To see a dark room, the first thing we usually try to do is turn on the lights, or open the windows.

Sometimes we have to feel around in the dark to find a light switch, which works best if we already know something about the room’s layout, and about what kind of switches and window latches we can expect to find (otherwise we might not recognize what we are looking for even when we feel it). In this kind of case we rarely stand in one place. We walk around the room, and explore it by feel before we can explore it by sight.

Sometimes, if we are lucky enough to have (or discover in our groping) a flashlight or lamp, we can direct light to different areas of the room, in search of the room’s own light sources. If such light sources do not exist, or if their light is dim or casts dark shadows, we will explore the room by the light of our own lamp.

Generally speaking, we prefer to see a room by its own light, and failing that we examine it by our own light. And if no light is available, we are forced to explore it by feel. And often we treat these preferences as discrete modes. We EITHER find the light and look around, OR we just point our flashlight at various points in the room to see what’s there, OR we feel around. But the most thorough examination involves all three: seeing the room from its usual perspectives in its usual mode of illumination, looking at the room from as many perspectives as possible, illuminating the shadowy areas with our own light, touching and experimenting with the objects of the room. Further, we can move these objects around, turn them in our hands or walk around them, viewing them from various angles.

And then a whole other world of possibilities opens when you of viewing images or maps of the room made by others, or hearing about the room from others. And nearly all of what was outlined above presupposes knowledge of rooms, windows, lights, etc. But now the metaphor is fuzzing up, so we’re probably violating its terms of use…

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I think what I’m doing here is feeling out a possibility of a formal relationship between metaphors of illumination, metaphors of perspective, metaphors of uncovering, metaphors of feeling out. I’ve had a vague sense, in the form of slight anxiety around some of my own favorite terms (perspective, horizon, insight, clarification), that perhaps I’ve been conflating or confusing concepts of understanding. I’ve been really irritable about the use of the word insight (which I think is perspectival knowledge on a subject’s sense of objectivity) for gaining facts about other people (which treats people as objects with attributes). And I have a hunch that clarifying these relationships will help me understand the variety of research methods better.

There’s a big difference between matters that are not clearly understood because nobody has looked at the matter closely or systematically enough, versus matters that have been looked at very closely but not from an angle that reveals what is most relevant or productive, versus matters that are essentially discovery of an angle of view versus knowing about the objects viewed from that angle (and I think this is the essential difference between qualitative and quantitative research), versus matters that are being overshadowed by considerations that perhaps obscure what most needs seeing.

Dig?

WARNING: This post is a process of understanding, not a product of understanding. That means it will cause anxiety, not relieve it. I am opening questions I do not know how to close.

Isn’t openness exciting, though? Isn’t openness liberating? Hell no, openness is not exciting or liberating. It is oppressive and dreadful until it is closed again, and closed better.

True openness allows the primordial chaos to flood back in and submerge us in dread. This is the infant’s element. It is what makes babies cry when left alone in a dark room. A philosopher’s proclivity to open what best remains closed — to welcome back chaos — is the real reason philosophy is hated by those who already know enough. The experience of being born is dreadful and none of us want to relive it, but reliving birth is the very business of philosophy.

What makes us feel liberated is to re-ask a question whose answer has overwhelmed us or paralyzed us or depressed us, and to re-answer it more compactly or more productively or affirmingly. (I’m reminded of Thomas Kuhn’s criteria of theory choice: Accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness.) We feel liberated when we replace unsatisfactory answers with good ones. And if it seems that we like to re-open questions, it is only for this.

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Some metaphors for the unknown:

• concealed
• disguised
• unnoticed
• microscopic
• dark
• in darkness
• invisible
• distant
• beyond (over the horizon)
• forgotten

Many of these metaphors (like metaphors in general) are visual.

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For any particular event of vision to occur a number of conditions must be met:

• a subject of vision (the seer)
• a capacity for vision (sight)
• a medium of vision (light)
• an object of vision (the seen)
• a situation in which all the conditions are present in specific relation to one another

The situation in which an event of vision occurs contains a number of relationships:

• the situation is finite; it is understood that things are outside the situation
• the subject seeing is characterized by possessing sight (to count them as separate — suspicious?)
• the subject has an objective presence in the situation he sees: he is situated as an object among the objects of the situation
• the subject seeing relates to the objects seen in a perspective, where closer objects are larger, and more distant objects are smaller, and the most distant objects disappear
• in relation to the seer and to peer objects, objects closer to the seer may obscure more distant objects
• light also has an objective presence in the situation, in that some object or objects in the situation emits the light by which things are seen
• light relates to the objects seen in illumination, where objects closer to the light source are brighter, and more distant objects are darker, and the most distant objects are no longer visible
• in relation to a light source and to peer objects, objects closer to the light source may cast shadows on more distant objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• multiple light sources may illuminate shadows from other light sources
• objects may reflect light onto other objects, and behave both as light sources and objects (and this includes the seer as object)
• the seer and sight is always one; where light sources and objects are always at least one, but potentially multiple

Of course, some objects in an event of seeing are respected as fellow seers, but strictly speaking, to “see” this into the metaphor is to confuse it. A fellow seer is to be heard, and what one hears might change what one sees.

Some truths can be possessed, mastered, memorized and remembered.

Some truths are silent companions. They are always there for us, and, when needed, without a word, leap to action.

Some some truths come and go as they please. We can try to recall them, but they do not always answer, and when they do return to us, it is the furthest thing from an act of obedience. We invite them to return. We keep the door open and the room clean. We welcome them home, dote on them, and hope they choose to stay with us.

Cynicism is the sound of the loveless whistling in the dark.

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To use one’s own direct experience to prove the nonexistence of something certainly succeeds in proving the nonexistence of something.

If you can show that your intuition will bear fruit, you can win the support of the community to develop it. If you can win the support of the community to develop it, your intuition will bear fruit.

If you can prove your value, you will win the conditions you need to be valuable. If you can win the conditions you need to be valuable, you will prove your value.

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A harassed mind can produce ideas of a certain kind, but it will be unable to produce others. A harassed mind thinks about many things at once, and it concentrates only in small intense and disconnected bursts. It is like an mental factory fill of mental assembly lines, which can be stopped and started by a skillful manager. The products sit patiently, ready for the next part to be added as time permits, until they arrives at the end of the line, in finished form, as specced. Halfway through its course, a product is half-assembled. Atomistic ideas are produced in this manner, piece by piece, systematically.

Concepts are different. A concept is conceived all at once in a burst of insight. A concept maintains its wholeness throughout its development as it self-articulates under its own generative forces into differentiated organs. Its struggle for viability cannot be stopped and started at will. It develops like a fetus, not like a machine.

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A harassed mind produces only atomistic ideas.

Many people who naturally think atomistically see no problem with universal harassment. It’s unfair to subject some people to harassment, while others are permitted to concentrate and dream up ideas. And to be realistic, while holistic concepts are often inspired and inspiring, business rarely demands inspiration as much as it does efficiency, predictability, flexibility, speed, repeatability. Or is that just the case because business has been dominated by atomistic thinkers?

If someone keeps finishing your sentences for you: 1) He might be trying to show you that you’re not alone in seeing things the way you do; or 2) he might be trying to understand you into harmless redundancy; or 3) he might be trying to bend the alien to the familiar; or 4) he may be trying to speak the familiar over the alien and silence it; or 5) he might be racing you to the insight; or 6) he might have forgotten everything in the world but the thought.

Altruism is a parody of magnanimity.

Buber, on the social vs the interhuman:

It is usual to ascribe what takes place between men to the social realm, thereby blurring a basically important line of division between two essentially different areas of human life. I myself, when I began nearly fifty years ago to find my own bearings in the knowledge of society, making use of the then unknown concept of the interhuman, made the same error. From that time it became increasingly clear to me that we have to do here with a separate category of our existence, even a separate dimension, to use a mathematical term, and one with which we are so familiar that its peculiarity has hitherto almost escaped us. Yet insight into its peculiarity is extremely important not only for our thinking, but also for our living.

We may speak of social phenomena wherever the life of a number of men, lived with one another, bound up together, brings in its train shared experiences and reactions. But to be thus bound up together means only that each individual existence is enclosed and contained in a group existence. It does not mean that between one member and another of the group there exists any kind of personal relation. They do feel that they belong together in a way that is, so to speak, fundamentally different from every possible belonging together with someone outside the group. And there do arise, especially in the life of smaller groups, contacts which frequently favour the birth of individual relations, but, on the other hand, frequently make it more difficult. In no case, however, does membership in a group necessarily involve an existential relation between one member and another. It is true that there have been groups in history which included highly intensive and intimate relations between two of their members — as, for instance, in the homosexual relations among the Japanese Samurai or among Doric warriors — and these were countenanced for the sake of the stricter cohesion of the group. But in general it must be said that the leading elements in groups, especially in the later course of human history, have rather been inclined to suppress the personal relation in favour of the purely collective element. Where this latter element reigns alone or is predominant, men feel themselves to be carried by the collectivity, which lifts them out of loneliness and fear of the world and lostness. When this happens — and for modern man it is an essential happening — the life between person and person seems to retreat more and more before the advance of the collective. The collective aims at holding in check the inclination to personal life. It is as though those who are bound together in groups should in the main be concerned only with the work of the group and should turn to the personal partners, who are tolerated by the group, only in secondary meetings.

Nietzsche, on the same insight:

Dialogue. — A dialogue is the perfect conversation because everything that the one person says acquires its particular color, sound, its accompanying gesture in strict consideration of the other person to whom he is speaking; it is like letter-writing, where one and the same man shows ten ways of expressing his inner thoughts, depending on whether he is writing to this person or to that. In a dialogue, there is only one single refraction of thought: this is produced by the partner in conversation, the mirror in which we want to see our thoughts reflected as beautifully as possible. But how is it with two, or three, or more partners? There the conversation necessarily loses something of its individualizing refinement; the various considerations clash, cancel each other out; the phrase that pleases the one, does not accord with the character of the other. Therefore, a man interacting with several people is forced to fall back upon himself, to present the facts as they are, but rob the subject matter of that scintillating air of humanity that makes a conversation one of the most agreeable things in the world. Just listen to the tone in which men interacting with whole groups of men tend to speak; it is as if the ground bass of all speech were: “That is who I am; that is what I say; now you think what you will about it!” For this reason, clever women whom a man has met in society are generally remembered as strange, awkward, unappealing: it is speaking to and in front of many people that robs them of all intelligent amiability and turns a harsh light only on their conscious dependence on themselves, their tactics, and their intention to triumph publicly; while the same women in a dialogue become females again and rediscover their mind’s gracefulness.

Nietzsche makes a lot more general sense and seems a little less sexist if you decode his comments on women with the aid of this Rosetta stone (from the preface of Beyond Good and Evil): “Supposing truth is a woman–what then?”

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This distinction is completely relevant to brand, not only externally, but also internally.

Comparing the experience of two people in the same situation, some elements of the experience will be identical, some different but compatible, some different and conflicting.

Those elements of experience that are reliably identical across experiences are interpreted as attributes of objects, and we call objective. Those elements that are reliably different across experiences we call subjective, and are interpreted as attributes of subjects.

In the end, however, all comparisons are made by subjects between subjects, through the essentially intersubjective medium of language, and they deal with experiences had by subjects. Objectivity is a subset of subjectivity with a very blurry edge and perhaps nothing but blurry edge around a point-of-approach suggesting a metaphysical existence. And other subjects are essentially different from one’s own. We are comparing unlike beings as though they are like, through language and phenomenal reference points — so the subjectivity of others is also a point-of-approach suggesting a metaphysical existence.

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To think of objectivity as somehow more real than subjectivity, and subjectivity as more real than intersubjectivity is to take what is furthest for what is nearest, and it has disastrous practical implications, as does taking objectivity to be unreal and invalid.

When we read a mystery we try to discern the essential truth of the mysterious situation from a smattering of details. We begin tentatively, with a hypothesis or set of hypotheses which orders our understanding and, more subtly, through the uncanny influence of relevance, our perceptions. Some details are regarded as significant, others as trivial, and some fail to register at all until much later.

As the mystery develops, anomalies accumulate; things stop adding up; we suspect that our failure to make sense of things might have less to do with absence of clues, than it does with misreading the significance of existing clues. The investigation becomes reinvestigation. We try on different interpretive schema, look at the picture from different angles, ask ourselves what understanding develops if some innocent-seeming character is hiding something, or if some suspicious character is actually benign or benevolent. We find our allegiances shifting, and with it the balance of relative certainties.

Eventually, an epiphany occurs. Often it comes in the form of a crystalizing paradox which changes everything at once, as a whole and in every detail.

We can also experience this same strange phenomenon — the hermeneutic shift — reading mystery novels, though the effect is mostly confined to the experience of the book itself. In reading real-life mysteries, the world itself is transfigured, ourselves with it.

Experience and invention. — However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment remain wholly unknown to him. This nutriment is therefore a work of chance: our daily experiences throw some prey in the way of now this, now that drive, and the drive seizes it eagerly; but the coming and going of these events as a whole stands in no rational relationship to the nutritional requirements of the totality of the drives: so that the outcome will always be twofold — the starvation and stunting of some and the overfeeding of others. Every moment of our lives sees some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others of them wither, all according to the nutriment which the moment does or does not bear with it. Our experiences are, as already said, all in this sense means of nourishment, but the nourishment is scattered indiscriminately without distinguishing between the hungry and those already possessing a superfluity. And as a consequence of this chance nourishment of the parts, the whole, fully grown polyp will be something just as accidental as its growth has been. To express it more clearly: suppose a drive finds itself at the point at which it desires gratification — or exercise of its strength, or discharge of its strength, or the saturation of an emptiness — these are all metaphors –: it then regards every event of the day with a view to seeing how it can employ it for the attainment of its goal; whether a man is moving, or resting or angry or reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive will in its thirst as it were taste every condition into which the man may enter, and as a rule will discover nothing for itself there and will have to wait and go on thirsting: in a little while it will grow faint, and after a couple of days or months of non-gratification it will wither away like a plant without rain. Perhaps this cruelty perpetrated by chance would be more vividly evident if all the drives were as much in earnest as is hunger, which is not content with dream food; but most of the drives, especially the so-called moral ones, do precisely this — if my supposition is allowed that the meaning and value of our dreams is precisely to compensate to some extent for the chance absence of ‘nourishment’ during the day. Why was the dream of yesterday full of tenderness and tears, that of the day before yesterday humorous and exuberant, an earlier dream adventurous and involved in a continuous gloomy searching? Why do I in this dream enjoy indescribable beauties of music, why do I in another soar and fly with the joy of an eagle up to distant mountain peaks? These inventions, which give scope and discharge to our drives to tenderness or humorousness or adventurousness or to our desire for music and mountains — and everyone will have his own more striking examples to hand — are interpretations of nervous stimuli we receive while we are asleep, very free, very arbitrary interpretations of the motions of the blood and intestines, of the pressure of the arm and the bedclothes, of the sounds made by church bells, weathercocks, night-revellers and other things of the kind. That this text, which is in general much the same on one night as on another, is commented on in such varying ways, that the inventive reasoning faculty imagines today a cause for the nervous stimuli so very different from the cause it imagined yesterday, though the stimuli are the same: the explanation of this is that today’s prompter of the reasoning faculty was different from yesterday’s — a different drive wanted to gratify itself, to be active, to exercise itself, to refresh itself, to discharge itself — today this drive was at high flood, yesterday it was a different drive that was in that condition. — Waking life does not have this freedom of interpretation possessed by the life of dreams, it is less inventive and unbridled — but do I have to add that when we are awake our drives likewise do nothing but interpret nervous stimuli and, according to their requirements, posit their ’causes’? that there is no essential difference between waking and dreaming? that when we compare very different stages of culture we even find that freedom of waking interpretation in the one is in no way inferior to the freedom exercised in the other while dreaming? that our moral judgments and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us, a kind of acquired language for designating certain nervous stimuli? that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text? — Take some trifling experience. Suppose we were in the market place one day and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us — and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world — and in each case a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey: why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait. — One day recently at eleven o’clock in the morning a man suddenly collapsed right in front of me as if struck by lightning, and all the women in the vicinity screamed aloud; I myself raised him to his feet and attended to him until he had recovered his speech — during this time not a muscle of my face moved and I felt nothing, neither fear nor sympathy, but I did what needed doing and went coolly on my way. Suppose someone had told me the day before that tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the morning a man would fall down beside me in this fashion — I would have suffered every kind of anticipatory torment, would have spent a sleepless night, and at the decisive moment instead of helping the man would perhaps have done what he did. For in the meantime all possible drives would have had time to imagine the experience and to comment on it. — What then are our experiences? Much more that which we put into them than that which they already contain! Or must we go so far as to say: in themselves they contain nothing? To experience is to invent? — (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 119)

When the Earth looks toward the Sun, its vision moves within the Sun’s bright blue-bounded heaven. Only when the Earth turns its back to the Sun and looks out into space through its own shadow does it gain a broader perspective on the heavens. It is comforting to imagine worlds cradled in daytime among the icy, silver specks.

Goods are necessary to sustain meaningful work.

1) We need the right goods to live right and be able to work well; and 2) we need other people to need the goods we produce, or the work lacks functional tension.

Neither means nor ends are dispensable.

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Since the industrial revolution we’ve treated means as an undesirable nuisance, which through the help of technology we can minimize. Less work was necessary, and that necessary work became worse work.

The dialogical process of making vanished. The circling process that makes work as absorbing as conversation — where the maker listens to and responds to his own work as he works on it — the feedback loop of craft — was snipped and straightened into the linear monotony of the assembly line.

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Knowledge workers work on assembly lines, called processes.

The same philosophy that produced and blessed assembly lines, produces and blesses processes. To this philosophy, efficiency is self-evidently good, numbers are more real than what we see, what we see is more real than what we feel, objectivity is truth, subjectivity distorts truth, ends justify means.

(Actually, this isn’t even a philosophy, it’s just “how things are”. Philosophy is what pretends things can be otherwise.)

Living by this reality, we set a specific, defined goal, then after follow a straight line as directly as possible to that goal. After the goal is defined and the line to the goal is planned out, we stop listening or looking: we execute.

If we hear or see something in the course of execution that suggests a change of course, what we hear is evidence of an error committed, and what we see is a mistake.

But through the eyes of craft, these errors and mistakes are twists and turns of a conversation.

Through the eyes of craft, the correction of a flaw, the improvisation in the face of the unexpected, the discovery of a blind-alley — these are the essence of development.

Through the eyes of craft, these meanderings, tackings, abortive explorations and failed hypotheses are the opposite of regrettable. They’re the pleasure of work.

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Marx was wrong to attribute alienation to not owning the means of production: alienation is loss of craft.

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Possessions and freedom only increase the odds you will be able to do what you were born to do (aka fulfill your destiny).

If you were given possession of the whole world and the freedom to do anything you wished, except for doing what you were born to do, you would feel empty and dead.

If all your possessions were taken away and were forced to do what you were born to do: you’d be happy.

The latter happens when fate thrusts exactly the right catastrophes on a person.

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Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

– W. B. Yeats

*

Do you know what you want? — Have you never been plagued by the fear that you might be completely incapable of knowing the truth? The fear that your mind may be too dull and even your subtle faculty of seeing still much too coarse? Have you not noticed what kind of will rules behind your seeing? For example, how yesterday you wanted to see more than another, today differently from another, or how from the very first you longed to find what others fancied they had found or the opposite of that! Oh shameful craving! How you sometimes looked for something which affected you strongly, sometimes for what soothed you — because you happened to be tired! Always full of secret predeterminations of how truth would have to be constituted if you would consent to accept it! Or do you believe that today, since you are frozen and dry like a bright morning in winter and have nothing weighing on your heart, your eyes have somehow improved? Are warmth and enthusiasm not needed if a thing of thought is to have justice done to it? — and that precisely is seeing! As though you were able to traffic with things of thought any differently from the way you do with men! In this traffic too there is the same morality, the same honourableness, the same reservations, the same slackness, the same timidity — your whole lovable and hateful ego! When you are physically tired you will bestow on things a pale and tired coloration, when you are feverish you will turn them into monsters! Does your morning not shine upon things differently from your evening? Do you not fear to re-encounter in the cave of every kind of knowledge your own ghost — the ghost which is the veil behind which truth has hidden itself from you? Is it not a horrible comedy in which you so thoughtlessly want to play a role? —

– Nietzsche