Category Archives: Pragmatism

Pluralism, education, competition, and brand

Brand, Pragmatism

Some forms of competition support pluralism, and some forms of competition undermine it. This fact has become conspicuous to me looking at the issue of school competition.

If K-12 schools were to compete like universities, creating areas of distinction, basing their claims of excellence on the accomplishments and reputations of faculty and alumni, that would be a form of school competition that would generate diverse approaches to education, suitable to a wide variety of adult destinies. But if school competition were to become a matter of who produces the highest standardized test scores, I think it would have the opposite effect. The differences would center around pedagogical techniques for approaching as closely as possible a predetermined ideal.

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I wish I could find the source, but years ago I read an article that claimed that what was different about the American business culture — the very secret of its flourishing — was its nearly-reckless environment of forgiveness, which encouraged risk, experimentation, optimism and consequently innovation. In Japan, if you took a risk and blew it, that was it for your career. In America, you were admired for your daring.

My question is this: Is our educational system encouraging or undermining this kind of inventiveness. Historically, how much has America’s success rested on technical proficiency — math and science — and how much on sheer confidence? Maybe those ludicrously high self-esteem scores of our students, so frequently ridiculed (most recently in Waiting for Superman) are actually a success indicator.

My fear, to put it in brand terms, is that the USA has turned its back on its brand, and has committed itself to becoming and international commodity. Our educational system is part of our unconscious national brand activation.

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And to circle this whole mess around to the start, I think what attracts me to brand is that competition between brands, to the degree that the brands really are positioned against one another, is a pluralistic mode of competition. Multiple standards of excellent compete against one another for business.

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

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If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

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A face is a gate.

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It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Proud not to be right

Ethics, Pragmatism

It is easy to see how we are right. It is much more challenging — morally and intellectually — to see how we are not right, or less right than we wish to be.

To see ourselves as right, all we have to do is point our eyes at things, take them in passively in our usual way, and see what we always see.

To see where we are not fully right (or where others who disagree with us are right), we have to attempt to see in new, less familiar ways. To be sure, it requires a certain degree of ingenuity and inventiveness to discover new possibilities of understanding. And of course, it requires humility — preferring being right to merely feeling right. But most of all it requires courage. One must endure temporary but intensely uncomfortable strangeness, resist the constant urge to turn back and retreat to the familiar, and persevere until understanding has been reached. Only through this kind of struggle can a person make considered comparisons based on real insight that addresses an audience wider than those who already see as we see and ditto our opinions.

But it is worth it. The reward is growth and humanity.

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People who already know everything are unable to learn. To them, that of which they ignorant is nonexistent. Why would we learn about things that are nonexistent and unreal?

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Few of us believe we know every fact in the world. We can sense the gaps in our knowledge, and are open to filling those gaps with new information, if that information is understood to be relevant.

The same is true for skills. Most of us can see where are practical lives can be improved by learning new skills. We are open to learning new methods or techniques for solving problems we face, if these methods are understood to be important to our success.

What is much rarer is seeing the need for improving one’s own worldview. The reason? Because one’s worldview determines what is perceived as relevant and important. From the perspective of an isolated individual (whether of an individual or a like-minded collective), one’s worldview is the world itself. It requires belief in intelligence beyond one’s own sphere of intelligibility to see any reason to even consider worldview.

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Most people equate education with the acquiring of facts and skills. Through this process we prepare students for the realities of life. The need for this is well-established, and what else is there to learn?

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If you think about the worst problems facing humankind, what is their nature? Are they a matter of lacking facts? Or lacking people with the technical skills to resolve them? Or are they the result of people who have no idea how to come to a mutual understanding?

Analytic dialectic and synthetic dialectic

Ideas, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

Two forms of dialectic can be distinguished. They have different characters and different trajectories.

Synthetic dialectic moves toward monism.

  • Synthetic dialectic is reductionistic.
  • Its method  is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which preserve irrelevant, complicating and inhibiting distinctions.
  • Synthetic dialectic has a passionate and destructive character. It tends to destroy complex structure and release energy.
  • Synthetic dialectic tends to decrease the total number of categories as well as the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting these categories, while increasing the scope of the remaining categories.
  • Synthetic dialectic is experienced as liberation from de-centering illusions — oppressive notions that alienate a person from himself, prevent him from living according to his own experience and judgment, and which oblige him to live according to the experiences and judgments of others.
  • The thrust of synthetic dialectic is to detect the irrelevance and invalidity of alien claims and to reject them on that basis.
  • Whether idealistic or materialistic, synthetic dialectic attempts to finally subsume all being under a single, universal ontological category, or a monad. This category is understood to be basis of truth. Thinking from other bases is at best provisional and at worst, false.
  • Synthetic dialectic can appear absolutist, and often succumbs to absolutism.
  • Synthetic dialectic strengthens the will, but weakens the intellect.
  • Synthetic dialectic synthesizes — “puts together” — broader, more universal categories. Fewer and fewer particularities are perceived in their particularity, but are taken as generalities, types or manifested principles and are treated according to their abstract intelligible character. Anomalous particularities are disregarded as irrelevant.

Analytic dialectic moves toward pluralism.

  • Analytic dialectic is antireductionistic.
  • Its method is to uncover and cancel contradictions in antitheses which project unnecessary, simplistic and unproductive equivalencies.
  • Analytic dialectic has a moderating and constructive character. It tends to consume energy generating structures of increasing complexity.
  • Analytic dialectic tends to increase the total number of categories and the quantity and complexity of relationships connecting them, while decreasing the scope of each categories.
  • Analytic dialectic discovers diversity within apparent equivalency. It looks for failures to detect relevant distinctions made by other people, due to the crudeness of one’s own schema. It discovers both new distinctions and new, valid, obligating claims from others.
  • The thrust of analytic dialectic is to detect the relevance and validity of alien claims and to affirm them.
  • Analytic dialectic attempts to understand multiple, overlapping ontological existences in all being, which permits the understanding of diverse, valid and finite perspectives. The ground of being is understood as an engulfing infinity, to which human beings relate in finite terms.
  • Analytic dialectic can appear relativist, and often succumbs to relativism.
  • Analytic dialectic strengthens the intellect, but weakens the will.
  • Analytic dialectic scrutinizes broad, universal categories and analyzes — “loosens them up” — into finer categorizations more capable of doing justice to “particularities in their particularity”. Particularities are still treated according to their intelligible character, but intelligibility is obligated to answer to the truth of particulars and to accommodate them.

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Both forms of dialectic are necessary to human life. Neither is intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. The question is one of context and dynamic balance.

Business philosophy

Philosophy, Pragmatism, Synesis

Philosophy asks: What purely intellectual factors constricting our options?

What assumptions possess our minds and make matters that could be otherwise and better seem absolute and eternal?

Where is our customary perspective hiding relevant clues from us that would be revealed as relevant if we looked at our situation from a different vantage point?

Where are we justifying our actions with explanations that do not actually do justice to those forces that really impel us?

How are we imposing habitual modes of thought on problems that call for different modes, which we would use if we “knew the moves”?

Where are our life practices depriving us of the inner resources or outer conditions necessary to concretely experience alternatives to how-things-are?

Where are our hasty answers concealing questions that need asking?

Where are our hasty formulations of questions concealing more fruitful question to ask?

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At this point in history it is embarrassing (quaint, pompous, ludicrous, and many other unpleasant things) to call yourself a philosopher in a business setting. Nonetheless, I still aspire one day to have a business card with the title “philosopher” printed on it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. Think about it: If philosophy helps ask and answer the questions I listed above, wouldn’t a business with at least one philosopher on staff have a pretty serious competitive advantage? The answer I’d anticipate is: “by having philosophical people on staff.” But what about that popular management principle that “if you don’t assign it to a person it doesn’t get done”? In my experience, that is exactly the case. Businesses tend to run around like chickens in chalk-line circles, for no reason other than failure to ask if the lines can be redrawn… or erased.. or even just stepped over. Why? They take the chalk-lines as the moral or practical limits of valid activity, and see the problem in terms of how the business is running.

Chains

Ideas, Pragmatism

“Dancing in chains. — With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that which we call ‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter. ‘Dancing in chains’, making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance: and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.” – Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

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Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.

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Most of us expect to build up to something compelling (usually some negatively conceived happiness — the absence of what we think is preventing happiness) through faithful observance of constraints. Or we think that if happiness hasn’t occurred, it’s because of some oversight. We start from the ground and aggregate upward. Standing at the top of the heap we think we’ll grab happiness out of the sky.

Philosophy starts from what is compelling and works downward, one reality at a time until it touches earth and closes the circuit.

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The chains of science, like all theoretical chains, are light and fine. They just draw limits around your movements.

The chains of practice, however, actually weigh your limbs down and threaten to immobilize you. Business, socializing, parenting, governing — pursuits traditionally avoided by philosophers — are not outside the domain of philosophy, they’re just such heavy fetters that few thinkers will wear them. It’s not that they are hard to think about. It is that they are hard to think within. They encumber the entirety of one’s being, thought and all.

Chord: Nietzsche’s practical metaphysics

Chord, Ideas, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Pragmatism

The circle must be closed. — He who has followed a philosophy or a species of thought to the end of its course and then around the end will grasp from his inner experience why the masters and teachers who came afterwards turned away from it, often with an expression of deprecation. For, though the circle has to be circumscribed, the individual, even the greatest, sits firmly on his point of the periphery with an inexorable expression of obstinacy, as though the circle ought never to be closed.

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Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned!

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A few rungs down. — One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul’s salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind’s greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind’s finest accomplishments to date.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I now see a number of people who have arrived at the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but only a few who climb back down a few rungs. For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it. Those who are most enlightened can go only as far as to free themselves of metaphysics and look back on it with superiority, while here, as in the hippodrome, it is necessary to take a turn at the end of the track.

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One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics… Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength … Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened, even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions. Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions, it does not succumb to them — it knows itself sovereign…

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?

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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.

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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.

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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

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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”.

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

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* 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.’

Meliorism

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Meliorism – the belief that the world can be made better by human effort. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from Latin melior ‘better’ + -ism .

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A selection of passages I’ve indexed in my wiki under “meliorism“:

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Thus speak and stammer: “This is my good, this I love, thus does it please me entirely, thus alone do I want the good.

I do not want it as divine law, not as a human law or a human need; it will not be a guide-post for me to over-earths and paradises.

It is an earthly virtue which I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all any common wisdom.

But that bird built its nest with me: therefore, I love and cherish it — now it sits with me on its golden eggs.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

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A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in… he is at peace, since there are no disturbances created by underground forces which have no outlet at one with himself and his surroundings. This state cannot be reached merely by inner work… The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

– Christopher Alexander

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There are unhappy men who think the salvation of the world impossible. Theirs is the doctrine known as pessimism. Optimism in turn would be the doctrine that thinks the world’s salvation inevitable. Midway between the two there stands what may be called the doctrine of meliorism… [which] treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

– William James

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We cannot continue the idea that human nature when left to itself, when freed from external arbitrary restrictions, will tend to the production of democratic institutions that work successfully. We have now to state the issue from the other side. We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one – like any idea that concerns what should be.

– John Dewey

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I’m preparing a pragmatist attack on metaphysically-grounded conceptions of morality. To make a pragmatist attack means to suspend for a moment the question of truth or falseness, and consider only the practical implications of a belief. How does a belief affect the believer’s actions? A few preliminary points:

  • When a person believes in a morality endorsed by something beyond humankind, whether God or nature, he is less likely to take personal responsibility for it. Passivity is passed off as faith: reality will take care of itself. (Someone who believes in natural rights appears to honor rights by attributing them to nature, but is he as likely to defend them as someone who values his rights but considers them vulnerable?)
  • When a person believes in a morality that is not a matter of agreement between people, but rather something that comes down from an authority higher than humankind he is less likely to take seriously the obligation to persuade other people of its truth. He is far more likely to impose it on others who are equally convinced they know the truth but are mistaken.
  • When a person believes in a morality that exists to serve a cause higher than humankind, he is less likely to consider the human consequences of his morality – neither to himself nor to others who follow his morality voluntarily or involuntarily.
  • When a person believes in a morality that is beyond human reason, his critical defenses are dismantled. If empirical observation and reason can’t tell him he is being manipulated and exploited, what can? Further, if reason is suspended, how does a person know what has overruled reason and whether it is itself valid? What is being trusted, and why? How does a person even know it is a virtue, and not a vice?
  • If a person believes morality is necessarily metaphysically grounded, if he comes to discover that metaphysics is radically mysterious and not solid and static like land but liquid like the shimmering surface of a sea he might sink into the depths of skepticism and antinomianism and never think to reach out for a human hand or listen for a human word. He will reject morality itself as false, rather than his human – his all-too-human – view of morality.

Notice the tendency here: metaphysically grounded moralities tend toward extremes of passivity and aggression.

Obviously, these points do not address the question of whether there isn’t in fact a metaphysically-grounded moral truth, despite the practical consequences. That is a separate question.

This is also not an argument against metaphysics, per se. My attack is strictly limited the use of metaphysics as a positive grounding.

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.”

 *

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.

 *

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.”

*

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.

*

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

Biography, 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

Biography, 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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.