“Ready, fire, aim!”
Framing idiocy as paradox doesn’t make it less idiotic. Except to other idiots.
*
Nietzsche: “The limit of humility. — Many have no doubt attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdum est [‘I believe because it is absurd’] and sacrificed their reason to it: but, so far as I know, no one has yet attained to that humility which says: credo quia absurdus sum [‘I believe it because I am absurd’], though it is only one step further.”
Our minds grasp only that which is objective in form. What concerns us most, though, is subjective in form. This fundamental agony of being is the root of the best and worst religion.
*
An object is that which exists side-by-side among other entities.
A subject is one who participates in a whole that wholly includes and exceeds himself.
*
A person: a subject and object, who relates as an object or subject to objects and subjects.
*
Both the objective and the subjective are violently reducible to the the terms of the other. One can inhabit a radically subjective world of extensionless phenomena. One can also inhabit a radically objective world as a being with emergent consciousness. Why, though?
The theoretical question of what can be changed is different from the moral question of what ought to be changed. The theoretical and moral questions considered together determine the practical question of what we will attempt to change.
Often we theorize morality by treating change we see as morally undesirable as theoretically impossible and we moralize theory by treating change we see as theoretically impossible as morally undesirable. Both of these have been called “faith”, and both have moved mountains of discouragement in the way of people who trust love, hope, effort, resilience, forgiveness and redemption.
“To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the brainless, everything looks like a no-brainer.”
*
Success in seeing your own complete rightness; failure to see your own partial wrongness: these two conditions are not only indistinguishable — they are identical.
*
We are rarely completely wrong, but we are never as right as we could be.
If someone protests our rightness, perhaps we are not as right as we should be.
The protester can be even more wrong than we are, but that does not make us any less wrong.
We can examine the protester’s complaints and refute his protest point by point, but that does not invalidate the protest. If a sick person misdiagnoses his illness, that does not make him healthy. But this is how we treat the misdiagnosis of a moral grievance. The central fact: something is wrong.
*
Insight is unlearning rightness — finding the wrongness in our own rightness — in order to become more deeply and broadly right. Depth: we see dimension upon dimension of new unities, new distinctions, new being — Breadth: as we see more truth we recognize more truth in more articulations.
*
There is certainly an absolute state of affairs. That state of affairs is one way and not another. That state of affairs, however, should not be confused with the truth.
The truth is the ideal of knowledge, the point we work to approach when we think in good faith.
To confuse this ideal of thinking with the absolute state of affairs is to idolize the human mind.
To confuse one’s own current conception of truth with the absolute state of affairs is to self-idolize.
“One’s own”: this might be the possession of an brave individual, but more often it is the possession of an aggregate of cowardly individuals.
An individual is ashamed to worship himself. Nobody will agree with him and many will condemn him. But a group rarely hesitates to worship itself. Everyone whose opinion matters — that is, the members of the group — agrees that the group possesses the truth. There is practical value in loving your enemy: the possibility of insight.
Pure objectivity culminates in the mastery of a subject.
*
Subjectivity seems arbitrary to objective knowledge; two thousand years ago so did nature.
*
Objective knowledge is a product of subjectivity.
*
Objectivity is not the opposite of subjectivity, nor is it the ground of subjectivity. Objectivity is a disciplined subset of subjectivity, and that subset is deceptively, shockingly variable.
*
If we all agreed on everything, we would have no concept of subjectivity, nor its antithesis, objectivity. The concept of objectivity was born of disagreement.
*
We do not pursue mutual understanding when we believe we can evade or overpower the other.
*
We’ve spent the last 300 years learning to reach agreement on matters of fact and forgetting how to reach agreement on matters of value.
*
We’ve built up a great body of knowledge from the phenomenal ground of earth, but at the height of objective consensus, when it seems our objective knowledge might finally explain us to ourselves, we find we speak different moral languages and cannot understand one another because we do not want to understand one another. The differences are so violent that the methodological substructure of science is swaying and buckling, facts are being shaken loose and crashing back to the earth. The whole edifice of agreement threatens to collapse all the way to the liquid ground.
Maybe the sky would have been a more solid foundation?
*
Just because the physical ground is a stable foundation for our physical feet, does it follow that physical reality is also the most stable ground for our knowledge?
We humans are so literal about everything.
*
If everyone had refused to hear Galileo out, had not tried to see for themselves what he’d observed and how he interpreted his observations they’d never have seen the truth of his theories.
Galileo was believed, not because of the self-evident truth of his assertions, but because people cooperated with him, tried to see from his perspective and willingly reached synesis with him.
Without agreement on method, agreement on fact would have been impossible.
Why did some agree to participate in his method, where others did not?
Why do some people agree to participate in certain religious lines of thought or practice to see what kind of truth they offer, where others do not?
Why do some people prefer dialogue, where others prefer debate?
*
It seems that what we see as valuable and relevant has a lot to do with what we choose to do. And what we do has a lot to do with what we learn to regard as true. And what we regard as true can change what we see as valuable and relevant, and subsequently what we choose to do…
Why -> How -> What -> Why…
*
Objective knowledge is unjust to subjects.
*
“Love as artifice. — Whoever wants really to get to know something new (be it a person, an event, or a book) does well to take up this new thing with all possible love, to avert his eye quickly from, even to forget, everything about it that he finds inimical, objectionable, or false. So, for example, we give the author of a book the greatest possible head start, and, as if at a race, virtually yearn with a pounding heart for him to reach his goal. By doing this, we penetrate into the heart of the new thing, into its motive center: and this is what it means to get to know it. Once we have got that far, reason then sets its limits; that overestimation, that occasional unhinging of the critical pendulum, was just a device to entice the soul of a matter out into the open.” – Nietzsche
*
Subjectivity nests inside objectivity as poorly as a garden nests inside a piece of fruit.
It is easier to think objectively, but who said truth is convenient?
To a hammer everything looks like a nail. To the brainless everything looks like a no-brainer.
The word “matter” is as semantically complex as any Greek goddess. It’s hard to explain what underlies the apparent chaos and gives it a mysterious coherence.
*
matter
noun
- physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, esp. as distinct from energy : the structure and properties of matter.
- a substance or material : organic matter | vegetable matter.
- a substance in or discharged from the body : fecal matter | waste matter.
- written or printed material : reading matter.
- an affair or situation under consideration; a topic : a great deal of work was done on this matter | financial matters.
- Law something that is to be tried or proved in court; a case.
- (matters) the present situation or state of affairs : we can do nothing to change matters.
- (a matter for/of) something that evokes a specified feeling : it’s a matter of complete indifference to me.
- (a matter for) something that is the concern of a specified person or agency : the evidence is a matter for the courts.
- [usu. with negative or in questions] (the matter) the reason for distress or a problem : what’s the matter? | pretend that nothing’s the matter.
- the substance or content of a text as distinct from its manner or form.
- Printing the body of a printed work, as distinct from titles, headings, etc.
- Logic the particular content of a proposition, as distinct from its form.
verb
- [usu. with negative or in questions ] be of importance; have significance : it doesn’t matter what the guests wear | what did it matter to them? | to him, animals mattered more than human beings.
- (of a person) be important or influential : she was trying to get known by the people who matter.
- rare (of a wound) secrete or discharge pus.
PHRASES
- for that matter – used to indicate that a subject or category, though mentioned second, is as relevant or important as the first : I am not sure what value it adds to determining public, or for that matter private, policy.
- in the matter of – as regards : the British are given preeminence in the matter of tea.
- it is only a matter of time – there will not be long to wait : it’s only a matter of time before the general is removed.
- a matter of – 1. no more than (a specified period of time) : they were shown the door in a matter of minutes. 2. a thing that involves or depends on : it’s a matter of working out how to get something done.
- a matter of course – the natural or expected thing : the reports are published as a matter of course.
- a matter of form – a point of correct procedure : they must as a matter of proper form check to see that there is no tax liability.
- a matter of record
- no matter – 1. [with clause ] regardless of : no matter what the government calls them, they are cuts. 2. it is of no importance: “No matter, I’ll go myself.”
- to make matters worse – with the result that a bad situation is made worse.
- what matter? – Brit., dated why should that worry us? : what matter if he was a Protestant or not?
ORIGIN: Middle English : via Old French from Latin materia ‘timber, substance,’ also ‘subject of discourse,’ from mater ‘mother.’
An administrator sees an organization in terms of resources: measurable quantities of material at the disposal of an organization. An administrator is a What person, concerned with countable things.
A manager sees an organization in terms of work: goals, objectives, activities, tasks, cause, effect, effort and time. A manager is a How person.
A visionary sees the world in terms of meaning: the values that animate people from within and motivate them to contribute freely and to participate willingly in the life of the organization. A visionary is a Why person.
*
Very few people simultaneously command all three dimensions, but out of the desire to feel individually complete and self-sufficient (from pride or fear of otherness) many people delude themselves into believing they are better equipped than they are to understand and command an organization without help from others.
“Help from others” means a person radically unlike yourself supplies something you essentially lack. You depend on another person to compensate for a genuine personal limit or incapacity. Most of us prefer to get assistance: to delegate something we could do ourselves to another person who has time or resources — or the inability to resist. We secretly think that if our organization were made up of clones of ourselves, we’d have a perfect organization.
While the belief that one is self-sufficient and complete in all three dimensions of leadership — What, Why and How — is not necessarily false, the self-sufficient leader is rare enough that claims of self-sufficiency should be assumed false until proven true.
The best leaders, whether they are most comfortable in the What, Why or How dimension of leadership are those who not only accept but actively seek out others who can do what they cannot do, who build alliances not with those like themselves but radically different from themselves, who desire nothing more than to help lead an organization that exceeds the scope of their own mastery to the greatest possible degree. A leader who can only feel comfortable leading what he has mastered has failed to master leadership.
*
The problem of leadership is mutilated and oversimplified through invalidation and flattened through reductionism.
Invalidation is treating something as irrelevant, unnecessary, unworthy of concern, and perhaps even as bad:
Reductionism involves collapsing one or two of the three dimensions into one of the others. Generally this happens innocently and without spite or aggression. A person for whatever reason simply does not see what is missing from his view. It is similar to color-blindness. The colors to which one is blind don’t look colorless — they just look like another color. Yellow and blue look the same, so until the blindness is discovered the difference is simply not there.
It is reductionism in action when administrators fail to understand that leadership involves a lot more than managing the organization’s resources. (The fact that most organizations call their employees “resources” is telling.) It is also common to see managers with no concept of inward motivation or values who believe it is their job to provide outward motivations (positive rewards, negative punishments) for conforming to the desires of the organization’s leadership. It doesn’t even occur to visionless leaders that their best employees are driven from within, and that to the degree that their inward motivations are connected with the goals of the organization, external motivations are superfluous (and often financially and spiritually expensive).
But with reductionism, nothing appears to be missing. (This is part of the phenomenon of the horizon.) Mere administrators “manage” by communicating expectations employees are expected to meet and by which they will be measured, and share a “vision” made up entirely of quantifiable success criteria. It’s not that these kinds of objectives are unimportant, but they should not be confused with management (which outlines a practicable how), or a vision (which makes people feel personally invested and inspired). Similarly, managers will tend to try to pass off practicable plans as vision, even when the plan is devoid of inspiration or moral value.
This is the root reason that business drains the essential meaning from every word it latches on to — levels them down and homogenizes them. The people who use and popularize them within organizations are often completely unaware of how much of words they miss. Once the words are drained of specificity they’re toothless at best and suspicious at worst.
*
What is needed is for all leaders to question one of the most deeply-held American values: self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency is not without value, but it has its time and its place. Self-sufficiency is of great value to isolated men or families pressing their way west through the wilderness. Self-sufficiency is king when the law is the law of the jungle.
But to the degree civilization has advanced, different values become (oddly) more valuable. Like it or not, that signals to us an undeniable higher and lower. Think about biology: an organism composed of barely-differentiated organelles swimming in a sack of proteins is lower than an earthworm, which is lower than a fish, which is lower than a dog, which is lower than a human being. The same is true for organizations. The parts become more differentiated, individuated — but at the same time also more interdependent.
(An analogy: does it matter that a Barbarian warrior can defeat a single Roman soldier when a Barbarian hoard clashes against a Roman phalanx? The Romans saw the problem of war very differently from the Barbarians, and for as long as Rome had enough of a sense of its Why that remained disciplined in its How and honest in its What the Barbarians were invariably trounced. Only when Rome lost its meaning and sunk into demagoguery, decadence and delusion did it become vulnerable to lower political orders.)
In civilizations, the capacity to make free alliances specifically with those different from oneself in order to extend the horizon of one’s own capabilities is what makes a man powerful. This is the trajectory of progress, from the lone man, to the clan of one’s own kind, to castes and subcastes, to universal unification of diversity within an ecumenical manifold.
*
Let’s set aside the confusions of altruistic morality. Maybe there’s a metaphysical moral principle hovering beneath the world that somehow blesses the altruist in some unprovable way. Maybe there isn’t. But let’s concentrate on what is immediate and palpable: an organization that knows how to win the full, free cooperative participation of a diverse set of human beings with different talents, sensibilities and leadership instincts who allows each person to serve in his natural way, wasting neither the talent and energy of individuals, nor the resources of the organization in artificial motivations (rewards and punishments)… such an organization will prevail over homogeneous organizations with capabilities circumscribed by the type it employs and organization where the leadership unwittingly amputates the organization’s reach at the length of the leader’s own arm.
Prometheus is the god of those with foresight who can conceive and clearly communicate a detailed picture of a desired result, along with the steps that must be executed, the obstacles that must be surmounted, and the risks that must be mitigated to actualize his plan with minimum risk.
Argus is the god of the multitasking administrator who works long days and keeps an eye on myriad disconnected details.
*
In ancient Greece, Hermes was (among other things) the god of commerce, but most of us have far too many pressing and useful things to think about to indulge in purposeless interpretation of cryptic myths.
How were 15th century explorers grilled before their expeditions were funded? What questions were they asked? What assurances were demanded?
If an enterprising 15th century bureaucrat had invented Colony Administration Certifications to protect investors from risk, the New World would still be undiscovered. But maybe the investors would have been just as happy with undeveloped Spanish beach real estate discovered and claimed in their names by Certified Explorers leveraging Six Sigma Exploration and Colonization Processes.
*
“If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.” – Napoleon Bonaparte, two years before Waterloo
*
“Executives often appear at Yves Béhar’s door, saying, We want to be the Apple of our industry. His response: Do you have the guts?” (Fast Company)
*
We need a new word for innovation. The meaning of the word has been so shamelessly blurred in the universal desire to be thought of as innovative, that we now use it for just about anything. Every company that tries to improve through incremental refinements wants to place “innovation” at the center of its brand.
And similarly every business leader with an ambition and a plan and a desire to make incremental improvements has “vision”.
I’d love to see a non-innovative business led by a non-visionary. That would be so different and strange it boggles the imagination.
If every company is innovative and every leader has a vision, what do we call a company which exists to radically transform its industry and the world and actively risks itself in the pursuit of that goal? What do we call a leader who has come to see what he does from a completely new angle revealing new possibilities invisible to the industry-standard eye?
Can we say such a company is doubleplusinnovative and its leader possesses doubleplusvision?
*
Do not honor the worthy,
So that the people will not contend with one another.
Do not value hard-to-get goods,
So that the people will not turn robbers.
Do not show objects of desire,
So that the people’s minds are not disturbed.
It’s a hell of an assumption to believe that the source of pain in painful situations is essentially the birth pangs of an insight.
*
It’s safer to assume that we can always learn from painful situations. The default lesson, though, tends to be: “never again.”
*
“No pain, no gain” is easily distorted into “Pain, therefore gain.” Notice the variable: gain. Pain is the shell in a shell game.
Check out Bill O’Reilly’s outrage that such a top-selling act as the Monkees could be denied admission to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
I love it that O’Reilly didn’t really like the Monkees when they were new, but now that he can enjoy them on the oldies station, he’s making them another of his personal crusades. (Entertaining thought of the day: trying thinking of religions as oldies stations for crazed prophets.)
Reflection is only one kind of contemplation
Empathy is abstract sympathy.
A merely sympathetic person is limited to what he has experienced himself. An empathetic person can discover shared or analogous feelings across different experiences and relate himself to an other different from himself.
In Jungian terms, I think introverted feeling might be more sympathetic and extraverted feeling more empathetic.
“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
*
Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.
*
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.
*
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.
I saw this on Andrew Sullivan’s blog:
What is happening in this scene?
A typical modern “wise fool” of the religious right is made to feel her limits. She may be unable to comprehend the aesthetic truth which stands outside the horizons of her totalistic vision of life, but the certainty that there is something here to know and the certainty that she is missing it is a viscerally real experience.
This dreadful embarrassment might very well have been this woman’s first authentic experience of transcendent truth.
*
It has become certain: something that concerns me is going on beyond my own sphere of intellectual mastery. How do I respond to this certainty? How do I relate myself to this beyondness, this Otherness? This is the root of one’s religious character. And everyone, without exception, has religious character.
Most forms of religiosity involve some kind of invalidation and reduction of beyondness. Invalidation: what exists beyond my mastery doesn’t exist, or it doesn’t exist in any way that concerns me, or its existence is a mistake, or it has no right to exist and ought to be annihilated. Reduction: what exists beyond my mastery is actually some by-product or derivation of things that are within my mastery. (The philosophies of Materialism and Metaphysical Idealism are two extreme, opposing forms of reductionism.)
Forms of religiosity based on invalidation and reduction reassure us: Whatever you need to know you already know. What you need to do is already clear.
*
I think it might be time for a public debate on the difference between the foolishness of the wise and the wisdom of fools. What makes the “wise” foolish? Isn’t it feeling so wise that nobody can tell you anything you don’t already know?
We need to shed this prejudice that a low IQ protects a mind against the foolishness of the wise. Intellectual arrogance has a lot less to do with loving the extent of our intelligence than with reflexively hating what stands beyond the limits of our intelligence and inspires dread.
In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan speaks for all who close themselves to the dread of beyondness:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy FieldsWhere Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not builtHere for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
*
To the degree a man’s truth is closed and private, when he speaks his private truth he is crazy and when he lives his private truth he is evil.
To the degree that man figures out how to share that truth and to speak it with others becomes sane and good — to the others who share it, and to himself. But in the end, if he only considers himself and his community of fellow-believers he still has a private truth, and his insanity and evil are just multiplied, and his ability to recognize that fact is diminished.
It is tremendously difficult to be responsible for the sanity and good of your collective. The collective itself will hold your responsible for being responsible and not indulging its easy, insular agreement with itself that it is privileged in possessing truth and goodness.
Before 0 A.D., an individual had moral obligations only to his own tribe. Individuals were not permitted to be solipsistic and satanic (in Milton’s sense) — but nations were another story. The notion of loving one’s enemy was absurd.
*
There is no way out of our current cultural impasse except to realize we all have important and disruptive lessons to learn from one another. We need the knowledge, but even more, we need the disruption.
Everyone has something to show us about life — even a filthy Samaritan, an arrogant Scribe, a noble Roman, a degraded prostitute, a corrupt official, a disgraced, discredited, godforsaken heretic.
An experiment: See if you can accept an insight from a fundamentalist or an atheist today.
Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human:
“Future of science. — To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?”