Category Archives: Hermeneutics

Thou dialectic

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas

Everything I do is guided by and serves one moral principle: a person is to be understood and related to as a Thou. A person is not to be  merely or even primarily understood as an object.

To attempt to understand another person objectively is to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

However, to attempt to understand another person without the help of objectivity is also to misunderstand what understanding a person is.

The scientific attitude and the romantic attitude misunderstand what understanding another person is.

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The objectifying scientific attitude and the radically subjective attitude that characterizes romanticism together constitute an antithesis which has been steadily attacked and weakened over the last century and which (I am convinced) is breathing its last putrid breaths. (Nothing wrong with dramatizing things, ok?)

The two attitudes fail to see how an unconscious agreement (a shared determinate ignorance, a cognitive process that is unaware of its own operation) has drawn them into to an intractable conscious disagreement.

It is impossible to find agreement within the terms to which the two sides are unconsciously bound, and they are blind to the possibility of an alternative.

The only possible positions either side can conceive fall on a linear continuum of impure compromises between two pure and antithetical principles. Whatever is not the thesis or its antithesis is understood to be an equivocating ambithesis.

When someone trapped in this kind of ignorance wishes to be principled, he is “uncompromisingly” either-or, wholeheartedly throwing his support behind either the thesis or the antithesis. When he wants to appear politic, circumspect and socially wise it starts talking about “shades of gray”. (After all, you’re either an unrealistic purist or someone who understands the necessity of compromise and occasionally taking it up the tooter.)

At all times, however, all conceptions brainlessly obey the limiting terms of the underlying unconscious agreement, both in the schema of the theory and in practice.

The process of illuminating such forms of shared determinate ignorance, and in the process discovering new possibilities of resolving the issue that fall entirely outside the terms of the old disagreement is called dialectic. One discovers a point of view that opposes the old opposition and unites them in their common limitation, and opens up previously inconceivable options, often also outside the point of contention.

Here is how I’ve been drawing the structure of dialectic. White is the thesis, black is the antithesis and the red is the dialectic overcoming of the dichotomy, which is a new thesis:

dialectic

Two problems I’ve had with this diagram. 1) Once the old dichotomy fades from relevance a new one forms as a new antithesis forms against the new thesis, and the process repeats. This diagram accurately represents the delusion of the finality of the overcoming (to which some people believe Hegel succumbed), but the whole purpose of dialectic is to overcome this delusion, so the representation must be regarded not as a feature, but a bug. There is no indication that the process will continue, and this indication is essential. 2) Thesis and antithesis are not equal. A fundamentalist and an atheist argue over the existence of a ludicrously misconceived “God”… both are ignorant of other possible conceptions, but it is far more respectable to disagree with a fundamentalist than to be one. The atheist is philosophically superior to the fundamentalist, but both are philosophically inferior to someone who knows other possibilities of knowing God. And of the two, the atheist is closer to that realization than the fundamentalist who mistakes himself for religious and is therefore more closed to lines of questioning that can overcome his ignorance. (AND! — by the way, the limitation of both is that they have failed to grasp the being of Thou, which closes them off not only to the being of God, but also to the being of other people, which brings us back to my original point.) So, the thesis, though not true enough, does at least bear some resemblance to the larger truth, where the antithesis is simply a negative indication: this resemblance is not enough.

For these reasons, from now on, at least until I know better, I am going to draw the structure of the dialectic differently, on the golden section, and also I’m going to draw the antithesis as gold because I like how that looks:

Golden Dialectic

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But what is the determinate ignorance shared by scientism and romanticism? Neither recognizes the role of tradition in selfhood. I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this soon.

Meanwhile, here’s something to think about:

The only way to know an Other as Other — as Thou — is to enter into dialogue and consequently come to see the world differently.

Dialogue -> Metanoia -> Synesis -> Tradition -> Community


Still stuck! (Gadamer)

Hermeneutics

The density of crucial insights in the passage below is staggering…

Consciousness of being affected by history is primarily consciousness of the hermeneutical situation. To acquire an awareness of a situation is, however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it. We always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished. This is also true of the hermeneutic situation — i.e., the situation in which we find ourselves with regard to the tradition that we are trying to understand. The illumination of this situation — reflection on effective history — can never be completely achieved; yet the fact that it cannot be completed is due not to a deficiency in reflection but to the essence of the historical being that we are. To be historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete. All self-knowledge arises from what is historically pregiven, what with Hegel we call “substance,” because it underlies all subjective intentions and actions, and hence both prescribes and limits every possibility for understanding any tradition whatsoever in its historical alterity. This almost defines the aim of philosophical hermeneutics: its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it.

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth. Since Nietzsche and Husserl, the word has been used in philosophy to characterize the way in which thought is tied to its finite determinacy, and the way one’s range of vision is gradually expanded. A person who has no horizon does not see far enough and hence over-values what is nearest to him. On the other hand, “to have a horizon” means not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it. A person who has an horizon knows the relative significance of everything within this horizon, whether it is near or far, great or small. Similarly, working out the hermeneutical situation means acquiring the right horizon of inquiry for the questions evoked by the encounter with tradition.

In the sphere of historical understanding, too, we speak of horizons, especially when referring to the claim of historical consciousness to see the past in its own terms, not in terms of our contemporary criteria and prejudices but within its own historical horizon. The task of historical understanding also involves [NOTE: notice, it involves, but is not exhausted by…] acquiring an appropriate historical horizon, so that what we are trying to understand can be seen in its true dimensions. If we fail to transpose ourselves into the historical horizon from which the traditionary text speaks, we will misunderstand the significance of what it has to say to us. To that extent this seems a legitimate hermeneutical requirement: we must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. We may wonder, however, whether this phrase is adequate to describe the understanding that is required of us. The same is true of a conversation that we have with someone simply in order to get to know him — i.e., to discover where he is coming from and his horizon. This is not a true conversation — that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject — because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person. [NOTE: I cannot overstate the importance of this point. Psychologism, all excessive concern for abstract “selves” divorced from concrete practical life, is pseudo-intimacy. Its hidden purpose is in fact to fend off genuine authentic intimacy, which is experienced in change of one’s own world, which is to say deep self-change. Psychologism is an attitude of spiritual self-preservation — not of continuity of life-process, but of static form. It is the mummification or pickling of the soul in self-image.] Examples are oral examinations and certain kinds of conversation between doctor and patient. Historical consciousness is clearly doing something similar when it transposes itself into the situation of the past and thereby claims to have acquired the right historical horizon. In a conversation, when we have discovered the other person’s standpoint and horizon, his ideas become intelligible without our necessarily having to agree with him; so also when someone thinks historically, he comes to understand the meaning of what has been handed down without necessarily agreeing with it or seeing himself in it.

In both cases, the person understanding has, as it were, stopped trying to reach an agreement. He himself cannot be reached. By factoring the other person’s standpoint into what he is claiming to say, we are making our own standpoint safely unattainable. [NOTE: Historical consciousness and psychologism both reduce the I-Thou relationship proper to its subject of inquiry to the terms of I-It, objective, eidetic, “earth yao” terms. This is practical solipsism — imposing one’s own sole I on everything within its purview — whether or not it also formally asserts theoretical solipsism.] In considering the origin of historical thinking, we have seen that in fact it makes this ambiguous transition from means to ends — i.e., it makes an end of what is only a means. The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim to be saying something true. We think we understand when we see the past from a historical standpoint — i.e., transpose ourselves into the historical situation and try to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth that is valid and intelligible for ourselves. Acknowledging the otherness of the other in this way, making him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth.

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“Interpretation”

If I read me, then I read into me:
I can’t construe myself objectively.
But he who climbs consuming his own might
bears me with him unto the brighter light.

– Nietzsche, from The Gay Science

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It seems time to repost one of my favorite songs, “The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure”.

Gadamer – “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”

Hermeneutics, Ideas

I am having problems getting through this chapter of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, “Prejudices as Conditions of Understanding”. This is one of those chapters where I’ve underlined and starred the margins of 85% of the text. Every paragraph presents a mind-blowing insight, which means I’m immediately compelled to apply that insight to a million problems outside of the book, which means I stop reading. (This is my personal test of a book’s awesomeness: Does the book fling me out of its pages into life?)

It’s always interesting to reread the same physical book, and to see how my own patterns of underling has shifted. This chapter was practically clean from the last reading, which I guess means I didn’t find it all that exciting. It is tangible proof of progress, or at least change.

The following passage may not make a lot of sense outside the context of the book, but I want to post it anyway.

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That subsequent understanding is superior to the original production and hence can be described as superior understanding does not depend so much on the conscious realization that places the interpreter on the same level as the author (as Schleiermacher said) but instead denotes an insuperable difference between the interpreter and the author that is created by historical distance. Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history. … . Not just occasionally but always, the meaning of a text goes beyond its author. That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well. Perhaps it is not correct to refer to this productive element in understanding as “better understanding.” For this phrase is, as we have shown, a principle of criticism taken from the Enlightenment and revised on the basis of the aesthetics of genius. Understanding is not, in fact, understanding better, either in the sense of superior knowledge of the subject because of clearer ideas or in the sense of fundamental superiority of conscious over unconscious production. It is enough to say that we understand in a different way, if we understand at all. [Note: This is why in active listening, the understander must not repeat back or synonymically paraphrase back what one has heard, but must interpret and apply what one has heard and submit this interpretive application to the judgment of the understood, aka validate it.]

Such a conception of understanding breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics. Since we are now concerned not with individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth. That this is what is meant by “understanding” was once self-evident (we need only recall Chladenius). But this dimension of the hermeneutical problem was discredited by historical consciousness and the psychological turn that Schleiermacher gave to hermeneutics, and could only be regained when the aporias of historicism came to light and led finally to the fundamentally new development to which Heidegger, in my view, gave the decisive impetus. For the hermeneutic productivity of temporal distance could be understood only when Heidegger gave understanding an ontological orientation by interpreting it as an “existential” and when he interpreted Dasein’s mode of being in terms of time.

Time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in the light of which everything handed down presents itself to us. Here it is not too much to speak of the genuine productivity of the course of events. Everyone is familiar with the curious impotence of our judgment where temporal distance has not given us sure criteria. Thus the judgment of contemporary works of art is desperately uncertain for the scholarly consciousness. Obviously we approach such creations with unverifiable prejudices, presuppositions that have too great an influence over us for us to know about them; these can give contemporary creations an extra resonance that does not correspond to their true content and significance. Only when all their relations to the present time have faded away can their real nature appear, so that the understanding of what is said in them can claim to be authoritative and universal.

In historical studies this experience has led to the idea that objective knowledge can be achieved only if there has been a certain historical distance. It is true that what a thing has to say, its intrinsic content, first appears only after it is divorced from the fleeting circumstances that gave rise to it. The positive conditions of historical understanding include the relative closure of a historical event, which allows us to view it as a whole, and its distance from contemporary opinions concerning its import. [Note: This reminds me of a Rilke quote I’ve posted a million times before, which I will post again below.] The implicit presupposition of historical method, then, is that the permanent significance of something can first be known objectively only when it belongs to a closed context — in other words, when it is dead enough to have only historical interest. Only then does it seem possible to exclude the subjective involvement of the observer. … It is true that certain hermeneutic requirements are automatically fulfilled when a historical context has come to be of only historical interest. Certain sources of error are automatically excluded. But it is questionable whether this is the end of the hermeneutical problem. Temporal distance obviously means something other than the extinction of our interest in the object. It lets the true meaning of the object emerge fully. But the discovery of the true meaning of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. Not only are fresh sources of error constantly excluded, so that all kinds of things are filtered out that obscure the true meaning; but new sources of understanding are continually emerging that reveal unsuspected elements of meaning. The temporal distance that performs the filtering process is not fixed, but is itself undergoing constant movement and extension. And along with the negative side of the filtering process brought about by temporal distance there is also the positive side, namely the value it has for understanding. It not only lets local and limited prejudices die away, but allows those that bring about genuine understanding to emerge clearly as such.

Often temporal distance can solve question of critique in hermeneutics, namely how to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand. Hence the hermeneutically trained mind will also include historical consciousness. It will make conscious the prejudices governing our own understanding, so that the text, as another’s meaning, can be isolated and valued on its own. Foregrounding a prejudice clearly requires suspending its validity for us. For as long as our mind is influenced by a prejudice, we do not consider it a judgment. How then can we foreground it? It is impossible to make ourselves aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed, but only when it is, so to speak, provoked. The encounter with a traditionary text can provide this provocation. For what leads to understanding must be something that has already asserted itself in its own separate validity. Understanding begins, as we have already said above, when something addresses us. This is the first condition of hermeneutics. We now know what this requires, namely the fundamental suspension of our own prejudices. But all suspension of judgments and hence, a fortiori, of prejudices, has the logical structure of a question.

The essence of the question is to open up possibilities and keep them open. If a prejudice becomes questionable in view of what another person or a text says to us, this does not mean that it is simply set aside and the text or the other person accepted as valid in its place. Rather, historical objectivism shows its naivete in accepting this disregarding of ourselves as what actually happens. In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk. Only by being given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to truth and make it possible for him to have full play himself.

The naivete of so-called historicism consists in the fact that it does not undertake this reflection, and in trusting to the fact that its procedure is methodical, it forgets its own historicity. We must here appeal from a badly understood historical thinking to one that can better perform the task of understanding. Real historical thinking must take account of its own historicity. Only then will it cease to chase the phantom of a historical object that is the object of progressive research, and learn to view the object as the counterpart of itself and hence understand both. The true historical object is not an object at all, but the unity of the one and the other, a relationship that constitutes both the reality of history and the reality of historical understanding. [Note: The past is a Thou!] A hermeneutics adequate to the subject matter would have to demonstrate the reality and efficacy of history within understanding itself. I shall refer to this as “history of effect.” Understanding is, essentially, a historically effected event.

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Rilke: “A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

Circles

Hermeneutics, Ideas

Black Elk:

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

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Gadamer:

We recall the hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole in terms of the detail and the detail in terms of the whole. This principle stems from ancient rhetoric, and modern hermeneutics has transferred it to the art of understanding. It is a circular relationship in both cases. The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole.

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Nineteenth-century hermeneutic theory often discussed the circular structure of understanding, but always within the framework of a formal relation between part and whole — or its subjective reflex, the intuitive anticipation of the whole and its subsequent articulation in the parts. According to this theory, the circular movement of understanding runs backward and forward along the text, and ceases when the text is perfectly understood. This view of understanding came to its logical culmination in Schleiermacher’s theory of the divinatory act, by means of which one places oneself entirely within the writer’s mind and from there resolves all that is strange and alien about the text. In contrast to this approach, Heidegger describes the circle in such a way that the understanding of the text remains permanently determined by the anticipatory movement of foreunderstanding.

The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding but, on the contrary, is most fully realized. The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves. Thus the circle of understanding is not a “methodological” circle, but describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.

The circle, which is fundamental to all understanding, has a further hermeneutic implication which I call the “fore-conception of completeness.” But this, too, is obviously a formal condition of all understanding. It states that only what really constitutes a unity of meaning is intelligible. So when we read a text we always assume its completeness, and only when this assumption proves mistaken — i.e., the text is not intelligible — do we begin to suspect the text and try to discover how it can be remedied. The rules of such textual criticism can be left aside, for the important thing to note is that applying them properly depends on understanding the content.

The fore-conception of completeness that guides all our understanding is, then, always determined by the specific content. Not only does the reader assume an immanent unity of meaning, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning that proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said. Just as the recipient of a letter understands the news that it contains and first sees things with the eyes of the person who wrote the letter — i.e., considers what he writes as true, and is not trying to understand the writer’s peculiar opinions as such — so also do we understand traditionary texts on the basis of expectations of meaning drawn from our own prior relation to the subject matter. And just as we believe the news reported by a correspondent because he was present or is better informed, so too are we fundamentally open to the possibility that the writer of a transmitted text is better informed than we are, with our prior opinion. It is only when the attempt to accept what is said as true fails that we try to “understand” the text, psychologically or historically, as another’s opinion. The prejudice of completeness, then, implies not only this formal element — that a text should completely express its meaning — but also that what it says should be the complete truth.

Here again we see that understanding means, primarily, to understand the content of what is said, and only secondarily to isolate and understand another’s meaning as such. Hence the most basic of all hermeneutic preconditions remains one’s own fore-understanding, which comes from being concerned with the same subject. This is what determines what can be realized as unified meaning and thus determines how the foreconception of completeness is applied.

Thus the meaning of “belonging” — i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity — is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices. Hermeneutics must start from the position that a person seeking to understand something has a bond to the subject matter that comes into language through the traditionary text and has, or acquires, a connection with the tradition from which the text speaks. On the other hand, hermeneutical consciousness is aware that its bond to this subject matter does not consist in some self-evident, unquestioned unanimity, as is the case with the unbroken stream of tradition. Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness; but this polarity is not to be regarded psychologically, with Schleiermacher, as the range that covers the mystery of individuality, but truly hermeneutically — i.e., in regard to what has been said: the language in which the text addresses us, the story that it tells us. Here too there is a tension. It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between.

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Try this out: What if the formerly-much-jabbered-about (* see note)  “Post-Modern Condition” is essentially the widespread breakdown of any “fore-conception of completeness” possessed at any level by our society. Because of our passive stance toward meaning (that it is to be discovered, not made, as if these two constitute some kind of absolute dichotomy!) since there’s no truth to be discovered, we resign ourselves to utter intellectual and practical fragmentation.

My view: the point of understanding is not to form an adequate picture of the “truth out there.” The purpose of understanding — of synesis, that twofold together — is to, by way of coming to (authentic) agreement on what is “out there” we create meaningful social solidarity: culture.

We seek truth for the sake of truth, in the same way we have sex to have sex. Babies are the side-effect of our intentions and the hidden telos.

Truth is social, and for precisely that reason, we must take truth seriously, which means to be rigorously non-reductive. By that I mean we cannot continue to identify truth with “objectivity”. It’s killing us.

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For your listening enjoyment: “Circles” by the Who and by Camper Van Beethoven.

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* Note: If we’ve stopped talking about postmodern fragmentation and disorientation it’s for the same reason we’ve stopped talking about modernist themes of alienation, nihilism, loss of faith — we no longer have any sense that a non-alienated, non-nihilistic, faithful might be possible, let alone preferable. We’ve never experienced having to contrast with not-having, so not-having is indistinguishable from reality itself.

The hermeneutical-rhetorical circle

Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

As a user experience practitioner, it is interesting to me that the hermeneutical circle (the movement between whole and part that characterizes the process of understanding) originated in ancient rhetoric. The privilege of my profession is that we get to stand on both sides of meaning, as understanders (in the mode of researchers) and as creators of things to be understood (in the mode of designers), and best of all, we get to iteratively connect the two modes. (I’m picturing the infinity symbol: we research understandings, we design things to be understood, we research understandings of our designs, we redesign… etc. )

It seems everything we do in user experience wants to be iterative. (* See note.) I don’t think this is an accident. I think it is because we are in the understanding business, and iterativity is the form of understanding.

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An idea to try on: user experience strategy/design as a species of rhetoric. Pan-sensory, interactive rhetoric. (I’ve been enjoying the perversity of using words revaluated by Gadamer to express benevolent thoughts as villainously as possible. This one falls short of the last example of the pattern, characterizing brand as “prejudice design”. )

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In his wonderful book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis Richard J. Bernstein made a very interesting criticism of Gadamer: that Gadamer did a good job of outlining a theory of hermeneutics, but in regard to practice he left us hanging.

My view is that experience design can be a practical extension of Gadamer’s thought, and in fact is following a semi-conscious trajectory toward this point. It’s always exciting to find new ways to integrate my philosophical mornings and my professional days.

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(* Note: Conversely, much of the friction we experience in the world of business seems to center around the flattening of circularities. Business likes predictability, so it likes nice straight lines. Non-linearity is innately unpredictable.)

A nonclarifying clarification of Birth of Tragedy

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Despite all appearances, the star of the Birth of Tragedy is Hermes. Hermes is implicated in the union of Dionysus and Apollo in tragedy, and is the primary object of the study. Further, Hermes is the subject of the study, the author.

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Imagine a herm with the face of Dionysus on one side and the face of Apollo on the other.

Such fusions are made possible by and manifest Hermes. Without Hermes, the realities of the world would be as numerous, as various and and irreconcilable as the myriad eyes of the giant, Argos.

A face is made possible by and manifests Apollo. Without Apollo, there could be no objects of intention: consciousness would dangle in a state of “conscious of…?” Even on the other side,  the question of “who is conscious?” is detached and unresolvable.

Hermes is the ethical face of Dionysus: the “outwarding” of what is purely “inward” (to use a common but misleading dichotomy), the inward being what would remain if one could subtract the sum from the whole of this reality we share and call the world.

Aesthetic differentiation

Brand, Hermeneutics

Gadamer on the Romantic/modern conception of aesthetics:

The shift in the ontological definition of the aesthetic toward the concept of aesthetic appearance has its theoretical basis in the fact that the domination of the scientific model of epistemology leads to discrediting all the possibilities of knowing that lie outside this new methodology [“fiction”!].

Let us recall that in the well-known quotation from which we started, Helmholtz knew no better way to characterize the quality that distinguishes work in the human sciences from that in the natural sciences than by describing it as “artistic.” Corresponding positively to this theoretical relationship is what we may call “aesthetic consciousness.” It is given with the “standpoint of art,” which Schiller first founded. For just as the art of “beautiful appearance” is opposed to reality, so aesthetic consciousness includes an alienation from reality — it is a form of the “alienated spirit,” which is how Hegel understood culture (Bildung). The ability to adopt an aesthetic stance is part of cultured (gebildete) consciousness. For in aesthetic consciousness we find the features that distinguish cultured consciousness: rising to the universal, distancing from the particularity of immediate acceptance or rejection, respecting what does not correspond to one’s own expectation or preference.

We have discussed above the meaning of the concept of taste in this context. However, the unity of an ideal of taste that distinguishes a society and bonds its members together differs from that which constitutes the figure of aesthetic culture. Taste still obeys a criterion of content. What is considered valid in a society, its ruling taste, receives its stamp from the commonalities of social life. Such a society chooses and knows what belongs to it and what does not. Even its artistic interests are not arbitrary or in principle universal, but what artists create and what the society values belong together in the unity of a style of life and an ideal of taste.

In contrast, the idea of aesthetic cultivation — as we derived it from Schiller — consists precisely in precluding any criterion of content and in dissociating the work of art from its world. One expression of this dissociation is that the domain to which the aesthetically cultivated consciousness lays claim is expanded to become universal. Everything to which it ascribes “quality” belongs to it. It no longer chooses, because it is itself nothing, nor does it seek to be anything, on which choice could be based. Through reflection, aesthetic consciousness has passed beyond any determining and determinate taste, and itself represents a total lack of determinacy. It no longer admits that the work of art and its world belong to each other, but on the contrary, aesthetic consciousness is the experiencing (erlebende) center from which everything considered art is measured.

What we call a work of art and experience (erleben) aesthetically depends on a process of abstraction. By disregarding everything in which a work is rooted (its original context of life, and the religious or secular function that gave it significance), it becomes visible as the “pure work of art.” In performing this abstraction, aesthetic consciousness performs a task that is positive in itself. It shows what a pure work of art is, and allows it to exist in its own right. I call this “aesthetic differentiation.”

Whereas a definite taste differentiates — i.e., selects and rejects — on the basis of some content, aesthetic differentiation is an abstraction that selects only on the basis of aesthetic quality as such. It is performed in the self-consciousness of “aesthetic experiences.” Aesthetic experience (Erlebnis) is directed towards what is supposed to be the work proper — what it ignores are the extra-aesthetic elements that cling to it, such as purpose, function, the significance of its content. These elements may be significant enough inasmuch as they situate the work in its world and thus determine the whole meaningfulness that it originally possessed. But as art the work must be distinguished from all that. It practically defines aesthetic consciousness to say that it differentiates what is aesthetically intended from everything that is outside the aesthetic sphere. It abstracts from all the conditions of a work’s accessibility. Thus this is a specifically aesthetic kind of differentiation. It distinguishes the aesthetic quality of a work from all the elements of content that induce us to take up a moral or religious stance towards it, and presents it solely by itself in its aesthetic being.

Blind to darkness

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Taoism

A question can be seen as a kind of intellectual darkness waiting to be illuminated by an answer.

Philosophy is not about illuminating darkness. It is about turning one’s head and making visible new regions where darkness and light can exist to one who asks and answers. It is about discovering new questions one has never thought to ask. And when the answers change the character of one’s spontaneous (pre-interpreted) lived existence — when the changes are authentically subjective, meaning the change is experienced as a transfiguration of the world (as opposed to a modification of one’s psychological attributes or one’s opinions about this or that fact, however fundamental that fact is) — philosophy crosses over its line into religion.

Where the sciences answer darkness with light, religion answers with vision questions philosophy raises from blindness.

*

As long as a science or philosophy does all its own asking and answering it remains sterile. Fertility requires otherness.

*

The best seem to speak only to their own kind. Nobody else understands them.

What is the cause of this, and what is the effect? Nobody understands because nobody wishes to understand. But, maybe the wish to understand has never been awakened simply because they haven’t been asked to understand. For sure, the wish to understand doesn’t want to wake up — but who ever thanks someone for waking them when they’re trying to sleep?

*

Calling someone a scientist’s scientist or an artist’s artist or a musician’s musician — this is usually considered a complement. I hope someday soon it will be considered a devastating criticism.

Are there any poets left who are not poet’s poets?

*

Collective solipsism is not much better than individual solipsism.

There are even forms of collective solipsism that encourage individual solipsism.

*

Years ago I knew someone who insisted that there is no essential difference between the understanding of a technical manual and understanding a poem.  This failure to distinguish between different orders of understanding makes knowing what a self is impossible. It reduces subjectivity to psychological terms — that is, it forces subjectivity into objective thought-forms. This failure always has a peculiarly moral character — it seems to originate in need rather than incapacity. Perhaps it originates in the fear of a need.

*

Sight knows only what is visible. Experience knows only what has been experienced.

*

Negation does not produce the negative. If negation is possible, the negative is already gone. Philosophy has already occured and cannot be undone. Innocence is irretrievably lost.

Samsara

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Phenomenology

The modern confusion of objective knowledge with knowledge in general causes us to reject knowledge we cannot account for in objective terms. Or worse, it leads us to reject knowledge in general in order to legitimize our non-objective sense of life, which we cannot recognize as knowledge.

What is needed is not a choice of one or the other, but a way to relate objective knowledge to its non-objective counterpart, and this means relating to it and through it until one finally apprehends its ground by way of comprehension of its forms.

This does not happen on the terms of objectivity. There is a rejection of a kind in regard to objective knowledge, but what is rejected is not objectivity, but its apparent fundamental nature.

*

(The question must be answered empirically, but the answer won’t be empirical.)

*

The world is not a deception. The deception lies in what the world is taken to be. If the world is taken at face value, acceptance or rejection of what has been taken is equally meaningless: one has been taken.

*

Scientism — science as metaphysic — is a species of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the locked foyer of genuine religion. The solution is not to annihilate the foyer door, but to unlock it. To unlock it we have to look in our hands and recognize the key as a key.

Hegel on practical transcendence

Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Hegel’s introduction to Phenomenology of Mind contains a description of what I have been calling practical transcendence:

This dialectic process which consciousness executes on itself — on its knowledge as well as on its object — in the sense that out of it the new and true object arises, is precisely, what is termed Experience. In this connection, there is a moment in the process just mentioned which should be brought into more decided prominence, and by which a new light is cast on the scientific aspect of the following exposition. Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

In this treatment of the course of experience, there is an element in virtue of which it does not seem to be in agreement with what is ordinarily understood by experience. The transition from the first object and the knowledge of it to the other object, in regard to which we say we have had experience, was so stated that the knowledge of the first object, the existence for consciousness of the first ens per se, is itself to be the second object. But it usually seems that we learn by experience the untruth of our first notion by appealing to some other object which we may happen to find casually and externally; so that, in general, what we have is merely the bare and simple apprehension of what is in and for itself. On the view above given, however, the new object is seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself. This way of looking at the matter is our doing, what we contribute; by its means the series of experiences through which consciousness passes is lifted into a scientifically constituted sequence, but this does not exist for the consciousness we contemplate and consider. We have here, however, the same sort of circumstance, again, of which we spoke a short time ago when dealing with the relation of this exposition to scepticism, viz. that the result which at any time comes about in the case of an untrue mode of knowledge cannot possibly collapse into an empty nothing, but must necessarily be taken as the negation of that of which it is a result — a result which contains what truth the preceding mode of knowledge has in it. In the present instance the position takes this form: since what at first appeared as object is reduced, when it passes into consciousness, to what knowledge takes it to be, and the implicit nature, the real in itself, becomes what this entity per se, is for consciousness; this latter is the new object, whereupon there appears also a new mode or embodiment of consciousness, of which the essence is something other than that of the preceding mode. It is this circumstance which carries forward the whole succession of the modes or attitudes of consciousness in their own necessity. It is only this necessity, this origination of the new object — which offers itself to consciousness without consciousness knowing how it comes by it — that to us, who watch the process, is to be seen going on, so to say, behind its back. Thereby there enters into its process a moment of being per se, or of being for us, which is not expressly presented to that consciousness which is in the grip of experience itself. The content, however, of what we see arising, exists for it, and we lay hold of and comprehend merely its formal character, i.e. its bare origination; for it, what has thus arisen has merely the character of object, while, for us, it appears at the same time as a process and coming into being.

 

Hegel haters

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

The objections to Hegel I’ve heard so far fall into three categories.

  1. Hegel is an obscurantist. The empty nonsensicality of his thought is concealed by his misuse of language and his needlessly convoluted arguments.
  2. Hegel lacked cohesive vision (synesis), and attempted to compensate for this deficiency through theoretical systematization. This is a view Nietzsche seems to have held.
  3. Hegel lacked awareness that his apparent final actualization of the potential of thought was only apparent. He lacked knowledge of the properties of what postmodernist thinkers call “horizon”.

It is hard for me to take the first two objections seriously. It seems to be a cynical choice to blame the author for one’s own failure to understand a work as it was meant to be understood. Instead of pursuing an understanding of the work as it was meant to be understood, Hegel himself is reduced to the status of an object of inquiry, something to observe and diagnose from an exterior vantage point. This sort of self-excusing from true hermeneutical reading (a dialogical reading that recovers the emic spirit in which the work was produced) justified by the belief that the author is a charlatan or an ideologue puts the reader in danger of listening like an ideologue, imposing his own limited fore-understanding on material that exceeds his philosophical reach, making transcendent understanding entirely impossible.

The third objection seems possibly valid. If the objection is valid, though, the question must be asked: is Hegel now refuted? or is he simply sublated, and paradoxically affirmed?

*

Early Nietzsche seems strongly influenced by Hegel, and it has been his more Hegelian passages I’ve liked best.

Answers are easy

Hermeneutics

Before you answer, worry a little: Are you so smart that you see the answer? or are you so stupid that you can’t see the question?

*

By the time you have recognized the existence of the problem, identified its nature, and formulated the problem as a question the actual answering of the question is trivial.

The worst problems remain troublesome because the problem’s question has been poorly asked.

*

One of my favorite quotes, from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.”

*

Knowing one’s way about is being oriented by a clear question.

Notes on emic versus etic

Design, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

In “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding” Clifford Geertz outlines a fundamental concept of anthropology:

The formulations have been various: “inside” versus “outside,” or “first person” versus “third person” descriptions; “phenomenological” versus “objectivist,” or “cognitive” versus “behavioral” theories; or, perhaps most commonly, “emic” versus “etic” analyses, this last deriving from the distinction in linguistics between phonemics and phonetics — phonemics classifying sounds according to their internal function in language, phonetics classifying them according to their acoustic properties as such.

Some thoughts:

  1. The precise meaning of the suffix “-icity” (at least when applied to existential terms) has been unclear to me. The problem has been in that no-man’s-land between registering the presence of light anxiety and actually doing something to relieve it. I know what each -icity word means (facticity, historicity, scientificity, etc.), I just wouldn’t have been able to explain to someone else what it means. The resolution turns out to be fairly simple. The suffix -icity indicates the root is to be considered from an emic perspective. X-icity mean X considered as an interiorized existential condition (which conditions exteriorized facts), rather than as a simple exteriorized fact. (Example: History is the record of past events. Historicity is being inside history as a participant, where each historic moment is understood to have its distinctive way of seeing history, and based on this historic vision, making new history. This condition affects an entire sense of reality, holistically.)
  2. Holism is a quality of the emic, and atomism is a quality of the etic. According to the hermeneutical circle, there is never an etic fact (a part) that is not articulated from an emic whole (a fore-understanding).
  3. Only the etic is quantifiable. The emic as such is discussable strictly in qualitative terms. The emic, however, since it generates an etic vision of reality (in phenomenological terms, its intentionality) will produce quantifiable entities. Attempting to grasp the emic in etic terms (such as statistics) is the factual and moral mistake of behaviorism.
  4. Epistemology knows only the etic. Mysticism and poetry tends to treat the etic primarily as a vehicle for indicating an emic vision. Phenomenology understands the etic in terms of the emic. Hermeneutics understands the interplay between etic and emic and attempts to navigate by etic triangulation other emic visions. Pragmatism might be applied hermeneutics to cultural ends. (Despite the name, pragmatism is much stranger than many showier forms of philosophy. Ever notice how the serious druggies try to look as normal as possible?)
  5. Buber’s I-Thou relationships regards the other as essentially emic. In I-it the other is regarded as essentially etic.
  6. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the practice of listening. It’s not primarily a matter of being considerate and letting the other talk (though that’s certainly a part of it). Real listening requires the entire battery of philosophies I listed above. Listening is inviting the other’s emic vision. One must allow the other to say what he is trying to say and to hear it without trying to force it into one’s own emic schema by stripping out its emic structure (that is, pattern of significance), retaining only its etic content. Then the listener must attempt to apply that structure concretely to his own experience in an attempt to show the other his understanding of what he has heard, and he must be open to the possibility that he has misunderstood. This restatement stage of listening, though, can be non-receptive and aggressive and be used to channel the speaker away from his emic vision toward the vision of the listener. (This is the hardest part of interviews: not asking leading questions or offering leading restatements that derail and rechannel, distort or otherwise damage the emic vision of the interviewee.)
  7. Subjectivity properly understood is emic, but it is so commonly misunderstood to be some kind of interior dimension of a more solid/concrete/real etic world that “subjectivity” has become ruined for all practical communicate purposes. On the contrary, it is the etic that is interior to the emic. The emic “interiority” of each other in our environment is in fact partially shares but largely transcends our own emic and etic vision.

Tree cross (alt palette)

Christian cred

Etymology, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams, Synesis, Taoism

Think about these statements:

“Bear with me.”
“Please hear me out.”
“It will all make sense in the end.”

Why are these requests necessary? When are they made?

To what feeling in the listener is the speaker responding?

What kind of appeal is being made? Do we owe it to another to give him a full hearing?

When is the appeal denied? Is it a matter of credibility?

What is the experience of denial?

*

To read the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament is to experience the most pluralistic religious vision ever recorded, from the most accutely and radically pluralistic people who ever lived. In what other scripture is the same story is recounted three different times from the point of view of three different people? It would have been easier and more obvious to collapse them into one univocal account, but instead the three experiences, three meaningful visions were presented together in a three-in-one synopsis – syn– (together) –opsis (seeing). [* See note 1 below]

I like to think of pluralism as a kind of parallax vision, that allows us to see hyper-dimensionally. With one eye you see a flat picture. With two eyes working in concert we see depth. Our so-called “inner eye” draws out the dimension of meaning. With a pluralistic synopsis we see meaning together – we share meaning and have community. We gain understanding, which the Greeks called synesis.

*

By the time Jesus began teaching his distinctively Jewish universal vision of life, the Jewish tradition had survived and overcome numerous cultural crises. They had dominated and been subjugated, had won their home and lost it. They knew belonging and alienation, and they knew both sides of power.

Most importantly they knew that knowledge of experience means to know an experience from the inside. Experiencing is inseparable from that which is experienced, and this means, to use a common visual analogy, that  experience is inseparable from its vision, as how the world looks from that experience. (One of my favorite Jewish thinkers, Edmund Husserl called this “intentionality”: seeing and seen are inseparable, as are hearing and sound, feeling and sensation, etc. [* See note 2 below].)

The Jews knew better than anyone that power is something that can be seen, but even more, it is a way of seeing – of life and the world as a whole. Power has its own kind of vision. When an emperor sees himself, or his court, or a rival power, or he looks upon a conquered enemy or slave, that emperor sees something radically different than the slave regarding the same situation. Power is something different, powerlessness is different. A palace, a body, a tree, a poem… everything is the same in a sense, but things are deeply different. The same goes for a stranger, expat, wanderer, outcast or outcaste.

Out of necessity, the Jews had to develop a way of preserving themselves as a tradition within these conditions. That meant living on a line between provoking attacks from the outside and simply dissolving from cultural self-indifference or self-disgust. They had to internalize their strength. They had to find dignity in their vulnerability to escape the indignity of weakness.

There was no way such a response to such a universal problem was going to stay contained within a small ethnic tradition forever. Whether it was Jesus or Paul, somehow the radical insights of Judaism went universal.

*

A series of words derived from the Latin word credere, “believe, trust”:

  • Credit
  • Credential
  • Credence
  • Creed
  • Credo

A series of words derived from the Old English word agan, “believe, trust.” :

  • Own
  • Owe
  • Ought (originally past tense of “owe”)

A series of words derived from Latin auditor, from audire, “to hear”:

  • Audit
  • Audition
  • Auditorium
  • Auditory
  • Audio

*

An example of divergent accounts from two of the Synoptic Gospels (which some scholars believe were adapted from yet another lost Gospel, “Q”, possibly a compendium of sayings similar to the (in)famous Gospel of Thomas).

These two passages are taken from Jesus’s famous Lord’s Prayer, his instructions on how to pray.

Matthew 6:12: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Luke 11:4: “And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

In Matthew 6:12, the Greek word used was opheilema. [* See note 3 below.]

In Luke 11:4, the Greek word was hamartia, which means literally “missing the mark”.

*

Out of time. Darn. I’ll finish this post if there’s any interest. [* See note 4 below.]

—-

* NOTE 1:  To call the New Testament inconsistent as some atheists do is to miss the point. To argue over which meaning is the right meaning as the fundamentalists do is to betray the point. To behave as though a plurality of possible meaning implies that all meanings are equivalent and that it is meaningless to discuss them… to go skeptical on that basis, and to ask cynically, rhetorically “what is truth?”… to wash one’s hands of the responsibility to engage dialogically in pursuit of understanding… that’s complicity in the conflict.

* NOTE 2:  Intentionality in Husserl’s sense is a core religious insight, expressed in a variety of forms, from the Jewish Star of David, to the Chinese yin-within-yang and yang-within-yin, to the Greek Janusian herms (with Hermes’s head fused to the head of a goddess, often Aphrodite), to the Hermetic hermaphroditic Androgyne, male on the right, female on the left, sun on the right, moon on the left. Listen for the inside-outside symbolic structure and you’ll find it everywhere. This capacity to hear and understand the form-language of symbol is what I believe is meant by “having ears that hear.”

* NOTE 3: Opheilema seemed like it might have a connection with the name “Ophelia” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if there was an etymological connection. According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Ophelia’ itself was either uncommon or nonexistent; the only known prior text to use the name (as “Ofalia”) is Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia.” It seems fairly obvious the name is a combination of opheilema and philia, love – “love debt” – love unrequited.)

* NOTE 4: Etymology of “interest”: ORIGIN late Middle English (originally as interess): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important,’ from inter– ‘between’ + esse ‘be.’ The -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss,’ apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important.’ Also influenced by medieval Latin interesse ‘compensation for a debtor’s defaulting.’

Primacy of dialogue

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

Bernstein:

… the notion of dialogue has been present from the very beginning of Gadamer’s discussion of play as the “clue to ontological explanation.”

 

When one enters into a dialogue with another person and then is carried further by the dialogue, it is no longer the will of the individual person, holding itself back or exposing itself, that is determinative. Rather, the law of the subject matter is at issue in the dialogue and elicits statement and counterstatement, and in the end plays them into each other.

A conversation or a dialogue is

a process of two people understanding each other. Thus it is characteristic of every true conversation that each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such an extent that he understands not a particular individual, but what he says. The thing that has to be grasped is the objective rightness or otherwise of his opinion, so that they can agree with each other on the subject.

In a genuine dialogue or conversation, what is to be understood guides the movement of the dialogue. The concept of dialogue is fundamental for grasping what is distinctive about hermeneutical understanding.

… Gadamer, in his analysis of dialogue and conversation, stresses not only the common bond and the genuine novelty that a turn in a conversation may take but the mutuality, the respect required, the genuine seeking to listen to and understand what the other is saying, the openness to risk and test our own opinions through such an encounter. In Gadamer’s distinctive understanding of practical philosophy, he blends this concept of dialogue, which he finds illustrated in the Platonic Dialogues, with his understanding of phronesis. But here, too, there are strong practical and political implications that Gadamer fails to pursue. For Gadamer’s entire corpus can be read as showing us that what we truly are, what is most characteristic of our humanity is that we are dialogical or conversational beings in whom “language is a reality.” According to Gadamer’s reading of the history of philosophy, this idea can be found at the very beginning of Western philosophy and is the most important lesson to be learned from this philosophic tradition in our own time.

But if we are really to appropriate this central idea to our historical situation, it will point us toward important practical and political tasks. It would be a gross distortion to imagine that we might conceive of the entire political realm organized on the principle of dialogue or conversation, considering the fragile conditions that are required for genuine dialogue and conversation. Nevertheless, if we think out what is required for such a dialogue based on mutual understanding, respect, a willingness to listen and risk one’s opinions and prejudices, a mutual seeking of the correctness of what is said, we will have defined a powerful regulative ideal that can orient our practical and political lives. If the quintessence of what we are is to be dialogical — and if this is not just the privilege of the few — then whatever the limitations of the practical realization of this ideal, it nevertheless can and should give practical orientation to our lives. We must ask what it is that blocks and prevents such dialogue, and what is to be done, “what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now” to make such genuine dialogue a concrete reality.

*

Buber:

The chief presupposition for the rise of genuine dialogue is that each should regard his partner as the very one he is. I become aware of him, aware that he is different, essentially different from myself, in the definite, unique way which is peculiar to him, and I accept whom I thus see, so that in full earnestness I can direct what I say to him as the person he is. Perhaps from time to time I must offer strict opposition to his view about the subject of our conversation. But I accept this person, the personal bearer of a conviction, in his definite being out of which his conviction has grown — even though I must try to show, bit by bit, the wrongness of this very conviction. I affirm the person I struggle with: I struggle with him as his partner, I confirm him as creature and as creation, I confirm him who is opposed to me as him who is over against me. It is true that it now depends on the other whether genuine dialogue, mutuality in speech arises between us. But if I thus give to the other who confronts me his legitimate standing as a man with whom I am ready to enter into dialogue, then I may trust him and suppose him to be also ready to deal with me as his partner.

But what does it mean to be ‘aware’ of a man in the exact sense in which I use the word? To be aware of a thing or a being means, in quite general terms, to experience it as a whole and yet at the same time without reduction or abstraction, in all its concreteness. But a man, although he exists as a living being among living beings and even as a thing among things, is nevertheless something categorically different from all things and all beings. A man cannot really be grasped except on the basis of the gift of the spirit which belongs to man alone among all things, the spirit as sharing decisively in the personal life of the living man, that is, the spirit which determines the person. To be aware of a man, therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic centre which stamps his every utterance, action, and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its centre do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation. It is only possible when I step into an elemental relation with the other, that is, when he becomes present to me. Hence I designate awareness in this special sense as ‘personal making present’.

*

Intentionality, in the language of Husserl, is the fact that every sense has its object and exists in having an object. If you don’t see something, you aren’t seeing. If you are not thinking a thought, you are not thinking. The intentionality of a human being is world. The intentionality of a friendship is not one friend within the world of the other, but rather the shared world of the friends. The world is shared (by way of co-intentionality) developed through dialogue about the world – in coming to agreements about the contents of the world. This is “seeing-with”. This is the meaning of not treating another person as an object. We want and need to be treated by our fellow-subjects as fellow-subjects.

*

It in the union of the ancient Greek and Jewish traditions is the  recognition of the ultimacy of the word, from which the “material” world is articulated from the chaos of the phenomenal flux. That flux, whatever it really is, is much stranger than we know, and not in some hidden way, but right there in plain sight if we choose to see it.

I’ve thought many times that people add fantastic mystery to life, not because life is not mysterious enough for them, but to drape over life’s own mystery, which is not under our control, and is infinite in the very real sense that we can make no finite sense of it. Each of us is comfortable with what is his, less comfortable with what is ours, and filled with dread at what is nobody’s. Through dialogue, we can learn the pattern of angst and overcoming and learn deep trust in the face of dread.

Techne, phronesis, design and innovation

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

A passage from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, illuminates a problem I have encountered innumerable times working as a user experience consultant: the need for predictability in innately unpredictable situations.

Before I quote the passage, I should provide some background, which involves the role of process in the practice of design, and how the need for predictability and preconceptions about process play into it.

What clients want is an established, proven process which can be applied to their business problems in order to lead them step-by-predictable-step to a predictable outcome. The ideal is maximum predictability throughout the process.

Predictability, though, can apply to many different aspects of a process. For instance, predictability can be applied to the specific form a solution will take, or it can apply to the general effectiveness of a solution to solve defined business problems. It can apply to the specific functions a solution must perform or it can aim at achieving more general goals (and leave open the question of what specific functions are needed to accomplish those goals). It can apply to varying granularities of time, ranging from the time it will take to complete the whole process, to the time it will take to complete each particular step within the process, all the way down to the number of minutes it will take to complete each sub-task in a project plan.

The question of which particular things must be predicted is very important because predictability comes at a cost. Every point of predictability necessitates a trade-off of some kind.

For instance, predictability in regard to the form a solution will take limits innovation: it means the form is pre-defined. The kind of solution available to this kind of pre-definition is most often an assemblage of “best practices”, which is a euphemism for “imitation”. An assemblage of existing elements is easily pre-visualized and implemented methodically and predictably with easily predicted results: a competently executed best-practices frankenstein will perform well enough to earn an employee a shiny new resume bullet and maybe a year’s job security. When a client comes in white-knuckling a feature-aggregate “vision”, nine times out of ten what looks like fixation on an idea is in truth only a side-effect of severe risk aversion.

Genuine innovation requires a different and slightly more harrowing approach. It requires a higher tolerance for open-endedness. Innovation entails, by definition, the discovery of something significantly new: a possibility nobody has yet envisioned and considered. Until it is discovered, the innovation cannot be shown to or described to anyone. (Innovation: ORIGIN Latin innovat– ‘renewed, altered,’ from the verb innovare, from in– ‘into’ + novare ‘make new’, from novus ‘new’).

Innovation does not necessitate radical unpredictability, though, and it also does not entail an undisciplined or purely intuitive approach. The locus of the unpredictability is in particular points within the process where discovery and the need to innovate are concentrated. At the micro-level, a solid innovation process is still mostly constituted of predictable activities, but wherever open-endedness is needed, the demand for predictability is relaxed or suspended. At the macro-level, at the overall success of the solution a solid, user-informed innovation process is predictably effective in its results, even if it is unpredictable in matters of form.

Most companies fail to innovate, not because they lack ingenious, inventive, creative people capable of innovation,  and not because innovation is unavoidably risky, but rather because the thoughtless demand for predictability at all points precludes innovation.

A big contributing part of this problem is that for many people, practice means predictability. It means pursuing closed-ended goals, and evaluating ideas with pre-defined criteria. The notion of an open-ended process, where evaluation involves human deliberation and multiple satisfactory outcomes are possible seems antithetical to “best practice”.

Here is where Bernstein becomes useful. It turns out that the Greeks were aware of this distinction, and had names for the types of reasoning  involved in each process. According to Bernstein, one of the most fundamental and damaging philosophical blindnesses of our time is the identification of techne (of technical know-how) with method. We tend to impose our conception of techne on understanding and practice in general, and in the process we lose something very important and central to humanity, a type of reasoning Aristotle called “phronesis”, generally translated as prudence or “practical wisdom”.

 The chapter from which this passage is taken is excellent from beginning to end, but here is the most directly relevant part:

…Phronesis is a form of reasoning and knowledge that involves a distinctive mediation between the universal and the particular. This mediation is not accomplished by any appeal to technical rules or Method (in the Cartesian sense) or by the subsumption of a pregiven determinate universal to a particular case. The “intellectual virtue” of phronesis is a form of reasoning, yielding a type of ethical know-how in which what is universal and what is particular are codetermined. Furthermore, phronesis involves a “peculiar interlacing of being and knowledge… Understanding, for Gadamer, is a form of phronesis.

We can comprehend what this means by noting the contrasts that Gadamer emphasizes when he examines the distinctions that Aristotle makes between phronesis and the other “intellectual virtues,” especially episteme and techne. Aristotle characterizes all of these virtues (and not just episteme) as being related to “truth” (aletheia). Episteme, scientific knowledge, is knowledge of what is universal, of what exists invariably, and takes the form of scientific demonstration. The subject matter, the form, the telos, and the way in which episteme is learned and taught differ from phronesis, the form of reasoning appropriate to praxis, which deals with what is variable and always involves a mediation between the universal and the particular that requires deliberation and choice.

For Gadamer, however, the contrast between episteme and phronesis is not as important for hermeneutics as the distinctions between techne (technical know-how) and phronesis (ethical know-how). Gadamer stresses three contrasts.

1. Techne, or a technique,

is learned and can be forgotten; we can “lose” a skill. But ethical “reason” can neither be learned nor forgotten…. Man always finds himself in an “acting situation” and he is always obliged to use ethical knowledge and apply it according to the exigencies of his concrete situation.

2. There is a different conceptual relation between means and ends in techne than in phronesis. The end of ethical know-how, unlike that of a technique, is not a “particular thing” or product but rather the “complete ethical rectitude of a lifetime.” Even more important, while technical activity does not require that the means that allow it to arrive at an end be weighed anew on each occasion, this is precisely what is required in ethical know-how. In ethical know-how there can be no prior knowledge of the right means by which we realize the end in a particular situation. For the end itself is only concretely specified in deliberating about the means appropriate to a particular situation.

3. Phronesis, unlike techne, requires an understanding of other human beings. This is indicated when Aristotle considers the variants of phronesis, especially synesis (understanding).

It appears in the fact of concern, not about myself, but about the other person. Thus it is a mode of moral judgment…. The question here, then, is not of a general kind of knowledge, but of its specification at a particular moment. This knowledge also is not in any sense technical knowledge…. The person with understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected; but rather, as one united by a specific bond with the other, he thinks with the other and undergoes the situation with him. (TM, p. 288; WM, p. 306)

For Gadamer, this variation of phronesis provides the clue for grasping the centrality of friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics.

 …

…for Gadamer the “chief task” of philosophic hermeneutics is to “correct the peculiar falsehood of modern consciousness” and “to defend practical and political reason against the domination of technology based on science.” It is the scientism of our age and the false idolatry of the expert that pose the threat to practical and political reason. The task of philosophy today is to elicit in us the type of questioning that can become a counterforce against the contemporary deformation of praxis. It is in this sense that “hermeneutic philosophy is the heir of the older tradition of practical philosophy.”

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To put it in Bernstein’s and Gadamer’s language: a solid, innovative design methodology requires an intelligently coordinated blend of techne and phronesis, guided by phronesis, itself. It is an immenently reasonable process – meaning that the participants in the process make rational appeals to one another in order to come to decisions – but what is being arrived at is not predetermined, and the decision-making process itself is not determinate. Many good outcomes are acknowledged as possible. The innovators are not looking for a single right solution, but rather a solution that is among the best possibilities.

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Incidentally, innovation is not needed always and everywhere (any more than predictability is). Unrestrained innovation is not a desirable goal, as fun as it may sound.

Myth of the framework

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

According to Bernstein (quoting Popper who coined the phrase) the “‘Myth of the Framework,’ is a metaphor which suggest that ‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language,’ and that we are so locked into these frameworks that we cannot communicate with those encased in ‘radically’ different frameworks or paradigms.”

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When you understand what people like Bernstein, Kuhn and Gadamer are actually trying to do, watching the spectacle of what they appear to be doing to people who approach hermeneutics (and related problems) from philosophically naive perspectives (both “for” and “against”) is funny but exasperating. The naive opponents manifest precisely the principles they attempt to deny. The naive proponents tend to take positions Bernstein is trying to overcome and become relativist caricatures: living strawmen for the naive opponents to successfully attack.

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Part of the reason I have become less enthusiastic about personality typologies over the last several years is that they are so easily used to assert the Myth of the Framework.

Not a textbook

Autobiography, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism

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

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

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

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

Parallax and intentionality

Autobiography, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I had been using the metaphor of parallax for a couple of years before Zizek’s Parallax View came out. The entire book turned out to be structured around the parallax metaphor and he used it essentially the same way. At that point in my life I was inclined to interpret that kind of coincidence as either an inevitable rediscovery of core esoteric truths or as some sort of synchronicity.

Once I learned about the connection between Hegel and Marxism, though, I realized parallax is one of the most universal and obvious examples of the dialectic form (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). If the dialectic form is a pre-existing cultural entity – and not a minor or obscure one, either – it is possible that the “rediscovery” of it was a lot more guided than it seemed to me at the time. I may not have been taught it explicity, but it is not difficult to see how it could be absorbed passively.

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The key to understanding passive cultural absorption is realizing objective conceptual thinking is only one of several forms of understanding a mind has available to it for interrelating and unifying the multifarious parts and aspects of its experience.

Naive thinkers are marked as such by their incapacity to distinguish the objective form of thought (which is ontological) from the objective being of a thing “thought about”. This observation is itself not “objective”: it exists as what I have been calling an intellectual move, or “the dance”. It’s the fundamental insight of late Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists.

Maybe I picked up the the Pragmatist dance from following along, trying to understand – trying to think-with a philosophical author, as opposed to thinking-about the apparent subject matter presented by the author in my own way, by my own pre-existing habitual moves. Maybe having been raised Unitarian-Universalist, which was a major tributary of Pragmatism, made me receptive to thinking in that way. Maybe there was a temperamental predisposition. At any rate, later, when I learned the counts and the names of the steps and the history of the dance’s invention and development, it was a factual consummation of something super-factual.

It gave objective form to a transmissible form of essentially subjective truth. It made it easier to share. Before, I’d have to demonstrate it, or indicate it with strange analogies.

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I had this thought last week and forgot to write it down:

Can we learn essentially subjective (that is, existential) truths from other subjectivities, or are we limited to objectivity – learning objective facts about subjectivity from one another?

Are we subjectively inert, sealed inside our own temperaments, and our own experiences?

Another big question: If we can learn essentially subjective truths from one another, is that best achieved through talking about subjectivity – through psychologizing? A theme I’ve encountered repeatedly among thinkers working from the Pragmatist and the Phenomenological traditions is intentionality: that there is no such thing as thinking without an object of thought. Thinking divorced from intentionality is nonsense.

Perhaps sharing a problem with another subjectivity, a problem that involves coming to a deep understanding for the sake of being able to collaborate on solving the problem is a more direct route to subjective learning than psychologizing.

I’ve even wondered if psychologizing isn’t ultimately a defence against sharing psychology – a counterfeit intimacy used as a block against authentic intimacy with the other – a sterile mutual self-exploration where shared experience is founded on sameness. Otherness is distant, sealed on the far side of an experiential membrane – never pursued, never approached, never welcomed. The radical other is an object of fascination, or fear, or mystification to be contemplated or classified but never touched.

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I see art as essentially bound up with subjective sharing.

Lesser art depends on recognition. It calls out to those who already know. Art decays into nostalgia and then pastiche.

Great art makes new knowers.

Philosophy is thought-art.