Category Archives: Hermeneutics

Key passage

Biography, Hermeneutics

This passage from Beyond Good and Evil, though universally relevant, is especially relevant for the designer who aspires to more than utilitarian goals (use-fulness and use-ability) and wishes to show our culture new ways of seeing, which in the parlance of the user experience industry is designated inadequately by the term “desirability”. These new ways of seeing can be quite trivial and have a strictly localized effect or they can penetrate deeply into a person’s experience of the world. What I am describing here is the essential continuum between design and true transformative art.

He who has followed the history of an individual science will find in its evolution a clue to the comprehension of the oldest and most common processes of all “knowledge and understanding”: in both cases it is the premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid will to “believe,” the lack of mistrust and patience which are evolved first–it is only late, and then imperfectly, that our senses learn to be subtle, faithful, cautious organs of understanding. It is more comfortable for our eye to react to a particular object by producing again an image it has often produced before than by retaining what is new and different in an impression: the latter requires more strength, more “morality.” To hear something new is hard and painful for the ear; we hear the music of foreigners badly. When we hear a foreign language we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds we hear into words which have a more familiar and homely ring: thus the Germans, for example, once heard arcubalista and adapted it into Armbrust. {Armbrust: literally, “arm-breast”; both words mean “crossbow.”} The novel finds our senses, too, hostile and reluctant; and even in the case of the “simplest” processes of the senses, the emotions, such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotions of laziness, dominate.–

As little as a reader today reads all the individual words (not to speak of the syllables) of a page–he rather takes about five words in twenty haphazardly and “conjectures” their probable meaning–just as little do we see a tree exactly and entire with regard to its leaves, branches, color, shape; it is so much easier for us to put together an approximation of a tree. Even when we are involved in the most uncommon experiences we still do the same thing: we fabricate the greater part of the experience and can hardly be compelled not to contemplate some event as its “inventor.” All this means: we are from the very heart and from the very first–accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.

In a lively conversation I often see before me the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity far surpasses the power of my eyesight–so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.

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One of my fundamental methods: to open out the meaning of individual passages I often string together scattered passages that inter-illuminate. Or, to say it as I experience it, I simply point out my own lattice of associations that spontaneously arise whenever I read something, even if I cannot articulate the connection. The form is analogical: a simple “this is like this.” The “this is like this, in that…” comes later – sometimes much later. My faith in my sometimes odd sense of analogy – my faith that is will lead me (nearly always along very uncomfortable paths) to insight – is one of my advantages as a designer and thinker, but it can lead me some strange places where people don’t really want to be.

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As anyone who has read Thomas Kuhn knows, it is anomalies that force scientific revolutions. Your sensitivity to anomalies and your readiness to question the structures and analogies that constitute knowledge determine the point where you break from the dominant paradigm and allow it to dissolve back into the anomalies (the phenomenal flux, the primordial chaos) from which it came before it was formed by language and logic into knowledge. This dissolution permits new analogies, new ways to makes sense, new ways to spontaneously experience the world, new ways to love.

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I like to place the words “design” and “designate” side by side and think about them together.

Design is a microcosm of culture. That is why I care about design.

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I’ve always liked the Shins “Mine’s Not a High Horse”: “These are the muddy waters / I’m swimming in to make a living / Were I to drown in them / Should come as no surprise.”

Skepticism and probability

Ethics, Hermeneutics

Some people, when faced with uncertainty, weigh all the factual and interpretive possibilities and respond to the one that seems most probable. Sometimes they’ll cycle through a whole series of possibilities, one at a time.

Others generate multiple possibilities, and weigh the degree of uncertainty of each, looking for overlap between the most plausible possibilities. They then respond practically to the whole probabilistic cloud as a single situation.

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The latter approach is optimal for hermeneutics, for concepting, for psychology, and for pretty much any situation involving extreme indeterminacy or doubt. There’s the facts and there’s the interpretive arrangements, and each modifies the other. Knowing how to dismantle an interpretation (which can look for all the world like reality itself) into bits of data and then to reassemble them into multiple divergent interpretations, when combined with an active imagination and a nuanced recall results in the capacity to generate a vast array of persuasive possibilities. Everything is left liquid to some degree. It’s a gift and a curse.

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For a skeptic, no knowledge is complete until it includes the meta-knowledge of ground of certainty. To lose track of this is to lose command of the knowledge.

What is psychedelic?

Hermeneutics

Psychedelic: Ecstatic liberation from the tyranny of interpretation. It is snipping the bale-wire of one’s world and the self that belongs to it.

It is East; it is springtime; it is daybreak.

Time slows for a moment. Most of us mistake that slow moment for forever; then the moment passes.

Practice precedes theory

Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Practice precedes theory. Practice is wordlessly active. Theory is the verbal ensurfacing of practice.

Hermeneutics is the practice of performing the ensurfacing practice in reverse  (most obvious when performed in the intellectual realm). It is the reconsititution of wordless intellectual practice guided by the theoretical content, treated as artifact, but not as the essential content of the writing.

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I read Nietzsche hermeneutically, but it took me nearly four years to explain how reading Nietzsche was unlike other kinds of reading. It took me all this time to find the descriptive language for a practice I’d already mastered, but mastered mutely.

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Genuine philosophy is not factual: philosophy presents its factual content like a starry sky, by which the reader/listener can navigate his understanding. The navigating is the essential philosophical act. But most people look at the star-charts and confuse navigation with astronomy.

You cannot summarize philosophy. You cannot factually transfer it. Philosophy is not reflections, it is reflecting. Philosophy must be coperformed, or it degrades into mere fact.

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What has made Nietzsche such a controversial and perpetually fascinating writer is this: much of his content is strictly artifact, often the opposite of his own private opinions. He leaves it to the reader to apply the intellectual practices he teaches; it is up to the reader to apply this practice to his own content and to reach his own conclusions. And he assumes his reader will need to reach his own conclusions because precisely the readers Nietzsche wants (of whom and to whom he wrote frequently) will find the content of Nietzsche’s apparent philosophy, his factual philosophy, completely unacceptable, offensive. But you have to stay with him, anyway, all the way to the ugly end. If you try to cut to the conclusions, you will miss everything.

Nietzsche’s ideal reader – out of the deep, intense urgency – will apply Nietzsche’s practical philosophy to the goal of escaping Nietzsche’s factual philosophy – to the refuge of his own conclusions. And just when you think you disagree with him, Nietzsche winks mischeviously and compassionately.

Remember: Nietzsche called himself the first Dionysian philosopher. Dionysus/Siva: the dancing god.

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The consciousness of appearance. — How wonderful and new and yet how gruesome and ironic I find my position vis-a-vis the whole of existence in the light of my insight! I have discovered for myself that the human and animal past, indeed the whole primal age and past of all sentient being continues in me to invent, to love, to hate, and to infer, — I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish: as a sleepwalker must go on dreaming lest he fall. What is “appearance” for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence,–what could I say about any essence except to name the attributes of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could place on an unknown X or remove from it! Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mockery that it makes me feel that this is appearance and will-o’-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more, — that among all these dreamers, I, too, the “knower,” am dancing my dance, that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve — the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

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I would only believe in a God who could dance.

And when I saw my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: he was the spirit of gravity — through him all things fall.

Not by wrath, but by laughter, do we kill. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!

I learned to walk; since then have I let myself run. I learned to fly; since then I do not need to be pushed to move from a spot.

Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. —

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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Spoiler: Dionysus is wordless practice, dance doing its dance. Apollo is theory and everything else that belongs to surface. Dionysian philosophy is doing, faithfully, what philosophical urgency (not curiosity or ambition) impels one to do. Only afterward – as  consummation – the accomplishment, which is known only in hindsight, is articulated. This is Nietzsche’s “overcoming“.

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This might be a pretty good scholarly paper.

Pragmatist inkling?

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’m beginning to suspect praxis is knowledge viewed from the inside… the essential counterpart to what is apparent when knowledge self-reflects or presents itself as knowledge. Consider this possible developmental process: 1) knowledge begins as an instinctive response to a novel situation, 2a) then the response is iterated and refined within the same and similar situations, 2b) and the refined response is demonstrated and imitated between subjects who participate in the interation and refinement process, 3) then the response is reflectively stabilized through analogies and models, and becomes a verbally communicable practice then finally 4) vocabulary is developed for the practice.

I’m sure I’ll see this in Rorty once I start him, because practically I began thinking like a pragmatist back in 2005, when I had to imitate Bernstein’s manner of thinking in order to follow him (learned the steps of his intellectual dance). That is the only way to understand philosophy as such. Since then I’ve applied Bernstein’s ideas and style to many problems – including design problems and political problems I’ve encountered at work. I’ve also found that same style of thought in Wittgenstein and the smattering of pragmatist thought I’ve read. Now I am interested in learning the vocabulary and the ethics of the pragmatist community.

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I’ve worked intensely and uninterruptedly for 40 months, to be able to say this (relatively) clearly: Hermeneutics is spiritual pragmatism. By spirit, I mean the intellect, but not the intellect that is the mental dimension of an essentially corporeal reality. Spirit is intellect acknowledged as the ground of reality.

Reading hermeneutically is navigating the author’s subjectivity by the objects of his inquiries. The real goal of hermeneutics is not to acquire facts, nor even to uncover the structure by which the author orders his factual reality, but rather to learn to think with the author through his work, and eventually to be able to approach problems as the author would approach them. Such practical knowledge cannot be transferred mind-to-mind across the membrane of individual subjectivities as reflective theoretical knowledge can. It requires gradual merging of wills, until one’s intellectual movements spontaneously mirror or at least play off the movements of the other, and understanding flows in without sharp anomalies or blurry romantic notions.

Hermeneutics is intellectual dance; it is spiritual pragmatism; and it is trans-subjective transcendental phenomenology. It all takes place in the borders between whole and part, mastery and tentative participation, insidedness and outsidedness, in knowing how to know when you do not yet know, and knowing the kinds of knowing one might have or not yet expect.

I set out to account for what it was exactly that Nietzsche did to me. He taught me the dance of dances.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation

Hermeneutics

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is a poetic demonstration of Gadamerian historicity. It is a self-interpretive narrative experienced from the inside, degrading retroactively as it unfolds into the future, always faithful to the truth of the utter faithlessness of memory. The content of memory might be the past, but its sole allegiance is to the future.

Kaufman is the best philosophical filmmaker I know of. He seems gimmicky because his urgency is rare, and his ingenuity is distracting.

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

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Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

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We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

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I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

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There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

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How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

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Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

Much too much

Hermeneutics

The surviving bits of my good taste are breaking down. Now I’m quoting Nick Drake lyrics: “If songs were lines in a conversation / the situation would be fine.”

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This has been said before, but it is true enough to bear repeating: some people really are palatable only after they’re safely gone. Once they’re out of the way you can invent over them a bit, tone them down, lend them dignity, make them self-sufficient, or even invest them with power. When they’re right there with you, though, they can protest at what you’ve made of them. Or they can ask for something you are unwilling to give. And what if what you refuse is precisely that which you cannot imagine yourself refusing anyone?

As a direct result of what appears to be a universal cultural condition, these unpalatable people leave themselves behind in diluted forms, in sounds and images and words, sometimes in legends – passive forms easy to falsify and adore. Alive and close up, as a speaking face – much too much.

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Art is an act of desperation. The rest of what we call art is craft, entertainment, stimulation and vain noise.

Phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, metaphysics

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

This morning Susan asked if I finally passed last week’s philosophical kidney stone. She says I seem to have worked something out.

I had a productive weekend. I think I figured out how phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and metaphysics fit together now as one coherent attitude toward life. I figured it out in a wordless way, though, so I can’t quite express it, yet. (I expect an image or analogy to occur, soon.) I believe this constellation of ideas is essentially liberal. I think I also see how it differs from conservatism, and especially neoconservatism.

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Good article: “What Makes People Vote Republican?” by Jonathan Haidt.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The noble lie

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

The idea of the “noble lie” is dangerous and unnecessary. It is a distorted conception of the kind of truth spoken in symbolic language, capable of graceful degradation of meaning in more limited ears – including the speaker’s own. I am talking about the revelatory language of religion and poetry.

A vision

Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Philosophy

Having vision is a matter of seeing from a distinctive point of view. What is seen from that perspective is not itself the vision but the result of the vision.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to vision and leaps over the perspective directly to the objects of sight. Any vividly imagined aggregate of ideas is “a vision”, whether it is seen coherently or not.

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A vision, being perspectival, is holistic. If, in the course of resolving a problem, you have a vision of its solution, if you are open and alert, you will notice that much more than the object of the vision is affected. With genuine philosophical problems everything is affected simultaneously.

Objectivist thinking misses what is essential to holism and leaps over the quality of wholeness directly to the object-parts that “constitute” a whole. Any aggregate, whether it is seen coherently or not, is called holistic if it satisfies all criteria of “completeness” – that is, no omission is identified. The being of the wholes is reduced to sum of parts.

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Thinking literally: If you stand in place and have someone else shift the furniture around for you have you changed your perspective?

If you change your opinion on this or that isolated fact have you changed your perspective on it?

Existential entities

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

The existential I – Heidegger’s Dasein – is the cheapest and most exciting philosophical discovery.

The existential You – Buber’s Thou – is more elusive. Catching sight of the concept of the existential You points the way to the development of the intellectual and ethical practice of existing in the I-Thou relationship. The rules in this strata of being are different from those of ordinary objective thought.

Developing the practice of the I-Thou relationship, one necessarily discovers the existential We, the ground of I-Thou. With that discovery one begins to move into the profound and boring world of Pragmatism.

(At this point, I’d call myself a Hermeneutical Pragmatist. When I’m done reading Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology I am looking forward to reading Richard Rorty.)