Five facets of reason

Ethics

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats

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In “The Second Coming” Yeats poses one of the great ethical riddles: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Who are the best and the worst? What defines them as best or worst? How does the question of best and worst connect with questions of belief and will?

What does it looks like when the best rediscovers its convictions?

My own attempts to resolve these questions have more and more revolved around reason. In fact, these attempts have traced a tightening spiraling question: what does it mean to be reasonable?

Below is a first attempt at an answer.

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Reason is not elemental. It is essentially composite and essentially complete.

With reason, the closest approximation to reason is the furthest thing from reason: a facet removed from reason is not reasonable; but reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

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Reason is fivefold:

Reason is empirical. Reason begins and ends with concrete experience.

Reason is logical. Reason follows the rules of thought, for the sake of civility.

Reason is realist. Reason exists toward a world beyond the realm of knowledge.

Reason is experimental. Reason’s knowledge arises from interaction with reality.

Reason is supple. Reason is ready for surprise, because surprise is the mark of the real.

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An isolated facet of reason is not reasonable.

Empiricism divorced from reason is impressionistic.

Logic divorced from reason is empty.

Realism divorced from reason is helpless.

Experiment divorced from reason is impulsive.

Suppleness divorced from reason is submissive.

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Reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.

Reason without empiricism is delusive.

Reason without logic is arbitrary.

Reason without realism is solipsistic.

Reason without experiment is scholastic.

Reason without suppleness is stagnant.

Inspiration, faith, belief.

Philosophy

Religions are born as freely-given gifts. They mature in gratitude toward the giver. They die as stolen gifts, snatched from the giver’s hand and stolen as a possession: a belief.

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The giver is a mystery known only by way of receiving from who-knows-where. In the absence of this receiving the giver becomes nonsense.

Once belief is perfected and eternalized — permanently comprehended fact — religion is stillborn-again.

Dis-born, dis-conceived, erased from past and future, annihilated: fundamentalist.

Law of Reason

Design, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.

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“Reason? Why?”

Because it is reasonable.

“But that’s circular.”

It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.

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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.

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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.

 

 

Anadyomenous

Philosophy

Reading, I just came across a new, excellent word: anadyomenous. It is the characteristic of “coming up or emerging (especially of Aphrodite from the sea).”

A google search turned up exactly one example of the word in use, in the very book I am reading.

 

Why do I love design research?

Philosophy

Why do I love design research?

First, I love new ideas. Performing design research early in a project generates fresher ideas. Yes, the ideas are better informed, but more importantly, they are better inspired. When we know something we are selectively filtering what seems irrelevant. But what is deemed relevant to any industry gets overcropped by experts and it loses its vitality.

Yet, it is to this expert-blessed depleted ground we go when we want to generate new ideas.

The real opportunities to innovate are hidden in plain sight as irrelevant stuff nobody thinks is important enough to talk about.

Just as importantly, new ideas are impossible to argue in the conventional way, relying on success of precedents. Newness always loses that kind of argument. But prototype arms (good) new ideas with evidence of viability and gives them a fighting chance.

Second, I love reason. We often think of intuition as a purely benevolent force. Think of all the names it goes by: inspiration, imagination, insight, idea. All great things begin with an intuition — and a heroic will to champion it and actualize it. But this neglects to notice that the most horrible things have resulted from malformed intuitions and tyrannical wills acting in the name of heroism — and these vastly outnumber the successes that have given intuition its good name.

And really, isn’t the essence of tyranny to have an intuition — an imagined thing, an alien inspiration, a spurious insight — imposed as a reality you must accept whether you believe it or not?

Reason is what allows intuitions to be accessed, assented to, internalized and shared. Reason is the ethic that feels an obligation to show, demonstrate, persuade and share ideas to anyone expected to treat them as real.

Reason is not just logic. Any horrible idea can be argued logically, and the logical structure is rarely what makes a horrible idea horrible.

Reason is not just adherence to what seems correct. All intuitions seem correct. What make ideas horrible is that they take their own self-evident correctness at face value and sees this as sufficient to require all others to treat the idea as fact, whether it is self-evident to them or not.

Reason means to establish truth socially through experiment. Where people will not submit to experiment — (because there’s an emergency, or there’s no time, or there’s no money, or there’s no point, etc., etc. etc.) —  unreason is at work. Unreason is another name for tyrannical intuition.

Third, I love transcendent truth. That is, I love the kinds of truth that cannot even be imagined until the moment they appear. You cannot go out looking for any particular transcendent truth, because, by its very essence you cannot know what to look for. All you can do is create conditions where it can appear and to expect specifically the unexpected. When things feel constricted, played out, used up or settled, and you cannot imagine how anything new could possibly happen in your industry, your field or your organization — you are failing to factor in the innately surprising nature of transcendent truth. Again, what we know secondhand cannot produce transcendent truth: only de-filtered reality with some of its chaos permitted to shine through.

Fourth, I love dialogue. Dialogue is a very specific kind of conversation: one that allows groups (usually small ones of two or three) to gather in the name of reason, in contact with a reality, and in the urgent struggle to find-create-instaurate something new together, to experience transcendent truth, not only of the situation and its possibilities, but also of one another.

Last, and very much least, design research produces better products. I really like great products. There’s a lot of them, though. We are drowning in great products. What is rare — if we are honest with ourselves — is great work. So, the principle cultural value of good products is that they increase the urgency to make even better products, and the urgency can grow so enormous and so unavoidable that organizations will sometimes resort to doing design research to create them.

I’ve done work with research, and I’ve done work without it, and the difference is total. But you have to want that difference. Powerful people and complacent people rarely want it. But the world needs it.

Circuits

ANT, Etymology, Philosophy

Intersubjectivity is conducted through the medium of things.

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I and You runs a circuit through It.

Are things otherwise?: I is short-circuiting, again.

An indicator of a closed circuit: intense heat.

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Circuit – ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from Latin circuitus, from circuire, variant of circumire ‘go around,’ from circum ‘around’ + ire ‘go.’

(It is interesting to think of the circuit as primarily the movement, not the substance that enables the movement.)

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Laurie Anderson’s “Closed Circuit”

 

The material called reality

Design

Reality is radically heterogeneous: it is made out of materials, people, ideas, imagination, interactions, feelings, roles, habits, perspectives… whatever interacts to make a situation what it is — that is real.

Design works with heterogeneous materials in heterogeneous situations. Whatever reality is there, no matter what it is, it is considered part of a system to be modified.

Design accepts the entirety of reality as its medium and material.

 

Self in design

Design

We have to be who we are to be a participant in any relationship.

When it comes to relationships selflessness is as destructive as selfishness.

It is entirely a matter of knowing how to situate first-person-singular — I — within first-person-plural — We — and to allow a second person singular — You — to do the same.

This goes for relationship between people, but also for relationships between people and  things.

To be selfless in creation — to set yourself aside to do what is called for —  is to make trash. It is crucial to invest yourself in the things you make.

To be selfish in creation — to fail craft by not listen to the material — is to offend nature, including human nature, and gives artifice a bad name.

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When we do design research we are not collecting bits of data that will speak for itself later if we suppress our subjectivity. Not only is this approach naive, it is unnatural, alienating and highly conducive to creating the projection it seeks to prevent.

To be good researchers we have to be there, in situ, listening, letting the present reality speak for itself while it is present, letting it teach us while it is there with us able to tutor us. We have to struggling to understand and to become fluent and articulate by seeing how the reality articulates itself. And we have to be changed by what we learn, from baffled outsider to fluent participant. It is our fluency that will guide our introduction of new elements into the situation, not the data we record, chop up into individual sentences, then categorize into labeled heaps.

What does the learning look like? Like a student struggling to understand, trying out different ways to grasp the material, making mistakes, accepting correction, trying again. Frustration, then light bulbs go off. Ideas erupt spontaneously. This is also what science looks like, not like white-coated gods standing above reality like objective eyes-in-the-sky.

To learn is a humble activity.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Design rhapsody

Design, Etymology

To design — to “de-” apart + “-sign” t0 seal or mark…

— to set a thing apart and and assign it a significance…

— to define the boundaries of some reality, to extract it from the surrounding chaos and to let its reality stand in the foreground against a background, and to let it be for itself and for us…

— to separate parts within a whole, give them joints, in such a way that a sequential encounter of part-by-part allows the whole to emerge spontaneously like the meaning of a sentence emerges word-by-word without need of grammatical analysis — that is, to articulate in every sense of the word…

— to invite things to participate in human life, to embrace their inhumanity by allowing them to speak in the conversation of craft, to learn the full truth of their existence so they collaborate with us to embody a significance…

— to designify, assign designificance, apart and special.

It is good to design, and this is a good time to be a designer.

)O+

From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees

Philosophy

There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.

Continue reading From Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees →

Gives me pause

Etymology

This post poses a question regarding the relationship between posing and positing. It is interesting to me that we pose questions, but posit assertions. Situations can pose problems. We keep people posted on what is happening, particularly about these problematic situations.

It appears that this family of words revolves around two centers of gravity, split from an original root, “ponere“, translated as ‘to place’ or ‘to show off.’ pausare ‘to pause’ and Latin positura ‘position,’ from posit– ‘placed’, almost a complementary negative/positive pair, with pausare being a momentary cessation of movement — a stop-motion or freeze-frame for catching a whirling problem in the act of being problematic — and positura being a positive movement of putting a thing forth.

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An eymological exposition of ponere words:

Pose – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French poser (verb), from late Latin pausare ‘to pause,’ which replaced Latin ponere ‘to show off.’ The noun dates from the early 19th cent.

Posit – ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latin posit– ‘placed,’ from the verb ponere.

Position – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French, from Latin positio(n-), from ponere ‘to place.’ The current sense of the verb dates from the early 19th cent.

Posture – ORIGIN late 16th cent. (denoting the relative position of one thing to another): from French, from Italian postura, from Latin positura ‘position,’ from posit– ‘placed,’ from the verb ponere .

Suppose – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French supposer, from Latin supponere (from sub– ‘from below’ + ponere ‘to place’), but influenced by Latin suppositus ‘set under’ and Old French poser ‘to place.’

Impose – ORIGIN late 15th cent. (in the sense ‘impute’): from French imposer, from Latin imponere ‘inflict, deceive’ (from in– ‘in, upon’ + ponere ‘put’), but influenced by impositus ‘inflicted’ and Old French poser ‘to place.’

Expose – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French exposer, from Latin exponere (see expound), but influenced by Latin expositus ‘put or set out’ and Old French poser ‘to place.’

Repose – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French repos (noun), reposer (verb), from late Latin repausare, from re– (expressing intensive force) + pausare ‘to pause.’

Positive – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French positif, –ive or Latin positivus, from posit– ‘placed,’ from the verb ponere. The original sense referred to laws as being formally ‘laid down,’ which gave rise to the sense ‘explicitly laid down and admitting no question,’ hence ‘very sure, convinced.’

Ditto

Philosophy

Serres: “Whether royal or imperial, whoever wields power, in fact, never encounters in space anything other than obedience to his power, thus his law: power does not move. When it does, it strides on a red carpet. Thus reason never discovers, beneath its feet, anything but its own rule.”

I’ve tried to make this point several times when observing the phenomenon of the elevator pitch.

Today’s power is busy, and it expresses itself as intense impatience: “Say it so I get it instantly and effortlessly, or don’t say it.” This constraint constrains all communication to repetition of the already-known; a reference to a thought already had; a ditto; flattery.

(Ditto. Irony detected and left intact.)

Myth thematics and mathematics

Fables, myths & parables

Myths are narrative formulas.

In mythological algebra the characters are variables; the plots, operators.

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To express an objective matter with precision, mathematize it.

To express a subjective matter with immediacy, mythematize it.

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Is mathematics inherent in nature? Are myths inherent in humanity?

Perhaps both are collaborations with immanence: true instaurations.

“I don’t know my way about”

Design, Philosophy

For expertise the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out the answer to this problem.” Expertise lacks the answer, but what the question is and how it will produce an answer is not in question.

For philosophy the unknown means “I still haven’t figured out how to think about this problem.” Philosophy lacks not only an answer, but the way to ask and answer a possible question. How to ask and answer and what the answer is are found together.

Wittgenstein’s formulation is elegant: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”

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Any explorer in a new land will not know his way about. His skill is not in already knowing the landscape. His skill is navigating unmapped territory and finding his way about. He will emerge with a map. He will not try to draw it before he has explored it.

We should be suspicious of any explorer who claims to already have a map and to know his way around unexplored territory. Either he’s taking you somewhere that has already been settled, or he doesn’t know his way about “I don’t know my way about” and is likely to get you lost in the wilderness.

Innovation needs philosophy.

 

Grammatical alchemy

Philosophy

Let’s not have a face-to-face conversation this time. That’s what kids do. They gaze at one another, each a potential mating object for the other, seeing, being seen and being seen seeing.

Instead let’s have a face-face-to-object conversation. Let’s do science together. That’s the only way to get to know one another intimately, as subjects.

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Each individual I runs a circuit through the world of things on its way to becoming a We.

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Grammatical alchemy: First person singular becomes first person plural by way of third person, and in the process second person singular is transmuted from third person to first.

Challenges vs. problems

Etymology

Examining the etymologies of the words, it is strange that we use the word “challenge” as a euphemism for “problem”.

Challenge: ORIGIN Middle English (in the senses ‘accusation’ and ‘accuse’): from Old French chalenge (noun), chalenger (verb), from Latin calumnia ‘calumny,’ calumniari ‘calumniate.’

Problem: ORIGIN late Middle English (originally denoting a riddle or a question for academic discussion): from Old French probleme, via Latin from Greek probl?ma, from proballein ‘put forth,’ from pro ‘before’ + ballein ‘to throw.’