliterated awarenesses are primary faculties in philosophy.

*

Common sense was originally not “what everybody believes in common” but rather that sense of reality that arises from interpreting and synthesizing all sense data. The conflation of these two very different meanings into a single word is a symptom of deep philosophical naivety.

More symptomatic distortions: “materialism”, “idealism”, “realism”, “pragmatism”, “paradigm shift”, “experience”…

The mundane world has an uncanny appetite for words it cannot digest, a need to grip in its stumpy little fingers what is ungraspable. It can’t understand it, and it won’t understand it — yet, it cannot leave it alone. It’s like a young boy overwhelmed by his first crush…

He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to “show off” in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. . . . He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, “showing off,” as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

 

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

*

“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

*

Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

*

Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.

 

 

Latour on false religion

Hermeneutics

Finally, someone says it: Fundamentalism is not “religion gone too far”, but the betrayal of religion.

Until now, I’ve been arguing against characterizing Fundamentalism as “extremist” forms of various religions (for instance, Christianity taken to extremes of strictness and intensity becomes Fundamentalist), but in fact a single religion with denominations defined by which host religion the fundamentalism has infested and perverted (so Islamic Fundamentalism is the same religion as Christian Fundamentalism, but outfitted with different forms) — but perhaps even affording Fundamentalism the status of a religion might be giving it too much credit.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to characterize Fundamentalism as a pathologically inadequate and blasphemous modernist philosophy assembled from words stolen from religion.

Fundamentalism is what results when a thoroughgoing modernist willfully assigns truth to  religious texts and traditions that are entirely incomprehensible from the modernist perspective. Instead of allowing the truth(s) of a text to be revealed to the reader as transfiguring insights, the text (a mass of words) itself is taken as the revealed thing, and faithfulness to this revelation is understood to mean adhering to the first interpretation (the “self-evident” meaning) arrived at by a mind trapped inside modernism. Of course, the consequent absurdities resulting from this ludicrous method makes sincere belief — that which we cannot help but take for true — impossible. This is where “faith” enters the stage: all opinions on what is to be regarded as true or false is labored out by the mechanics of explicit ideology, and the output (the Belief) is prioritized over the spontaneous beliefs that arise from reflective lived experience.

Anyway, here’s Latour’s take:

…This phenomenon [of religion] is not defined by an original type of subsistence, of risk, but, on the contrary, by an often desperate quest for substance, guarantees, some substratum. For those who use the term “religion” are really appealing to another world! And this is exactly the opposite of what we are trying to identify. There is no other world — but there are worlds differently altered by each mode. The fact that people speak tremulously of “respecting transcendence” hardly encourages the ethnologist to take this phenomenon seriously, since she sees quite clearly here the wrong TRANSCENDENCE, the one that has IMMANENCE as its opposite rather than its synonym. What is so disagreeable in the appeal to the “supernatural” is that the “natural” is accepted in the same breath. And if someone speaks, in hushed tones, of “spirituality,” we are warned that a peculiar idea of “materiality” has just been swallowed whole. Why should our investigator be concerned with those who raise their eyes toward Heaven to speak ill of the things of the Earth, of “rampant materialism,” of “humanism”: what do they know about matter, reason, the human?
What passes for religion today can offer only a particularly discouraging avatar of the quest for immobility, for the incontrovertible, the supreme, the ideal. Some have gone so far as to take religion as a quest for the absolute, and even as a nostalgic portal to the beyond! Religion turned into a “rampart against relativism” and a “supplement of soul” against the “secularization” and the “materialism” of “the world here below”! No targeting mistake is more spectacular than this one. Really?! All those treasures of intelligence and piety only to end up with this? Thousands of years of uninterrupted translations, continual variations, prodigious innovations, to end in a quest for foundations? How can anyone be so mistaken as to worship these false gods?

Even if she steps completely out of her role, the indignant investigator no longer even dares to call such a perversion a category mistake. “Heresy” would be a euphemism; should she speak of category horror? How puerile they seem to her, the ancient confusions between Yahweh and Baal or Moloch! The idolators would never have dared confuse their God with an undistorted transport, an immobile motor, an uncreated substance, a foundation: at least they knew that one could not institute Him without a path of alterations, interpretations, mediations. Fetishism is only a peccadillo alongside the idolatry in question here: the replacement of the religious by its exact opposite, the confusion of the relatively holy with the impious absolute. And this blasphemy is uttered in the temples themselves, at the heart of the churches, before the tabernacle, from the pulpit, under the wings of the Holy Spirit! Where are the prophets who could have spewed forth their anathemas against these pollutions, these ignominies, these abominations? Where are Jeremiah’s tears, Isaiah’s lamentations?

No, if the investigator wants to hold onto her sanity, she has to look for the religious outside the domain of religion. She has to hypothesize that what is called “the return of the religious” manifests only the return of FUNDAMENTALISM. And we can understand why. Incapable of situating multiform values in institutions made for them, reactionaries of various stripes fall back on an ersatz solution that seems superficially to “defend the values” — by placing them out of reach!