it's all about the archive here. it's all in play.

the 'fa jing'

2009-12-08T19:08:16Z

Lauren was reading black-letter tax code and noting the difference between legal person and living person. I said, "Actually, we as legal persons aren't living persons. And, come to think of it, what makes us a living person in that sense is often the least important thing about us, just a bunch of immediate stuff that passes away long before we're dead. So that would mean law is trying to tell us that, and encode what's truly living about us. Which would mean...that law itself is going to be straining to become living."

[See, the night before had been a night with the Godcousin, and he was speed-riffing current cases of things being designed on the biological model, like bridges that can read their own material conditions and adjust accordingly, or airplanes, or airplane skins. I thought how Hegel's Logic--Logic, mind you, the least living thing there is--includes a chapter on Life and leads impercepibly to it, shows how everything is trying to get there, as a logical--even ontological--consequence.]

How would that be? What would 'living law' be? Well, there's that experience you can have with the Torah if you can get ultimately devotional about it. Could modern law really attain anything like that? I think so. It would start with what I've been trying to do for ten years anyway--take something like the Model Penal Code, that's reached a high state of polish on the level of 'determinations of reflection' (outline form, cause and effect, subject vs. object), and try to tease out what you can feel is something going on behind it, something that could be expressed much more adequately in another kind of expression, like the system of classic axiom switches I tried at first, which I'm now in turn embedding in dialectic. Dialectic goes easily to Taoist, which goes to a 'xi' (繫) style of writing, and there you have it--a 'Fa Jing'--a Law Jing to go with the Logic Jing, History Jing, Poetry Jing, Protocol Jing.

Like she was poring over the definition of 'related persons', and one bullet point was 'the fiduciaries of two trusts with the same granter'. That is, if I hold on to a college fund to give to my child on his eighteenth birthday, I'm implicitly two people, one granting it (the granter) and one hanging on to it (the fiduciary). Those could be split into two literal people, so those are 'related people'--two that in the prototypical case are one. Well, in the ticklishness of that new idea, we don't think on to very simple extensions. For example, a granter doesn't have to only have one trust, and each could have a different person acting as a fiduciary. Are those related people? (What's driving this is that people figure out how to get around regulations by, say, renting things to themselves at inflated rates, and they do it through legally splitting themselves into two parties, one to rent to the other.)

So there it is, in the realm of 'reflected determinations'--in this case a bulleted list. But what's driving it is a classic axiom switch of one party becoming multiple and multiple parties one. Dialectically, that's One and Many, with the demonstration of how they turn into each other, which can only be grasped by going very quiet and slow, not the frenzied and reactive they cultivate in Law School.

A 'Fa Jing' from a tax code. It would be not only logically rigorous--clean and adaptable--like I was originally shooting for, but living, devotional, lending itself to Adults instead of Careerists.

mechanical vs. chemical relation to information

2009-02-06T19:53:26Z

There are a lot of people that I love to death for how they take in information constantly, especially when they feel it should be more than information and actively keep it related to the values involved, especially when they have a non-stop heart for communication. It's then that there'll just be this one little thing missing that I can't get my finger on, some way they've still managed after all that to keep it recreational.

Maybe it says it to distinguish between a mechanical and a chemical relationship to information. I want to say it as looking to have your operating system updated, not just your database. I want to say it's looking for reformatting, educating the instinct for what counts as a question, what counts as an answer, what other motivations there can be that aren't really other ones meaning others that even more so are others, what the values are and the values of the values and how they not only have to have their conflicts resolved but are in fact the resolution of conflicts, and all this because every value is one I plan on living by. Or I want to say it's running the arrows all ways, like if some data proves a theory, take the theory out and ask if the data would themselves suggest it, or if something is a prime example of something, check if in fact it has any relationship to other things I'd consider a prime example of it. I want to say it's having two paths between any two points, everything with both a theoretical and a practical version, an immediate and a mediated version, a thing-in-itself and a for-other version, one version as a whole and one as a totality.

But all of that could be statements said and managed. How about just the earnestness to come up with such statements? Not if it's an earnestness to come up with statements.

And it seems like it could say it to picture the learner and the learnings as substances coming together and note the difference between them being inert plastic or reactive chemicals.

But then I hear Tillich talking about revelation and recognize it as not just an experience of religious information. Then he says that revelation and salvation are the same thing because revelation is only revelation to the extent it changes you, and, after a little reflection, I recognize that too, with everything, not just religion.

And I remember that this was the basic experience of Christianity, and did that maybe set it all off?

Christianity had the problem of answering every question you could think of but none that you ran into. That led me out past it because if there was a Jesus that could touch you and you'd be healed, then we must have something wrong, it must be addressed to what you run into moment to moment. And that went along, anyway, with the idea that the Messiah was going to come from somewhere you weren't looking, and enjoinders to stay radically awake. So when science and art showed the same problem, in came the issue of what could you really vouch for spending time on, what would be with you in times of gravest crisis, what you could feel alive and active on your deathbed, and this sort of 'chemical' relationship to it always produced just such things.

And the blank stares or outright rancorous accusations of those who didn't have this sort of relationship to things were very similar to the ones during church days with those who hadn't experienced Christ.

Then there's that claim that Christ is the Logos. Understanding Christ as the fulfillment of Judaism wasn't enough, but moved on to being the fulfillment of Hellenism, and now I want to know other major civilizations and what it might mean for them to be heading toward a fulfillment.

But anyway, after all this time of trying to say it and say it and the people I said it to the most, after years of hours, still saying, "But you're still not saying how." I have to wonder if that basic confrontation with Christ--Christ himself, the guy, walking around, being Christ--has been the engine of it all ever since. It's looking like it.

But again, that statement's going to be worthless to someone who doesn't have a chemical relationship to information.

faith

2009-01-24T19:38:40Z

Tens of thousands of churches everywhere are praying for our President. So this is where it's important that the lessons of the 'faith' churches be taken seriously. Faith can't be "Oh God please please pleeeeease". This is where it's important that prayer not just be for purely personal affairs, but for things we know to be right, by multiple, interlocking standards, things that make us reach for expressions like "God's kindgom" and "His will being done as it is in heaven." Because when you're praying for that, faith stops being irrational declaration against the evidence, but is the evidence. Hope stops being like the 'sure' in "I'm sure he wouldn't forget your birthday", where the expression of sureness is brought in as comfort because what's really sure is that comfort is needed. Faith is Affirmation of the Already Accomplished.

It's important. When it comes to prayers like a New Day in America, where ethics, character, citizenship have weathered the maulings of the cynics at their most talented and numerous, and, as had to happen, emerged instructed, there shouldn't be any quivering. We all have higher selves that we've been keeping in storage, salvaging for ornaments for ourselves. When public life is all dark, any little salvaged ornament of light can make one look higher than the greats, while staying, justifiably, in the margins, impotent for either greatness or public life. But now the lights are on and little, local priest costumes don't have their effect. The higher self has to receive its much-needed maintenance and come out of the garage.

And this isn't a matter of Maybe or Hope So. It's Accomplished. People can whine, accuse, extend the cynic function past its charter, it doesn't matter (and for sure I'm not talking about vigilance). They're standing on nothing. It's done.

criteria for study sessions

2008-06-28T16:55:55Z

There's always the question of other people coming along on study sessions, and I always have to mock up some ground rules off the top of my head. Figured I'd actually write some down yesterday, then figured I'd go all the way and put all the criteria I hold myself to, only now burdened with the contrast to whatever the hell that is people do who, for whatever the hell reason, don't do this. It makes it sound so hard. It's only hard by contrast to something that really has no reason to be there contrasting to it, considering this is most likely what that's wanting to be. This is actually really easy, or at least the hard that humans were made for. It sustains itself and you, unlike purely intellectual, purely artistic, purely personal pursuits, right through the kinds of trying circumstances you'd normally turn to religion for. In fact it incorporates lessons from religion, a union of reason and faith that can draw on enjoinders like "Seek and ye shall find" and "He takes care of the birds, are you not worth more than they?"

The awful criteria, said by means of that awful contrast. In no particular order:

Has to be a pleasant way to spend time without being just a pleasant way to spend time, everything both sparkly and dead serious.

Has to veer wildly around while staying absolutely unified, a central, even spiritual, insistence that embraces everything, at every moment, settling for nothing less than total particularity and total universality at all times. Not just particularity, not just universality, both. Not just from time to time, always.

Which means the things you're doing aren't things you just decide to do, can't come from either of the opposites External Assignment or Personal Decision, but have a rhythm of their own that you're responsive to, the veering being their veering. In fact you should never be quite sure whether you're choosing it or it's choosing you. (How do you get there? By setting it up while asking it to set it up.)

At all times applying the highest--ever-heightening--criteria for what you'll give energy to, but criteria heightening by diversifying, again with the unity in diversity.

Everything both preserved as self-contained moments and in strong, developing threads.

Achieving both professional rigor and accessibility to non-professionals, without those being two separate things.

Silly personal particulars, obsessions, quirks, preferences, should be neither rejected nor accepted as-is, but redeemed in the big picture, united with their fulfillment, preserved in their places. (Sometimes it turns out they do have to go away, like if they can't exist without a terrible conception of self and others.)

Absolutely no identity moves of the kind "I'm a this, not a that."

Each personality type works to incorporate the opposite types.

When faced with not getting something you want, you have an ongoing relation of Want to Right that allows you to say, "What's right here?" and find yourself wanting whatever's right.

Everybody has to be able to trust that everybody else only wants what's right, right through the discussions about what that is.

answer to a linguistic conundrum

2008-06-17T05:30:32Z

We're doing a standard grammar lesson, loading up on grammatical categories, and the main reason people choke seems to be that categories in general just don't work for language. But what are you going to do, not use them? But I use them all the time. And there can't be that 'they' talk--"They call something an 'adjective phrase' even though..." "They always just..."

Well, there's this: Standard grammar categories are very good at saying what it is we need to find a way to say.

three worthwhile technical terms to introduce

2008-06-16T16:40:00Z

'Magazine Literacy'--I've always admired people who read magazines and newspapers and websites and have put together all this commentary on the basic state of things. Well, I guess actually sometimes it's not even that level, but a reciting of things they've read in an urgent tone. But anyway, it needs to be recognized that it's not at all the same as an earnest insistence on knowing/discovering/seeing. It's not, for example, (to the tenderhearted: for example. There are many other examples) being in Doe library finding out what your questions are, getting 30 good books, weeding them down to 8 very good books, and finding a new layer of focus by interacting very closely with such books with a tight notetaking.

I have to make this distinction because 'Magazine Literacy' is a mode of being, and I can't talk to somebody who's in that mode about what I'm doing, for the same reason I can't publish in a magazine. Earnest can't talk to Disposable. It will always make the earnest disposable, never the disposable earnest.

'Sunglasses Authority'--Looking closely at the gesture involved in the well-fit lyrics I'm studying, one thing that comes up just grammatically is the same thing that's involved in the passive voice, or a participle before a noun, or any time the object of a verb doesn't come right after it: There have to be very well-established frames, with very well-understood elements, each with a very well-understood relationship to the frame. (What has to happen for a car that's towed to be a towed car? There has to be a well-understood vehicle authority that's understood to deal just with cars, towing being one of the things it does to them, and that our car, for whatever it means to us, has become only a pawn in that game, a point in that plane (literally, when it's parked in the impound lot and referenced by the parking space)). When the language is being liberal, the underlying semantics will be conservative.

I'm running into that same conservativeness in lyric-fitting, or actually, the pop-icon gesture. And what that's suggesting is that the authority being projected is of the type "Let me find where the mob is going so I can lead them". It's of the type "Cultural Cred", where the basic layouts are mastered and that mastery is demonstrated subtly.

"Playing Just Your Side of the Net"--Saying just your side and relying on the the other person to supply theirs, as opposed to working their side into yours already, or talking explicitly in order to work their side into yours. It leads to volleys--the ball just going back and forth across the net, each supplying what the other one is leaving out. One of the very miserable downsides of that practice is that sociability has to be antithetical to substance--there has to be 'small talk'--gigawatts of it--the classic enjoinder against Religion and Politics, and the less classic but equally prevalent one against talking about what you're working on. (It works when I talk to people about what they're working on. It works very well, and I'm waiting for someone to demonstrate some sign of life by going, "Hey, I should learn to do that.") (The other miserable downside is never becoming anywhere close to what you could become (hence your culture what it could become) due to 90% of your energy (and everyone else's) being dissipated for nothing.)

oh yeah, action. that's what's missing if it's going 'the value of the value of the value'

2008-06-12T16:53:00Z

I've always explained finding the meaning in things as finding the themes behind them. And then the themes behind the themes. And then the other things those themes lead to. Which are in turn the meaning of the themes. And so on.

Only to get blank stares again. "Yeah, but what's the point of that?"

And it's not that I wasn't putting it in terms of action the whole time: "The right form is 'This is what happens if you go up that road'", "Knowledge is getting around experience", "Theory is research protocol", etc. But the fact the person I was talking to wasn't that concerned about acting on things, and I wasn't requiring them to for our conversation to make sense, took the action-type meaning out of the action talk.

And often I'm even talking about a theory-type of acting. You do have to actually do theory. If you give people just the results of hard theorizing, even their appreciation is a bit dismissive. So I answer that by telling the story--I simulate the work for them. And that of course can always be more thoroughly spelled out, so that gave plenty of potential to tap when it only made the tiniest bit of difference.

how's this for a theory of 'critical voices'

2008-06-11T16:03:42Z

I forget if everybody calls them 'critical voices', or if that's terminology we've come up with among ourselves again, but you know when you go to do something, write something, learn something on your own, invent something, talk and try to make a difference, and you get shut down by thoughts of "I should be faster" "this has all been said before" "I don't know enough" or on and on to thoughts that couldn't even be listed here because they'd be critical things someone--anyone--had said in the last 48 hours, and the main point is that they swamp you and shut you down. Whatever you call that.

Lauren and Elise were both dealing with that yesterday and both ended up at the same place. Lauren told me some of the critical voices that were plaguing her as she tried to do this one prompt I'd given her. Things like "This is all too general" or "It doesn't sail" and I was puzzled how she could recognize a good she was missing and not therefore know what she was shooting for and go after it. It seemed there were only two possibilities, either she could fulfill the criterion or there was something wrong with the criterion.

She looked at how the criteria could be 'third person descriptions', asked herself how she could make them into 'first person descriptions' (more accurately, both at the same time), and came out at working on her organization scheme. Hm. She came out at the 'meta-'.

The meta.

Let's say that when we get busy looking at something, we're necessarily not aware at first of the looking itself--how we're framing questions, what we're counting as an answer--That means it's implicit, merely internal, and any time something's merely internal, it'll show up as something merely external. Call the part of our mind that can just do things without explicitly knowing what it's doing 'the conscious', and the part that explicitly knows what the conscious is doing the 'self-conscious'. Isn't it telling that we refer to critical voices as being 'self-conscious'?

Elise at the same time picked up on Kenneth Burke's 'Dramatic Pentad' system of classifying theoretical methods, and said not only was it giving her a way to classify theories she was coming up with, but ways to come up with such classifications.

Calling it 'the theory of theory' doesn't get across what an important psychological function it has. By having access to what your conscious mind does implicitly, having those parameters available to alter, having everything brought out of the shadows and integrated in to the whole process, the 'critical voice' phenomenon goes away.

Also telling that the voices were things she could picture strangers saying. Strangers. The social aspect again. I'm guessing critical voices come with a basic picture of strangers, which is that other thing I've been saying, that you have to picture the search for wisdom going on in a wisdom environment, not an environment of pettiness and crassness. People can be looked at as both at all times, and learning to see the inherent wisdom everywhere (without going so far as to give people credit for it) probably goes a long way to making the critical voices into a wisdom environment, if not to relieve them of the role of 'environment' altogether.

it's so good to have all these reciprocities finally worked out. now what about all these antinomies

2008-05-31T00:36:23Z

A reciprocity is when the negative has a 50-50 role in the complete phenomenon. For example, when you're trying to solve a problem, all the failed attempts aren't just failed attempts, but rational failed attempts, and don't just go off into the dust bin, but stay on as data for the larger picture of what works and what doesn't. Or any position you take, it's best if the opposing position is still highly plausible to you, that you can very much see how someone would want to believe it. Or the best criticisms are the ones you very much don't want to give--still keeping around that person that wants everybody to just get along.

Explaining how that 'crystal soup' works very often runs into things like this.

But then there's the antinomies. An antinomy is when something can be read either of two conflicting ways and in fact can only be read two conflicting ways at the same time. They don't feel like two opposites working together in functioning reciprocity, but just like having glasses with one blue lens and one red, giving you headaches. Like whether somebody should be held accountable for their shit and exhorted or treated as a victim of their circumstances and understood. Or how somebody can be so cool in their own light, and so not cool in lights that can matter very much. (And, yes, people are in the habit of just deciding (then deciding the opposite, then opposite again, then just think about something else.))

And I'm wondering...do the antinomies go up with the reciprocities? I know a lot of them aren't actually new, but ones that have been there all along but I'm only now noticing--that it's a step up that I'm noticing...

update

2008-05-30T09:43:22Z

Lyric Machine is going very well. There are about eight melodies now getting saturated with lyrics--and that's such a good experience all by itself, the way a melody can support an unlimited amount, even when you let it be impossibly picky--the fit between word and gesture has to be sinfully catchy. Then whole lists can be lifted and transported directly to other songs, and always in those same, pivotal places. It's turning out, though, that syllable number should only be considered if the melody doesn't allow a change in the number of syllables. That puts the lines I'm focusing on (the ones where the lyrics have the most punch, and tend the most to write themselves) in an even bigger family--With syllable-count out of the way, I can focus on what's really going on--What is it, simple phrase-structure trees? 'Derived' as opposed to 'Base' spaces?

This is such a good place to go with all the songwriting. Just doing CD after CD was missing something.

Spending the afternoon on a trellised veranda we know, got the picture again of what exactly I'm saying we can accomplish. There's this kind of crystal soup you can set up so that any book you open, it takes up a meaningful place with everything--like even opening the Quickbooks manual, I landed on a sequence of use-cases that made a prototypical picture of axiom breaks, and I saw how those breaks can be seen as happening from the prototype's own dialectic, not from some unexplained outside contingencies. And this from a doggedness about understanding software, not some extra little predilection to see philosophyness in things. (It's even misleading to say 'whatever book you open', because when you get this working, whatever book you open won't be just some whatever book. The 'crystal soup' can itself bring books in.) And it's of course not just books. Like this afternoon, a Nigerian woman was sitting next to me, and when she saw the Combinatorics book, we got talking and she told me about how math is learned in Nigeria. "It's not a language. It's not even really numbers. It's hands-on, it's intuitions." They were doing algebra in fourth grade, but it was with some thing I didn't quite understand about picking objects from around the room and giving them a letter name, then you getting a letter name...didn't get what she was saying, but she says I could ask anyone raised in China, because they do it the same way. But that thing, that Americans are shut out of math because here it's treated as a language--that's exactly what I've been saying for years about my mathlessness, and what I've found fixed by Combinatorics.

The 'crystal soup'--it brings things in and gives them their place, and everything takes off, nothing is wasted. And I do mean it's still making an appearance years later, tied in every which way, not just flighty and self-canceling.

I think I can show people how to get that up and running.

BUT I also don't think it could happen without having a heart for 'God', to say it very vaguely. I don't think all that time I spent going, "Your will, not mine," was optional. And I'm flummoxed for how to talk about it, because people who don't have that heart therefore cast it into some version no one would want to have a heart for. The ludicrous ways non-God people conceive of what it's about is matched only by the goofiness of church people, and almost makes me wonder if that goofiness coming apparently with full conviction out of their brains is how they're being punished. Like thinking of morality as taboo, and deciding from there where they stand on it. How do people think of taboo at the mention of morality? Like taboo about sex? Morality is critical understanding of sex, not taboo about it. Well, I guess it would be the same thing as not being able to imagine how a Quickbooks reference could be philosophical.

And as for Combinatorics...Looks like each of those chapters is going to have a very special memory associated with it, of a day sitting with it for ten hours. Today was Stirling numbers.

latest from the theory and practice of general scholarship

2008-05-24T18:53:49Z

The last couple times, it's been the Logic, first about the right way to do Cause-and-Effect in history (Never pose an effect that's greater than its cause), and just now about Ground and Condition. See, meantime we've got this whole Cultural Evolution research project--lately, the history of property, most recently the history of money and banks, so that that and the Logic make a Theory and Practice of scholarship in general.

It's funny, people are starting to describe them as 'serious'. And yet what do the people saying this do when they're unbuttoning and kicking back? Opine about politics! At some point, anyone who indulges in coffee-house opining has to notice that what's enjoyable about it is the air of smartness and purpose, which should start getting unsettling if it depends on the people around not knowing enough to see it as a watery gruel. At some point it has to become what it's pretending to be. And what would be lost? Something would be lost by that? What, it wouldn't be relaxing any more? The relaxing was a feeling of flight through awareness of the world, so there's a constant, underlying tension if it's not true. Make it true and the only tension is wings beating against air, and an expectant self-restraint.

Everything's always both relaxing and tension, so put them in the right place.

(By the way, looking again at what roles music's supposed to have, surely Nusrat is one of them, and coming off taking in his gestures on YouTube, what should come on the player but an Eminem track, a bonus from 'Don't Call Me Marshall'. And, you know, this should be wrong, what with the spiritual function of Qawalli, the years of training under a master, but...Nusrat and Eminem seem like equals to me. Nusrat is one of the examples, Eminem is another. That's not a casual remark, not a passing sentiment in the moment.)

But Ground and Condition...(after a long ride out to a pretty place we know with cheap chips and fountain soda, ocean making one of its incursions inland)...the discussion of grounds-type discourse gets across something that's still falling short with the beautiful, literate, cultured people--They'll bring up some event to attend, and give the most considered, judicious, rich-textured, fragrant reasons for it. But...uh...wait...don't mean to be difficult, and without taking from the bountiful qualities involved...but why those reasons now? And...as much as those reasons fly when the thing they're reasons for is already present, if you were to take them just by themselves, would they, of themselves, suggest this thing?

Not to mention this, which can take quite awhile to come up: If something good does come of the event, it's so often something qualitatively different from the reasons given for it. In fact, I've had a problem forgetting my real reasons for doing things because I keep falling back to the dust-jacket ones.

This only seems troublesome if you're not imagining the alternative. I've been calling it 'Threads'--you get 'threads' going, and they don't just provide a review and sanction for things that come along, but they also seem to bring the things along themselves. ("Would the reasons of themselves suggest this event?" can literally become the reasons suggesting the event. The mistake we can make with reasons for things is the same one as trying to understand someone like Hegel, which is still receding from you because you're still thinking it's going to be like some knowledgy statements sitting there waiting for you to sort through them and put them on like earrings. Giving reasons for things still operates off the picture that we go through life making our decisions for our reasons, that the buck stops at our desk, which is an important half of the truth.)

So he's saying what real Ground is, as opposed to 'grounds' for things, and he says it sublates itself--something's really a Ground when it throws something up then tucks back away out of sight. Like what? Well, we're talking about group dynamics and Elise makes a passing comment that a city is a large group, and, oh, nooo, a city is not a group, is it? What is it, a collection of groups? Oh, god, hell no...Well, what is a city, then? Szheezusss...a city is so freaking big compared to anything a couple of chatting scholars could toss out, in fact, look at all the groups--we get to picture ourselves as resting on general sinews of the World, the Ages, but it's not general Humanity, Eternity, we're derived from, but the city. When the city is working right, it can let the groups believe they're standing directly on Heaven.

A city, there's an example of Ground. Tosses these things up and tucks itself back away.

But no sooner do we get this glimpse of Reality as opposed to Talk and it's time to talk again. Only what's different this time? That the real ground of things isn't something obviously connected to them, but tucked away. This fresh infusion of research protocol: Don't look for the grounds of things by looking at them and free-associating off of them, but look to the things hiding off-screen. And what are those? Conditions--history of private property, money, the middle class, etc.

back to the first hegel passage I ever read, and hated...

2008-05-22T08:57:40Z

And the people on whose behalf I defied this proved him right by coming out exactly like he said they would.

"In passing from play to the seriousness of learning, the child becomes a boy. At this stage children begin to be curious, especially for stories; what interests them in these is ideas which do not come to them in an immediate manner. But here the main thing is the awakening feeling in them that as yet they are not what they ought to be, and the active desire to become like the adults in whose surroundings they are living. It is this desire which gives rise to the imitativeness of children. Whereas the feeling of immediate unity with the parents is the spiritual mother's milk on which children thrive, it is the children's own need to grow up which acts as the stimulus to that growth. This striving after education on the part of children themselves is the immanent factor in all education. But since the boy is still at the stage of immediacy, the higher to which he is to raise himself appears to him, not in the form of universality or of the matter at hand, but in the shape of something given, of an individual, an authority. It is this or that man who forms the ideal which the boy strives to know and to imitate; only in this concrete manner does the child at this stage perceive his own essential nature. What the child is to learn must therefore be given to him on and with authority; he has the feeling that what is thus given to him is superior to him. This feeling must be carefully fostered in education. For this reason we must describe as completely preposterous the pedagogy which bases itself on play, which proposes that children should be made acquainted with serious things in the form of play and demands that the educator should lower himself to the childish level of intelligence of the pupils instead of lifting them up to an appreciation of the seriousness of the matter in hand. This education by playing at lessons can result in the boy throughout his whole life treating everything disdainfully. Such a regrettable result can also be produced by perpetually stimulating children to indulge in argument and disputation, a method recommended by unintelligent pedagogues; this can easily make children impertinent. Children must, or course, be roused to think for themselves; but the worth of the matter in hand should not be put at the mercy of their immature, vain understanding.

With regard to one side of education, namely, discipline, the boy should not be allowed to follow his own inclination; he must obey in order that he may learn to command. Obedience is the beginning of all wisdom; for the will which as yet does not know what is true and objective, does not make this its goal and therefore far from being truly self-dependent and free is still immature; such a will is enabled through obedience inwardly to accept the authority of the rational will coming to it externally and gradually to make this its own. On the other hand, to allow children to do as they please, to be so foolish as to provide them into the bargain with reasons for their whims, is to fall into the worst of all educational practices; such children develop the deplorable habit of fixing their attention on their own inclinations, their own peculiar cleverness, their own selfish interests, and this is the root of all evil."

The worth of the matter at hand should not be put at the mercy of their vanity...

Yep, that's been the issue this whole time. Right through all the teaching innovations I was always coming up with, that seem to contradict what he's saying here, I always end up tangling with them over their inability to feel worth. I've tried to get across the worth of everything so that they'll pursue everything based on its worth, instead of because some authority person said so. That includes 'worth' not being just because people say so, and will pay you. But they can't hear that, no matter how clearly spelled out and put directly, literally, in their hand, as long as worth to them is what satisfies their desires. And nothing he's saying here solves that problem, so what he will solve in the meantime is not letting things of worth be disdained by little kids.

It's like from age 10 I'd found that rebelling is what creates the things worth rebelling against. Not understanding things is what makes them seem not worth understanding. Treating things as a task imposed is what makes them 'hard'. Creating and discovering aren't something someone else wants you to do, so that watching TV and hanging out are 'me' time. Rather, nothing can be more 'me' than creating and discovering, and less 'me' than watching TV and hanging out (and, very important, rather than eliminating TV and hanging out, this basic spirit takes on TV-watching and hanging-out versions). And, no, that's not just me. Watching TV and hanging out creates the person who wants to watch TV and hang out.

And while everybody--and I do mean everybody--put me over away from them as some different kind of creature, I tried to tell them how that wasn't true. All I was doing was not defeating myself.

And I still think that's true.

What do you do if no amount of proving that makes a difference?

And something else I caught on to really early is that just telling people fed the problem, as long as the telling was 'me facing them'. I would try everything I could to 'face the same way'--give examples, tell stories, use their own words, their own experiences. (Strange, I never did the ultimate facing-the-same-way: posing intriguing, fertile questions. Oh yeah, that's because nobody would ever follow up on anything, and later on, as a teacher, I couldn't walk away because I needed the money.)

But looking at the explanation he gives...Immediacy makes the universal appear as an individual. So there's a paradox: By trying to put people in immediate contact with the spirit of things, it made that spirit appear as an individual, whether me, or God, or even they themselves (the problem of people becoming all about personal growth). But, damn it, the alternative is for them to relate to it in a mediated way--awful, external, superficial, default descriptions of what I'm doing--that make it into something impossible and undesirable to do.

The answer is in the nature of immediacy and mediateness, that they're not separate. Hegel's answer here is to start it off mediated and let it 'gradually' become immediate. That's why he's stressing that the principle of education is that everyone knows they're not what they ought to be, and strives from their own inner dialectic ("Spirit never lets in anything alien, but breaks it off"). But there is also the possibility of an obedient self-insistence: "I will never ever fail to honor anything worth honoring, and with that said, I will honor it by getting myself to see how it's worth honoring." The first way gives you people that seem to always be just outside the heart of things, and the second gives you people that seem to always be just outside the body. For the world's immediate needs, it should choose the first, and for it's long-term (mediate) needs, it should choose the second. Hmm...someone's being immediate, so the universal appears to them as mediated, leading to an immediate mediated-immediate...(exercise: fill in second)...(Then there's long-term immediate needs, like building drainage or communications networks, like Euler did.)

Lauren brought this Hegel passage to me right as we entered our current phase. And, whatever may have been the right way to deal with me as a kid, there's no question this is authoritative, on file, United States Geological Survey topo for how to set it up for them.

Well, I guess all along there's needed to be two messages, right? "This is what's possible if you don't defeat yourself" and "This is what happens to you if you do." Becoming aware of the height of heretofor unimagined possibilities necessarily implies becoming aware of the depth of heretofor unimagined self-handicapping. I'm wanting to talk people out of, for example, ever engaging in conversation that's disposable. Showing what's possible if you adopt that standard, that what's possible is what they want, not to blab on for nothing, is one way of doing that, but it kind of necessarily implies the opposite, right? I don't know how I thought I could keep out the 'tails' side of that coin, that if you think it's just the way life is to have whole hours go by in no way memorable to anybody, then you're shut out of everything that really matters.

hmm, 'study philosophy by studying every subject, etc.' has two ways it could go, doesn't it?

2008-05-20T17:54:17Z

The idea is that philosophy is kept from shutting up in itself by taking as its data the particulars--and I mean the most technical, mundane, picayune particulars--of every subject. At the same time, the subjects are kept from shutting up in themselves by having to be in the service of philosophy.

But it could go the other way, couldn't it? It could be philosophy reduced to 'applied' philosophy, and subjects reduced to New Age housewife homilies.

Hm. Have to fix the wording there.

shaping up what the 'school' is

2008-05-20T17:08:45Z

Elise and I did a session (bubble tea, then mexican, then pizza, in windows under awnings or tucked in against shaded brick), and these are things where we have to get the question at the same time as the answer, spend as much time defining what we're doing as doing it.

Bus ride back: So what are we doing? What was that just now? We'd done a page in the Logic where he talks about causal-type explanations in history, the principle that the effect should never be larger than the cause, how the 'for the want of a nail' type of story misunderstands itself. Why are we doing that? Hm, well never mind that it's directly relevant to one of our main projects, which is directly relevant to everything--the Twelve Themes, Twelve Domains one--but if sleepy people groan and complain, what else can they be given? Well, they can be given this:

This is a school. And so far, there's a little bit of curriculum settling in, so far just the keystone. The mission statement: Study philosophy by studying every subject, study every subject as a way of studying philosophy. The keystone class: Dialectic. The textbook: Hegel's Logic.

I mean, if you only came away understanding Hegel's Logic, you're doing good. Not a whole lot of things around that can supply that, and that book is up there with the most important ones we have. Add in that we're not talking a college-class type of understanding, but an active, living one, speaking to your actual life, coaxing your actual life toward something worth speaking to, the Voice of someone whose voice is like the World itself talking (All the other big philosophers are in there as ancillary reading, right up to Derrida).

That alone is not bad.

But even that isn't just for its own sake. It's the keystone of an arch, that includes, for example, the Twelve Themes Twelve Domains project in cultural evolution, which can also recommend itself all by itself. And then the math is shaping up, as the spirit of Euler done in the spirit of Euler.

couple major developments

2008-05-18T09:37:58Z

Neils Abel was asked how he got so good at mathematics so quickly, and he said, "By studying the masters and never minding their pupils." I heard that a long time ago. My response? I quoted it to people, a lot. And, uh, amassed Dover math books. Because they were cheap, and Dover said they were 'classic' texts...

And you know a persistent thing that I took, and cited, as a main fact about my life? That I wasn't a mathematician. That I was a good expositor, but didn't have the basic gift.

Now, hang on...What?

All my math books were of the kind Abel had contempt for, I took it as just a fact of life that I didn't have a gift for being an actual, Abel-type mathematician...and I knew--and quoted--often--Neils Abel's stricture about this.

Because now I have this Combinatorics book by actual, Erdos-number-one mathematicians, and I find myself doing very mathematicianly things. I no longer think there's a single element of basic mathematical spirit that's beyond me. And I can get better to the extent I work at it, too--Euler kept expanding right up to his last day.

I'm especially pursuing this because I see what a difference it could make for Lauren and Elise for me to be like the authors of this book.

And, man, what else might this apply to? Doesn't everyone live with the background information that they're not of any great significance? The main reason they can't be interested in being of great significance is that they're like I've been about being a mathematician: All their learning material/environment has been crap, and they're like the Czechs who I'm told smoke like refineries and just consider lung cancer to be a part of life--People take it as given that they're not destined for anything. And it IS because what they've been breathing. This shit isn't kidding and the analogy with the smoking Czechs isn't a stretch. I can't believe I so allowed a part of my soul to be cauterized like this, that it was so impossible to blame the books I was reading, how my ignorance kept me ignorant, that, not being real, due to these people not being real, I wasn't able (pun) to see they weren't real. And could not have been made to admit it. Ignorance is ignorance--it means you don't know you're ignorant. You say books are good because they look good to you and they seem credentialed enough.

They're not just a little bad. They're harmful. "Oh, come on...I'm sure the authors have basic competence in their field, and they had to undergo very thorough review to get to their level. Basics are basics and you need your grounding in the basics, they're at least good for that..." If that's you, then you're ignorant, too. It spreads, and you're spreading it. Yeah, of course you don't agree. You're ignorant. I'm sure even you would admit that, as freely as you're offering this counsel, you wouldn't charge anyone for it. You're sleepy and just drooling in your sleep.

Like your teachers? Get along with them, look up to them, enjoy their observations, thinking style, refreshing side-pursuits? What do you picture yourself to be? "I learn from the masters and don't bother with their pupils." The people who bar you from the Source don't have horns. They're not bad people, or stupid, or boring.

And that goes for friends, too. Man, the difference between friendships that seriously pull you up, in ways that dwarf who you were and then dwarf the dwarfing, versus the literate, cultured, witty settling in to the agreed-on meeting level, smiles, confidence, persona, low-level exercising of wit...

A way I was putting it yesterday, when I was explaining the different kinds of 'morphisms' to Lauren and Elise: On the one hand, everybody has the duty to know about the central things of central disciplines, and on the other hand, the guardians of those disciplines have the duty to not put it in a purely insider form. And if both sides would do their duty, it wouldn't feel like duty!

A duty to understand...That's like saying you have a duty to lose weight, or a duty to not poop in bed.

Second development: That conflict I've been turning over and over on here for years--Critical vs. Committed, Value and Limit...There was a moment I saw a couple guys in a polished car, bumpin' Lil Wayne, sprawled in the seats, and I happened to have my two basic reactions at the same time: The one that goes, "God, the trivia," and "God, that's so cool." And this time, rather than inflaming the incessant attempt to decide and inability to and ridiculous resulting logical innovation, I simply flipped the lenses back and forth, looking at it first one way, then the other. Oh...You can do that...

I started doing it with everything...Oh, man, the resolution...What a weight off...There's not one thing that hasn't plagued me with being both wonderful and heinously misguided. And it's not about choosing. And it's also not about throwing your hands up and saying "That's life." You make yourself flip between them. And there is a stance you take: We all have a duty ('duty') to not be such antinomies. It's possible to look ahead to the perspectives in which you're a total splurge nodule and do something about it. And know that anyone who doesn't won't stay wonderful--they'll (and you won't be able to believe/picture this until it happens) flip around to what it is they're supposed to be improving on--just flip right over to it, smack.

Such a weight off...It was such a long ache looking for this...

if value is improvement, then it's creating what it's improving on

2008-05-15T16:52:12Z

For example, blogger pundits. Every time I get in a conversation with one, it seems like something really valuable is happening, that I couldn't pick a better way to spend that hour. Then, for example, I try to tell them what I'm doing lately and find (again) that they don't have a real intake system. They can shine when someone listens to them, but they can't return the favor. And I fall into a confusion--are they cool or not? They're outrageously cool when they're talking, responding to prompts, and a public liability when it's their turn to listen.

So one thing to notice: Their value consists of being an improvement--There's a non-stop background of stupidity in the world that's being confronted. So if we go with the principle that if something requires a contrast for it's definition, it is what it's contrasting to, or is even creating what it's contrasting to (or being created by what it's contrasting to), how could that be? Oh, well, actually with this one that answer's pretty immediate. It's like when I was reading a mess of sensationalist stuff about stock investing, and the most helpful advice for everybody seemed to be: "You're thinking of the market as a big ocean that you, brave little surfer, are negotiating. Instead think of it as a big ocean made entirely of surfers like yourself." The world that the blogger pundit is improving on is a world of blogger pundits, and the reason it needs improving on so incessantly is because everyone improves on it in a way that keeps it needing improvement. That's actually easy to see when you look at the whole picture instead of singling any one out. Like, having a discussion about law yesterday, the pundit-type attitude is that it's all stupid, pointing out all the very real ways that it's endlessly ridiculous. But that doesn't at all have to be the basic attitude, and shouldn't be. What I find when I look at law is logical issues that we all face everyday and should be working through all the time in whatever we're doing, so that we have functioning ways of dealing with them when they show up in legal cases. The driving sense can be that we're all in the same boat on this, all working through these things together, and that in fact it's pretty interesting, not a hopeless confusion.

And being created by what you're improving on, that's got even more potential.

value and limit--a dialectic logic answer

2008-05-15T16:24:49Z

The struggles I've had with people being so beautiful and so not at the same time, so important and so not at the same time. (The biggest class can be summarized as 'beautiful/important when they're talking, ugly/trivial when it's their turn to listen'.) A dialectic logic answer to that is that while you're extolling someone, you're being oblivious to all the billions of others just as extollable (especially if, like me, you insist that everybody is extollable in some way). I guess we're thinking that we're going to get around to them eventually, but it doesn't really work that way, and in fact, if you look at it, that great mass of anonymity is required. So that's what's showing up as Limit in each person. The light on them casts a darkness around them--the basic obliviousness that's even worsened by this our example of how we should be relating to everyone--and the darkness around, due to all the identities involved--that people are people, praise is praise, value is value--shows up in that person. Their limit is everyone else making their presence felt.

So now, like with all math proofs, I should be able to look and see what premises could not hold--Like is it possible to single out all the things that require presupposing a basic Mass of Anonymousness, and just avoid them?

twelve hours straight of projective geometry, understanding all of it

2008-05-12T07:05:31Z

There was a Jack-in-the-Box on a deserted industrial road, out where I could have only dreamed it up, but my dream was that strong. I hadn't stopped at it when I found it, because it would have meant stopping, but here, a month later, the morning could be about finding it again. Having not figured out yet how to ride off into paintings.

This time it was an armory. Then the tire sprung a leak. Made my way back on diminishing air to a more conventional Jack-in-the-Box, that almost perfectly copied the layout from...from...oh come on, now where's THAT one?...You know, that one...out past, well, everything, really...you know, that one...the one with the layout exactly like this, only low ceilings and no windows, lit with an electric chandelier right in the middle of a summer day. That's the one I really want to be at, duck into it from the heat and glare, dried-out eyes adjusting...but I can't find anything and the tire's leaking...

Twelve hours straight of Projective Geometry. An old Oxford book from the 30's. The story is that, for all the abstraction Geometry is even the paragon of, it was choking on sensuous artifacts, like distance, or even extension. The book set out to redo Geometry without them...and it turned out to not even be awkward--it happened so naturally, I had to remind myself it was happening. Even went up into conics...Ellipses and parabolas without distance? Yep, just a projection of the plane intersecting with itself. Went right on to the chapters I'd subtracted from the overall page count--'Non-Homogenous Mesh Gauge'? No. But it ended up being the most elegant introduction of number into it while still not really introducing it. Addition was just an involution, with one point specified for zero and another for infinity. Multiplication, too, just an involution, another point specified for one.

And to think, the Combinatorics book has Projective Geometry as almost a side example of Combinatorial Geometries in general. And even then...sensuous artifacts...little points you arrange and count? Where this is heading is Dialectic, points are just being-for-self--the duality of points and lines, announced as a discovery in Projective Geometry, is deduced in the Logic.

Now I can't really explain, nor expect to experience again, what doing Lyric Machine is like after twelve hours straight of Projective Geometry. It seemed synaptically obvious that all lines that worked on a given melody were equivalent to each other under a family of transformations. Haven't been able to quite recapture that feeling/image, but Deep Structures and Transformations, that looks promising, maybe even recapitulate the whole Chomskyan phylogeny, from there to Logical Forms to the Minimalist Program, telescoped down to a few weeks.

Two really catchy songs, with hundreds of lyrics on each, consistent perfection of fit making them like bin after bin of bulk candy. The switch to this from what people first try to do does look teasingly like a simple mode shift, temptingly like the mode shift between Narrative and Expository in Mandarin.

But something I've found out...Trying to get my finger on what's missing in the conversations of my very literate, stylish friends...I want to say earnestness, just an actual intention to succeed in finite time, to incessantly bring everything back to things that most need to be talked about, to incessantly reevaluate what that is, and what works best and what else works better. An earnestness...except that there shouldn't be a word for it...It's like looking for a word for not dragging a pencil randomly around on a page and calling it writing...why should there be a word for not doing that?

And it occurs to me how deep the effects have been of attempting to fuse art and life. Everything has all become an act, everything is artful form. The extent of the delusion is starting to settle in, everywhere things are just said just because, by the cool people, the literate people.

kmonlift @ 2008-05-05T00:59:00

2008-05-05T08:42:15Z

Got clear today that 'Foundations of Mathematics' is another field that we're doing as part of the whole math coverage. I mean, I've been doing it automatically, but I got situated today, saw it as a thing. It got to a place where multiplying a matrix by 6 multiplied the determinant by 6-cubed, and I got into how it's not clear what it means to multiply a cube by six, whether to take a cube and replicate it six times, or do a six-times magnification (which means what? that the lines are times six, the areas are times six, or the volumes are times six? has to be one or the other or the other.) And don't leave that as just some local, hyper-specialized conundrum--look for what it's an example of.

Came out a lot like Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'. (Except he could never get what he was looking for because he didn't have dialectic.) So that's what we did this morning, before her tutoring appointment. And so shapes up the summer's Statistics curriculum--Mathematical Statistics, Combinatorics, and Foundations of Mathematics.

She asked again tonight, "So remind me...why is Linear Algebra important again?" Tonight's answer: "Well, first, let's just get clear that it's important because IT is, quite independently of whether either of us think so. It's been around a couple hundred years before us, will be around hundreds of years after, is used by millions, and could itself just as easily ask why either of US are so important." "So it's important because it has applications." "Applications AND a self-subsistent existence, both of which are evolving steadily. Why would you want to be on the outside of that? Go ahead and assert your precious little independence. It lives on and you don't." "But if you sign on to it, you die anyway." "I don't know about you, but I'm talking about signing on to the spirit of it, to the extent that I live on in the same way it does, like Hegel, or Euler, or Jung, their works seeming to show up when you need them, speak to you right on time, sometimes seeming to pull up next to you."

This one Lyric Machine exercise has taken off so ridiculously that lines appear fully formed--when I don't want them to. And the ones I've written down...they hold up. They have that same air that I've been picturing when on long walks, being able to spin these out going down the street, moving in gesture to them, a one-man parade. I could learn a hundred of them and be at that spot right now.

And next is asking what other rhythms/melodies work for these lines? And then other rhythms/melodies for which they don't work, for which a whole other infinity works, except for these little points of overlap, where what's going on comes up. Like how that whole family of accent-on-the-second-syllable words--all with prefixes: contain, contend, confuse, perceive, perplex, pervade, excite, exchange, exude, etc.--that showed up as key for punchy line-endings, also show up as key for extended first syllables. It's a special class of words that way, probably having to do with that syllable being a resultative, which work off of intending to be both frame-external and frame-internal at the same time.

preserve by surpassing pt. 2

2008-04-29T17:27:59Z

One issue in teaching, if you've got it centered around an ongoing creating/discovering, is what to do about the standardized part? Surely there's no way to show someone, say, vector multiplication in some brand new, fresh way each time. Surely there are things that are just going to be the same over and over and there's just going to have to be room for that...

Well, last night it got to one of those moments, where Lauren just needed the basic vector multiplication derivation, and it did look at first like it was going to be the exact same as what I first learned in high school, with maybe some mannerisms indicating interest. But there was this one thing that could badly stand to be added in, come to think of it:

Every time I have to do some kind of thing involving changing coordinates--like even just that afternoon, rederiving the convoluted regression formulas they have in Stats books from the much slicker Linear Algebra I've been using, there is this nasty brain hemorrhage that always paralyzes my face: "Wait, what happened to the square root in the bottom? Oh, wait, am I wanting the coordinate relative to...to...wait, what is this relative to, what can it be relative to, what does 'relative to' mean? Wait..."

I have been suffering that nosebleed for years. It really can just freeze everything. So, you know, while we're here, this would be a good opportunity to clear that up once and for all. And I had just been saying that morning a major class of places where cognition seems to fall short is Viewpoint Management, and just hours earlier I had revamped the main Cognitive Grammar premise as "Take any two ways of saying something, that are supposed to be synonymous, and look for the difference in Viewpoint Management" So it was ripe to cast this as a case of that, draw the diagram, and ask, "Find the length of this side relative to all three possible units."

It has the side advantage of taking out a degree of mystery from the dot product being the cosine of the angle. And it still looks exactly like something you'd expect to see in a textbook somewhere, but a cleaner textbook, a little more in command of the material and fostering a little more command. One step closer to the Olive Tree.

And anyone who gets the vector presentation with that tweak on it will be spared forever the "wait, should this one have the square root?" seizures.

So is it really possible to have even the standard stuff be new every time? If you take every instance as an opportunity to get it simpler by understanding more fully, deeper by understanding more broadly, then it does have the effect of making it new each time. Would it work in a classroom situation? Don't know. Also don't know if it would work with a bag over your head underwater.

In other news, Elise got the hang of Placement (in vocal technique) and was spinning out resonant overtone series along a free sampling of the permutations. Come to think of it, that was also a 'preserve by surpassing' moment. It had started months ago with me showing her what I'd learned from my voice teacher, but my teacher had taught it with the premise that there's an optimal placement, and I had added in that there could be a range of optimal placements, and understanding means exploring them all. And this time there had simply been months intervening and that idea was familiar, obvious, to me, instead of new, and I think the obviousness with which I held it had a lot to do with Elise getting it so completely so quickly. (She'd been so completely lost and forlorn minutes before.) (And I just got that, that this time being new was the issue and being familiar the solution. 'New' is one-sided, one of those one-sideds that happen when How Things Are Supposed To Be gets said in contrast to something else one-sided.)

And we also returned to the Cultural Evolution project, with, again, a preserving by surpassing. I was, of course, again right back to the 'Yeah, but what is this really?' even though we'd been through several rounds of that and it was pretty damn good as it stood. But in subjecting it to yet another round, it picked up a major simplifying complication (I guess it's a feel for that possibility that drives a lot of this): Instead of having one Theme that's being addressed within six or seven historical domains (Cultural Polarization and The Temperance Movement, Cultural Polarization and The Civil War, Cultural Polarization and The Great Awakening, etc.) have six or seven Themes being addressed within six or seven historical domains. In fact...let's have twelve of each. See, we'd just come off a meeting with my cousin who's doing an apprenticeship in the Capitol and brings back tales of Sacramento, and he had said there are twelve committees that all legislation gets vetted through. Twelve. And the Rules committee can almost always find one that's appropriate, occasionally needing two. And Feynman had said that genius is having twelve problems you're always working on (asking how absolutely everything that comes your way can be used for one of those problems), and, hm, that advisory group for incoming Senators strictly set the number at six for issues you should set yourself (could be that it's half twelve because in that case, getting a victory for an issue means the dual project of getting a defeat for the other side.) So, okay, that's getting a little numerological, but the idea that you could pick twelve themes, knowing they have to be like legislative committees, in that everything you want to say can be sent to one of them. So let's have twelve (really well-picked) themes, and twelve (really well-picked) domains. (And then there was the discussion of what are themes and domains, like one is Value and the other is Value-Free, or like a good theme is a domain-ish theme and a good domain a theme-ish domain, and we can save ourselves the full calendar of nosebleeds right now by not thinking one has to be the Fundamental and the other the Derived, but expecting them to trade off those positions.) So, like, Cultural Polarization would be an office within a theme, which would be Class in general, including how high and low envy each other (how they exclude each other and then wear the other like 'pelts', as I was saying on here a couple years ago.).

one thing that seems like it would for sure have to go to have a Barack era

2008-04-23T12:11:58Z

Pundit Smarm. That kind of Weekend Expert whose main mode is confident assertion. The couple of times I've seen a reporter, who usually gets away with that and makes a career out of it, come at Barack, they've come away looking like hacks. That's good. Easy expertise, that doesn't have to pay a price, that doesn't have to do any governing itself, that isn't passionate about empathy and synthesis, that's in it for the star points, should be shown up.

But could it happen? Could millions and millions of bloggers do without those paper fiefdoms? I don't see how we could deserve a Barack if we don't. If we're wanting what Barack seems to be bringing, we've got to be better. We've got to trade in those silly AM-radio microphones for actual care.

don't know who else this is an insight for, but it's a major one for me

2008-04-23T11:36:42Z

One of the main things I do is work subjects down until they're pretty, till hard things seem easy, making things accessible without popularizing, and it's actually an insight right now to realize that's not supposed to be for the sake of being a nice guy. It's not in order to be a liberator. It's so people can pass me up. I'm supposed to do long work to make short work of things so that someone else can go where I wish I could have gone.

That changes a lot about when I should do it and for who.

The good news is that standing on someone's shoulders is a limited analogy and that two people can in fact stand on each other's shoulders. Pulling someone up pulls you up. In fact, try on this idea, which I think is one of Hegel's: God himself pulls himself up by pulling people up. (There's a possibility that in Hegel pulling me up, I'm pulling him up. Who knows how much of what I'm doing with him he would have thought of?)

Speaking of which, I finally got a working explanation for Defaults, and, in fact, I wouldn't absolutely have to keep using the words 'competitive' and 'cooperative'. It's not that people have purely personal wants at the tops of their lists, but that they still have the universal separate, self-subsistent, and behind the particular. So like, they can only imagine the value of a thing being something you can name separately from the thing, and that impoverishes it, making it then have to stand on something behind it even more impoverished, until you get something either cynical or dogmatic. With that comes straight, unsupported ego, holding things up by pure will.

That could give me my whole working premise, attending to that in all its forms. Like how one of the main motivators is that the greatest themes still depend on hopelessly particular outworkings for their existence. Why would you need some hopelessly particular little thing like a Combinatorics lesson, when you could have the theme behind it on its own? Because a theme can't really exist without its examples. Realizing the preciousness of something being flawlessly both particular and general is one of the main reasons I give myself so completely to stuff, no minute wasted, no minute regretted. Or that whole thing about not doing things in argument form but mapping together points of view, that's getting over the idea that one's point is something separate, self-subsistent, and behind the arguments for it.

See, there's been so much travail over how somebody can get a self-sustaining process going, without needing the 'external structure'--every explanation I've offered--for a couple decades now--has been more detailed and thorough than the last, only to still be met with, "But you still haven't said how to get there if you're not already." Is there a process to getting there, like, what?, are there exercises or something? Perhaps the answer is everything and anything that deals with every and any case of putting the universal off away from the particular.

So, speaking of subjectivity, this takes the individual out of the center--the center isn't people putting themselves in the center (hmm...curing the problem of people putting themselves in the center by putting that in the center...), but the universal having a hard time staying united with the particular. The syllogism U-I-P comes out at I-U-P.

Having made a note of that, it seems an auspicious time to flip Logic open, augur style, at random. Here:

"Self-subsistence pushed to the point of the one as a being-for-self is abstract, formal, and destroys itself. It is the supreme, most stubborn error, which takes itself for the highest truth, manifesting in more concrete forms as abstract freedom, pure ego, and, further, as Evil. It is that freedom which so misapprehends itself as to place its essence in this abstraction, and flatters itself that in thus being with itself it possesses itself in its purity. More specifically, this self-subsistence is the error of regarding as negative that which is its own essence, and of adopting a negative attitude towards it. Thus it is the negative attitude towards itself which, in seeking to possess its own being, destroys it, and this its act is only the manifestation of the futility of this act. The reconciliation is the recognition that the object of this negative attitude is rather its own essence, and is only the letting go of the negativity of its being-for-self instead of holding fast to it."

True to the New Age contexts I've always heard that in, I tend to think only of learning to recognize ourselves in our enemies and such, but it's also talking about thinking theories can be understood apart from how they're verified, or moral positions can be understood apart from the cases one has in mind, or the purpose of a thing having to be something cognizable apart from that thing, etc.

cooperative power

2008-04-09T17:04:44Z

In Haas library with Elise, though I was just going to sit there and work on group theory (as part of the combinatorics thread). But, over there, in a garish font more like what you see in the Business library, was 'Groups at Work'. Another of those things where it seems to be hovering half as far from you than it really is. 'Groups'...Ha ha, group theory...

Went over and got it and it ended up being the thing for the afternoon, and the next few days. Especially this one passing reference to six aspects of power in negotiation (referencing 'Fisher (1983)'). I recognized all six, and none of them were sheisty, nothing manipulative or self-interested:

1.) Skill and knowledge. Go in having done your homework. That could easily be taken in the manipulative sense, but look how easily it can also not be. It's one of the things I've meant by Clarity--have a sense of the Lay of the Land--gather background and background of background until it becomes a sense. And it's not a trick for getting the outcome you want. It's that if you don't, everything descends to manipulation, cajoling, enforced, numerical settlements. Everything stays on the surface and dissipates everyone's energy by the megalitre in wrangling over disconnected details. And it reduces you down to a mere interested party, with wants needing satisfaction. Who would want to do that to themselves? Just go in knowing where you are, what the issues are, what the center is.

2.) Good relationships. Doesn't take much, and it doesn't have to be fake, doesn't have to be a tactic. It's where 'seeing each person in their own best light' has a place. Staying perpetually interested in everything with the 'Explain anything to anyone at any time' attitude allows you to connect with people over things they're dying to connect over and rarely get a chance. It allows the connection to be about developing something they've got centrally going on.

3.) Good alternative to negotiating. How totally much it cleans up if you can live with the outcome of the bargaining not happening at all. I've got my bare minimum lifestyle that I know will work, that allows me to get done what I need to. Look at what happens when you don't have the option of walking away, how much it becomes a charade, making demands when you don't really have anything to stand on. I've also called this Clarity, though I guess it would be Situational Clarity, the objective side of Clarity, where you get it clean by getting the setup right.

4.) Elegant solutions, brainstorming. Another thing I've meant by Clarity.

5.) Legitimacy, objective criteria. I've only ever thought of the cheap paper version of that, so I'd flatly deny it was anything I was interested in, but, thinking about it, there is a real version of it, and I have had it going on pretty constantly. Like when I'm doing a math demonstration, I know that the completeness of grasp that I'm insisting on is what the Guardians of the Gate mean by precision and rigour, even though they like to scowl sometimes whenever they just don't recognize something. And any chance to tie in with core curriculum, do it, not because that's just more practical, but if you have reason to believe it's in the core for a reason.

6.) Commitment, saying what you're willing to do, both positive and negative. I did have to learn to not let myself get cajoled into commitments I knew were ill-advised, that I wasn't going to be able to do, not just because of personal failings, but because they weren't going to work with everything else.

So the next day, we have a long, fruitful session--where Lauren saw a larger lesson in the course of the combinatorics demonstration--having to do with the immediate ways you want things to work versus the sometimes qualitatively different ways they actually do--having to do with the connection between how women stay so stubbornly at the individual-egos level and the troubles they have with math--and Elise and I went until closing with a really satisfying jam, deriving quaternion multiplication but then looking for the simple something lurking behind it, how the permutations of the symbols was going with the distribution of the positives and negatives, found an isomorphism between them. And the whole time, the usual insistence, and further definition for and commitment to getting everything out of its insular In-House geek form and into how it's talking about something that's everywhere--this time with Commutative Graphs, how individual-by-individual translations between two domains can forget to ask if the relations are being preserved. And then a ride through a temperate Alameda at night, how peaceful that place is.

And it just seemed like such a perfect cap to it to bring in the six aspects of power.

The role that's been playing since...You know, Nietzsche was on to something when he said virtue started out as power, but he missed how power itself matures, goes from looks and grandeur and cruelty and prizes to something like those six things. And come to think of it, a lot of what I've been calling my ethical side over the years--especially the parts having to do with Integrity--are really about that cooperative kind of power. Like not giving an answer on a test until I can personally vouch for it, no matter what little rewards or punishments are being dangled. Or not doing kinds of art I can't personally vouch for, no matter how much I'll be liked or laid. What a mistake to think of that as being principled, moral, anything like being a good boy. It's about not being anyone's bitch, including not just being my own bitch.

That perspective changes a lot. Like we got a chance to go to the ballet and Lauren was talking about going in heels, and Elise objected, not understanding how that fit with all the things they'd been talking about. But it went right over into whether you Ought to wear heels, instead of just where it fell in the cooperative power picture. Like the issue turns out to be Elegance, so, okay, what is Elegance? A lot of times it's Sleekness, and the bells it's ringing are sleekness of design, though only as a symbol of sleekness in general, so you'd want to do the symbol when it's Symbol Time, when your way of being is naturally folding up for the night. And there's how heels solve the foot problem, bring the body down to a point, float instead of plod, again effortless mastery. Okay, so where does it fit when you look at it?

doe day

2008-03-08T09:42:31Z

The reference librarians give me shit lately, like they're scandalized that I would request a stack pass. I think it's their conflictedness I'm seeing, between being ultimate champions of somebody who would actually do serious research as part of everyday life, and the postulate that no serious research could possibly go on outside Mother Institution.

So they stand in the path and demand my purpose, and when I'm only too eager to tell them, in fast-clipped improvised abstracts, the various interrelated projects, they make it really clear, "Please, we're going to let you in, alright? Just let us give you shit for a minute."

We got to Berkeley at 2, but didn't go in until four--it was just too Day outside, like the whole off-campus area was in a big laundry room, all dryer exhaust and chemicals, light that had been sucking on butterscotch candies, Elise offered me her last bubbles, jasmine and tapioca. I caught a glimpse about something to do with how the ratio of powers--incommensurability--is the synthesis of direct and inverse variation--There will always be the competing and equal outlooks that the goal is to go along with something or play off of it, and those are somehow one motion in the person of natural talent who always gets the balances impossibly perfect. The motion is somehow like a four-dimensional one that projects to a counter-movement in one space and co-movement in the other. The Subway even brings back that afternoon in Santa Cruz, sleeping in a rental car thinking I had colon cancer.

Evans Hall first, to score the most comprehensive ever Mathematical Statistics compendium. Or, barring that, any of the sixty books with the same title that are just basically not scared of theory. In Doe, it was History of the Enclosure Movement--the period in English history where common property went over to complete privatization. And history of property in general, and the role of the Revivalist movement--still working out why American culture polarized in the 1800's. It's looking like part of 'figuring out what question to ask' is a purely technical thing of having an instinct for the Dewey decimal system--noticed that the last three search strings I entered gave books in perfectly contiguous locations--Jamestown is all in one place, Enclosure, Great Awakening. I remember there were those days when I shrunk down Dewey's outline of knowledge onto two pages taped together and would just pore over it, with gusts of determined memorizing. That's even just a technical exercise someone could do, get the faculty of asking the right questions.

A half hour of collecting books, in three piles of seven, then, pulling out the one that's calling hardest, open and put pen-hand to paper, small writing, question and answer alternating at high frequency, like the activity LED on an overworked modem.

whatever this move here is

2007-12-20T15:52:34Z

When you first discover something like...say there's a day you discover 'being scientific', the magic of clearing up so much--stray wafts of superstitiousness we live with, bumbling unclarities in the ineffective world of anecdote--damn but a little scientificness can clear up so much, a little operational definition, a little taking recourse in experiment.

The first thing that happens is taking off with it as the magic touchstone. And that needs only one thing--to take off with it as a magic touchstone, taking off with others as well, collecting them.

The magic touchstone is that move there. And applied to itself.