Pragmatic presequence

Philosophy

I just connected two of my favorite ideas, the hermeneutic priority of the question, and the pragmatic maxim.

Both are attempts to account for meanings of ideas.

The principle of the hermeneutic priority of the question (as Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it) conceives understanding of any idea (or text) as a matter of hearing it as a response to an implied or explicit question. If a reader hears the idea as the response to the question intended by the author of the idea, the idea is properly understood. If the idea is heard as a response to some other question unrelated to the one implicitly asked by the author, it is misunderstood, even if the misunderstanding is a productive one.

The pragmatic maxim (originally conceived by C. S. Peirce) sees the meaning of an idea as the consequences that follow from the idea if it is believed to be true. William James called these consequences the “cash value” of the idea. (One excellent application of the pragmatic maxim is a religious one, the question of God’s existence. Instead of asking whether God exists or not, ask what follows from your belief or disbelief in God. In this, and many other cases, “therefores” are far more clarifying than definitions.)

These two ideas snap together with irresistible elegance, as the complementary upstream and downstream of meaning — the pragmatic presequence and consequence of ideas.

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the consequences that follow from it.

Subjective disposition

Philosophy

If, from our very earliest moments, we learn to conceive ourselves as beings who exist in space, an object among objects, within a world held in common — and then later to understand subjectivity as a way to account for differences in how we apparently experience this shared space-bound, object-filled reality we inhabit together, our basic disposition will be objective.

Is this the natural human intellect, or is it cultural? I don’t know, but I can say that this was the disposition I had when I emerged from the oblivion of early childhood, and it seems to be, if not universal, common to most people around me.

When I was very young, Unless I was confronted with evidence to the contrary, I assumed people experienced things the way I did. When they didn’t, this seemed to require explanation. Of course, every child learns the fundamental fact of subjectivity, that I have my experiences and others have theirs. I can feel pain or pleasure, when others do not, and vice versa. To recognize that an something painless or even pleasurable to me might be painful to another is less obvious. And to suspect that that the pain another is attempting to express or describe might be of a kind unlike any pain I’ve known is far from obvious.

But all of these ways of conceiving subjectivity, as means to explain difference in a common objective field, belongs to what I’m calling an objective disposition.

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Somewhere in my early 30s I shifted my disposition to a subjective one — or rather, I began to — because the first event in the shift was a second objectivity.

I want to clarify what I mean here by shift, because this shift was not only a change in ideas, or assessment of what ideas were true or false, better or worse, more or less compelling or more or less useful for my purposes.

The shift in disposition arose from a mixture of interrogating my basic understandings and values, and experimentally entertaining new understandings and values, but did not consist essentially of new ideas or ideals. Something else happened, and it could not be communicated in any direct way. It could only be indicated or expressed, not explained. All I could say about the change itself was that it defied speech, that it changed literally everything and that I could not imagine a supernatural event more surprising or momentous than this.

Strangely, what I was able to talk about was the objective world as it reemerged in a very new way — what Richard Rorty calls redescription. This new world demanded redescription.

Later, the need to bridge this new objectivity and my own experience of it with the understandings of others around me, especially those closest to me, became urgent. As I reflected on the relationship between subjectivity and the multiple objectivities that had seemed true to me, and in fact, in both cases were indistinguishable from reality itself, I shifted from a second objectivity to what I am calling a subjective disposition, which sees all objectivity as arising from subjectivity.

I stopped feeling the need to root my metaphysical accounts in a shared objective, spatial world containing objects and subjects, as the primary setting of reality, and everted the relationship so that space, time, objects and fellow subjects were contained within subjects who have the strange ability to interact and even to commune into larger subjectivities and to individuate into smaller ones. Where consistent commonalities of experience occur across subjectivities, objectivity emerges, expands, stabilizes and establishes itself so firmly it becomes possible to evert truth so fully that subjectivity seems to be an epiphenomenon of objectivity.

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So, now, I’ll ask you: Was this a religious conversion?

When I read accounts of religious people, I believe I know exactly what they are talking about.

However, if you were to ask a typical smart atheist to make a list of all the stuff they do not believe, I would probably share most of their disbeliefs (if not all of them).

So, I had a strange shift in pretty much everything all at once, and reached for the concepts available around me to make sense of it. Had I experienced the same thing a thousand years ago, I would have had different concepts around me. Perhaps I would have made sense of it with angels and demons and netherworlds, instead of subjects and objects and redescriptions.

Dadvice to Helen

Hermeneutics, Judaism

Helen sent Susan and me a page from her Mussar book, and asked “What does this mean?”

For some reason (probably because I was reading Fishbane) I found this question inspiring, and gave a reply that I want to capture here:

First, understand, there won’t be a factual answer. It will be more a tilt of understanding.

The best thing is to struggle. Ask yourself some questions: “The vengeance was toward Egypt via the waters, not toward the waters per se. Gratitude prevented Moses from using waters as an instrument of vengeance. Where have I seen situations where gratitude impedes vengeance?”

Or “Is there always collateral damage in seeking vengeance? Where have I seen it? How can I link gratitude to choosing not to be violent?”

Or “If we have a deep feeling of all-encompassing gratitude, is vengeance even possible at all? Is violence? Is hatred? What happens to our moral and emotional disposition if gratitude dominates our moral disposition?”

That is how to wrangle with sacred texts and commentaries.

Does that help at all? You should spend around 10 minutes meditating in self-dialogue of this kind for every minute you spend reading. Maybe even start by writing yourself questions. The tilt in understanding actually happens in the thrust of questions you discover to ask yourself.

Every factual statement we hear gets its meaning from an implied question. Most misunderstandings can be reduced to hearing a statement as answering a question the statement was not meant to answer. In philosophy we are trying to acquire conceptions capable of posing unasked questions and producing novel answers.

 

Depiction of villains

Philosophy

Whenever I want to know who someone is, I try to get them to talk about the people they hate. Whether in art or life, the depiction of villains demonstrates selfhood more than depiction of heroes.

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Definitions de-finitize. They tell us what something is, by distinguishing it from what it is not. But we are most accustomed to third person definitions. How can a person seeing from the first person define my own self from the entire everything I enworld? “My” is somehow not first person, here, nor is “me”.

Me — first person object — is a deflected 3rd person who corresponds with I, first person subject.

*

Some people understand themselves only as first person object (me), while first person subject (I) is lost in oblivion.

Such people “look for themselves” but rarely \ask: who’s looking? They assume self is some kind of findable content instead of a container, a found thing instead of the finding agent, someone known instead of someone who knows — a thing among things within everything, not an everything of its own.

They are the I-less Mes.

A society of I-less Mes, also act as a We-less We who acts without detecting the We who acts.

They’ll each say “speaking as a…”, but they don’t realize there is a We who needs everyone to speak as a something. The political We remains as inconceivable as the Me who constitutes it.

Here  even subjects are objects, but the real subject always remains preconceived.

*

I-less Me, Me-less I seem to attract, as do I-full Me and Me-full I.

*

These mind states are not essential. They are produced by how we think and act in the world. They are varieties of enworldment, and can be changed.

When enworldments change, miracles happen.

Sacred and profane

Philosophy

The bits of reality that understand that they and all other bits of reality are finite participants in absolute infinitude — each its own center-point in the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere —  seem almost essentially different from the finite bits of reality that mistake themselves for the absolute itself, by seeing validity in only one of the myriad possible truth-conceptions.

One of the better essentialisms, if one must be an essentialist is the distinction between sacred and profane.

The sacred is deeply, humbly, mystically pluralist. If one commits to a single truth, this is a methodological decision.

The profane, on the other hand, is philosophically omniscient, conceptually equipped to understand every relevant fact, though lacking capacity to contain all facts, because nobody can know everything.

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If I could make one change to the world it would be to persuade all parents to adopt this as their scold of choice: “You are not the sole center of the universe.”

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We have sacred and profane confused. Sacredness is oriented toward living relationship with what is not ourselves — not comprehension, belief or identity, which has much more to do with our own sequestered mental processes, however passionately we process our mental product.

But we feel heat from high-voltage mental short-circuits and mistake it for the warmth of care.

This encourages us to view the most profane, fevered theological fanatics for the most devoutly religious people, despite the fact that the object of their devotion is ideoidols — not any being who transcends their imaginations. Similarly, we allow ideological identity-mongers to enjoy exclusive rights to the virtue of empathy, though their intense feelings are bound up now with real living people that they know personally, but with their own mental images, their own logics, their own sociological theories, and most of all their own ethical status — and they fail to notice that they dehumanize not only their detested enemies, but those they imagine themselves to champion. Worshippers of imagined gods, defenders of make-believe people, riding into epic battles on the side of good against the forces of evil — dangerous sleepwalkers in philosophical Augmented Reality goggles, swinging real weapons in real rooms with real people in them…

Meanwhile, sacredness goes about its work respectfully and unobtrusively, learning, sharing, forming relationships and making modest accomplishments.

Inherent truth

Philosophy

Today, we are inclined to take Michelangelo’s notion of forms inhering within blocks of marble more as poetic expression than factual assertion: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Perhaps someday we will reach a point where, similarly, we will hear the notion of truth inhering within reality as poetic expression. At the time we will experience even the driest, most matter-of-fact assertions that reality bears an inherent truth as one kind of poetic stance, without any inclination to argue over whether it is true that fact is a poetic mode.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.” – Jack Handey

The Collective Mental Disorder game

Philosophy

I don’t know why I do this. I just posted something thoughtful on Facebook to be ignored, snarked at or bufoonated upon.

From years of reading about mass misbehaviors (aka history) and living through a couple myself, I’ve come to the belief that whatever can go wrong in the mind of an individual can also go even more horribly wrong in the culture of a collectivity.

I enjoy the exercise of imagining every variety of mental disorder on a mass scale. I start with speculating what it would look like as a mass phenomenon from the outside, because that is easier. You can look for pattern matches using stuff you’ve picked up from History Channel or best seller historical fiction. That’s the warmup.

Then I try to imagine the same phenomenon from the inside as an unsuspecting participant, fully bought into the version of truth generated by the totalizing interpretive scheme and its logic. I’ve learned this in school as fact, see it reinforced wherever I look, and everyone around me agrees with it (or at least all decent people do). What is the world like from this standpoint, ordered within this perspective?

A few examples: What would mass delusion be like, experienced from the inside? What about mass narcissism? Mass OCD? Mass sociopathy? Would there be any hints of what was going on? How could I know? I’m guessing every hint would be handily explained away by the logic of the disorder, so how would would I and those around me logically neutralize every clue that we’d lost our collective mind?

I have a copy of the DSM on my shelf, and people sometimes ask why we we have it. I usually answer “bad taste in friends” or something along the lines of needing to diagnose my book hoarding problem — but I think I’m going to take it off my shelf and put it on my coffee table, so I can open it to a random place and play the Collective Mental Disorder game with visitors.

I recommend declining any invitations to my home until this whim blows over.

Co-marveling

Biography

Helen and I built our relationship on sharing experiences. It began with cooking together, then mountain biking, and then listening to music — and then marveling to music.

This is very different for me; I’ve always seen relationships in terms of conversation, and most importantly, exchange of ideas.

But from childhood to late adolescence, Helen absolutely refused to connect intellectually. I was forced to find some other mode of relating to her, and finding it changed everything for me. To share the experience of marveling — to have a similarly awestruck response to beauty — connects us to each other and to the world. It is communion.

Then, after pointing me to the world beyond language, Helen became obsessed with linguistics, and now her knowledge is so deep, intricate and technical it defies my comprehension.

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Exchange of ideas remains my primary mode of relating to other people. But now, the ideas I’m most keen to exchange are ideas that affirm the reality and the importance of reality outside of what words capture — the realities to which we relate through art, through religion, through wordless interaction, through sharing nonverbal experiences, through the exchange of gifts.

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Language itself can grow solipsistic if we don’t perpetually reintroduce it to what transcends language. Yes, language and reason is reality but in a very important sense it is also with reality. Reality involves but exceeds the word.

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I am still reading Michael Fishbane’s Sacred Attunement. My current section is examining a passage from Genesis from four multiple hermeneutic modes, called Pardes:

And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’ And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-el, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. — Genesis 28:10–19

For Jacob it was a space, marked with an anointed stone.

Why can’t it also be music?

Hounds of Love

Abbey Road

The Green Bus

Naive realized

Enworldment

Second-naturalness is naive realization.

We go from one state of naive realism to another, hopefully to a naive realism energized with a profound sense of irony and creative possibility. But, ironically, one we cannot help but take for real.

This state transcends postmodern knowingness. It commits, because it has overcome the silly idea that in the absence of a reigning Truth only anarchy is possible, and rather, has come to accept a more democratic ideal: respect for what realities say to us when we interact with them.

Authority has been broken, shattered, pulverized, atomized, subatomized and distributed to every corner of the universe, and now everything is due its respect.

Or so it seems to me, and I find it hard to believe otherwise.

The Click

Enworldment, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Myriad ways to experience the world are possible, and these ways of seeing the world correspond with particular orderings of intuitive activity.

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Can you perceive this dancer to be spinning clockwise and then to be spinning counter-clockwise? Can you feel what kind of effort you are making? There may be inner-chatter associated with your effort, but if you pay close attention you’ll notice that the chatter is neither the effort itself, nor is it able to capture the effort in words. Something beyond language is happening.

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When we look at an optical illusion and we perceive it first one way, then another — what is going on there? This is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon. There is an inner click, and our perception changes from one stable state to another.

When we read a text and we derive one meaning from it, but then later, another — is this really that different from the various gestalt modes of an optical illusion? And is the intellectual click that happens across the different readings really a linguistic phenomenon?

I would argue that both of these cases manifest a tacit shift in our intuitive order, which we experience most obviously as a change in experience of an intentional object (a visual field or a text) — but which also for the duration of the experience changes how it is to exist.

Like optical illusions, like texts with layered meanings, minds are multistable. And the various stabilities perceived or understood “out there” are actually the various stabilities “in here” doing the perceiving or conceiving in a particular mode of inner intuitive collaboration. This is what is at stake in all interpretation. We ourselves change when our understanding changes. (A religious person might prefer saying it in different language: Our souls are transfigured by faith.)

Of course, we can also lose order. We can be of two minds on some matter, or we may be conflicted, confused or perplexed. These less-ordered or chaotic states also affect how it is to exist.

Confusion about what is going on in the world makes us feel confused in our own being. It is no accident that we say “I am confused” when we are unable to make sense of something.

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To get our intuitive mess back in order when we say “I am confused” or to break an intuitive order that says “I am miserable” or “The world is a vale of misery” we cannot just operate directly on our intuitions. Intuitions just aren’t a kind of thing we can manipulate like objects. (((Intuitions are subjects, each a sand-grain-sized jewel in Indra’s Net, each a divine spark that beyonds All in its own partial way.)))

I would also argue that operating directly on the conclusions our intuitive orders produces willful delusions. We cannot just decide that “I am clear” or “I am happy” or “The world is a vale of happiness” and spontaneously see things that way, any more than we can look at an optical illusion and just assert that we see it as the gestalt that has not yet clicked for us.

We must approach our intuitive orders indirectly, through various intentional objects, and do intuitive experiments, trying to entertain it in a multiplicity of ways, until a gestalt shift occurs that changes what we experience, both on the whole and in part. (I call these gestalts effected through such shifts synesis.)

When the click happens and we truly understand a situation differently, experience it differently, reach different conclusions and find ourselves feeling and responding differently — this is metanoia.

Metanoia is often translated as repentance, which is not altogether wrong, but it misses the spirit of the change. Repentance over-emphasizes the penitential emotions that motivate us to do better. It is about re-understanding things in such a way that makes the non-desirability of our old way clear, and causes a new way of understanding, behaving and existing to emerge and click in place that is experienced as clearly preferable to the earlier way.

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When we try to change our lives, what we believe, how we behave, without making our intuitions click into a new order, we will speak and act in a way that is artificial. To maintain our changedness we must constantly micromanage ourselves, police ourselves, remain vigilant of ourselves. We must consciously “do the work” of enforcing the desired cognitions, conduct and speech, or our unconscious selves will horrify and shame us with its unwanted outputs.

If we change our lives through metanoia, the change is obviously different from what seemed natural to us before, but this new existence is second-natural. We spontaneously, intuitively (literally), effortlessly have a new and preferable outlook on things, and our souls somehow, mysteriously, feel better.

This year's winning illusion presents a simple shape rotating around a horizontal and vertical axis at the same time

Synesis and perplexity

Synesis

Learning is never just a passive transmission of truths from one mind to another. Learning is an integration of new knowledge into an existing body of knowledge.

All this knowledge, old and new, is held together with intuitive knowing — pre-verbal relating, responding or feeling — of various kinds. This intuitive holding-together is what is meant when we say we understand something. Behind every understanding is a complex coordination of intuitions — an intuitive concerting that makes sense of something. And behind that is intuitive holding-together of understandings that situates and relates each bit of knowledge within our overall sense of the world.

The Greeks, with staggering elegance, called understanding synesis.

Synesis means, simply, “bring together”. Synesis is a bringing together one’s own various intuitions, in order to bring together various ideas and perceptions into something understood, which is then brought together with the rest of one’s understandings, one’s holistic understanding of everything. And once something is understood by one person, it can then be taught to other persons, and then there is a fourth bringing together: shared understanding. So synesis brings together many diverse kinds of bringing together: intuitive, phenomenal, conceptual, social.

Sometimes people must come together to develop an understanding where understanding does not yet exist.

There is a problematic situation that is understood only partially, vaguely and inadequately — or that is understood in conflicting ways — or, far more rarely, is perplexing to everyone involved. Nobody can even agree on what the problem is, or what the questions are that need answering.

These problematic situations are uncannily challenging. The more the situation is examined and analyzed, the less clear it becomes. People begin to see and feel the contradictions in their own positions. Superficial and vague opinions fall apart and dissolve into incoherence.

The problematic situation becomes a full perplexity: a failure of understanding so total that articulating the problem or asking questions is impossible.

Perplexities generate intense anxiety. It is the anxiety we all felt as students struggling to understand a math problem, or trying to get the meaning of a poem or text passage we find opaque. It is the feeling we have when someone corners us and overwhelms us with details on topics we know nothing about, and they refuse to let us disengage. Perhaps you feel some anxiety right now.

In perplexity we are confronted with a demand to understand something that defies all understanding.

If we can avoid confronting a perplexity, we will. We will ignore it, or get by with a vague gist, or we will dismiss what perplexes us as nonsense, or as something for someone else to figure out, something that is not for us.

If we cannot ignore, evade or escape the perplexity, and are forced to confront and enter it, the anxiety can bloom into intense negative feelings. We might feel hostility toward the situation and the people involved in it, especially those who seem responsible for inflicting the anxiety. We might see them as hostile, aggressive, maybe even vicious, malicious or even evil. If we respond accordingly, we might be vicious, malicious or evil, ourselves, but with just cause, of course.

But the anxiety is not about any thing or person. Anxiety is something we go into, something we are in, something that grips us, and which then infuses everything around us, even our memories and prospects. It is like depression.

Referring to anxiety (or perplexity) as “something” is not exactly right. Anxiety is not really a thing. It is, in fact, an everything. It is our own self in a certain mode of existence, refracted through every particular of our existence.

When we in a state of perplexity we become anxiety, because anxiety is the experience of perplexity, and in it our enworldment, the world as it is for us, becomes anxious, on the whole and in detail.

Why does perplexity cause anxiety?

Generations of existentialists have taught us that anxiety is caused by nothingness, and most of all by our own eventual nothingness: death.

No being wants to die. Every synesis is also a being, and does not want to die.

Perplexity is synetic nothingness, in every dimension. It is the nothingness of shared understanding, social alienation. It is the nothingness of significance in a mass of incomprehensible data, chaos. It is the nothingness of our own intuitive coherence, nihilism, self-alienation. It is an ontological migraine. It is drowning in blindness and nullity. It is selfhood’s death, even when one knows the body will live on.

When perplexity happens, a synesis will need to come apart, essentially to die, so it can be brought back together in a form capable of making sense of what confronts it.

It is rare for one’s deepest synesis to be threatened in this way. But areas of understanding, even relatively minor subjects, say our understanding of an academic subject, or an understanding of another person’s subjectivity, or a problem we encounter at work, can throw us into crises.

When synesis is allowed to come apart and then is brought back together as a new synesis capable of ordering what was chaos, to conceive ideas that were inconceivable, to speak where speech was impossible, even to perceive what was imperceptible — and, further, is able to do so in a way that can be shared with other people who, before, were unable before to establish a shared understanding — something else happens, too — something unprovable, difficult to speak about, but absolutely palpable: more of one’s own self is brought together in the new understanding.

It as if silent, intuitive aspects of our inner selves — marginal, suppressed bits of potential within us — alienated spirits — are invited to participate in this new, more expansive understanding, and to become full citizens of ourselves.

We feel more whole, and we feel more connected to others, and to our own world, and to the greater reality. And, if we are open to it, we feel an embeddedness within a vast, incomprehensible reservoir of infinite potential, which exceeds, envelops, sustains and conceives reality.

Once we enter perplexity, how do we bring together a new synesis?

It is a how, and one that cannot be said or foreseen, only done through its own synesse. It is done using words, but much of it happens prior to language. It is done by groping, feeling, smelling, intuiting.

“Here I do not know how to move around.”

Methodic wisdom

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Star, Synesis, Wheel

Susan and I have been debating what wisdom is. We each felt the other’s view was incomplete. I thought her conception was overlapping too much with prudence; she thought mine reduced wisdom with mere open-mindedness. (Actually, she was right.) As we turned the question and viewed it from multiple angles, it became clear, as is so often the case, that it was a matter of emphasis. She was emphasizing exercise of foresight and consideration — awareness of implications beyond the immediate desires and compulsions. I was emphasizing readiness for thought-defying shock — awareness that our awareness is always partial and situated within a much vaster and weirder context, only the minutest speck of which we are conceptually prepared to understand or even perceive. We’re slowly converging on an agreement. Here’s my latest attempt, written primarily for Susan’s review:

Wisdom is an attitude of mind that considers ramifying implications that transcend the immediate concern, in time, in space and in subjectivity — especially those nonobvious implications that unfold only in careful consideration and those that unfold in ways inconceivable until they unfold in reality and which will be understood as inevitable only in retrospect. Wisdom expects to be surprised, because wisdom knows the limitations of thought, and leaves room for irruptions of reality and the epiphanies they bring.

If we accept this definition of wisdom, that would make design practice a methodical form of wisdom — an alternative to speculative-thought-and-talk decision-making.

Design method directs us to go to the reality we plan to change, and encourages us to interact with it directly, in order to encounter some of the implications and ramifications of our proposed changes — many of which we otherwise would never consider.

Design is methodic wisdom.

Chief among design’s considerations are the subjective ones — the interpretive and experiential consequences of deep, hidden differences in subjectivity that must be learned before they can even be conceived. (* see note below.)

Subjective learning of new conceptions is a rigorous exercise of hermeneutic, intellectual and emotional empathy (which I prefer calling synesis). It can sometimes radically redefine the designer’s understanding of the design problem, by revealing it in a new subjective light with new practical consequences — metanoia.

This metanoia — this new, consequential reconception — simultaneously reframes the problem and opens space for novel solutions. Problems and solutions, questions and answers, possibilities and actualities burst forth together with new conceptions. And because the new conception has been learned from real people and refer to real contexts, the newly conceived solutions are far more relevant and on-the-mark. I like to call design metanoia “precision inspiration”.

(* Note: The whole field of thought around conception is grossly misunderstood. Until a conception is learned, all ideas that require it are either inconceivable — submerged in intellectual blindness, neither perceivable nor imaginable — or misunderstood by another conception that comprehends it in a wrong sense, and commits category mistakes. If the originating conception of a set of ideas is finally acquired, the new conception spontaneously reorders the understandings, both on the whole and in part, and there is an epiphany. If the reconception is a very deep one, upon which many other conceptions are rooted, and these have wide-ranging pragmatic consequences, it can seem that everything has changed all at once. The scales seem to have fallen from one’s eyes, one feels reborn as a new person, and it feels and if the entire world has transfigured itself. Until one has experienced something like this, all language associated with this kind of event sounds like magical hocus-pocus — but this is only a misconception of what remains inconceivable. The consequences of this hocus-pocus are just the copious category mistakes of the believing fundamentalist and the unbelieving antifundamentalist.)