Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men. Having a few around requires an economy in which the virtue of independence is cultivated, and a diversity of human types can find work to which they are suited.

Crawford, 2009, on solidarity and self-reliance, p209.

Posted on February 15, 2010

… ‘autonomy,’ … means giving a law to oneself. The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a wolrd that is not of our making.

Crawford, 2009, on solidarity and self reliance, p208.

Posted on February 14, 2010

Band Name Idea: “The Cult of the Sovereign Self”

Posted on February 12, 2010

[This] kind of self-reliance … is essentially different from the cult of the sovereign self, and it requires some further reflection on the idea of agency … . [This idea of agency] is activity directed toward some end that is affirmed as good by the actor, but this affirmation is not something arbitrary and private. Rather, it flows from an apprehension of real features of the world. This may be something easy to grasp … . Or it may be something requiring discernment. In activities that are directed toward some end, the goodness of the end in question isn’t simply posited. There is a progressive revelation of why one ought to aim at just this, as well as how one can achieve it. The progressive character of revelation energizes your efforts to become competent — something about the world is coming into clearer view, and it is exciting. The sense that your judgments are becoming truer is part of the experience of being fully engaged in what you are doing; it is a feeling of joining a world that is independent of yourself, with the help of another who is further along.

Crawford, 2009, on solidarity and self-reliance, p207.

Posted on February 12, 2010

A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship — of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers… . By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence — a positing of interchangeability that elides human difference of rank.

Crawford, 2009, on solidarity and self-reliance, p201.

Posted on February 11, 2010

Thank you internets! A few days ago I wondered if such a thing existed, and it turns out that Chris Harrison, using a data set by Christoph Romhild, created a visualization of the internal cross-references in The Bible. (via David Zimmerman, via Greg Atkinson.)

Posted on February 10, 2010

I am compelled by Karl Barth’s and T.F Torrance’s scientific view of Theology. ”Scientific” because in real science, one must give oneself to the subject matter, must subordinate oneself to it, in order to fully know it. They have an unlikely (to me) co-traveller in Matthew Crawford, philosopher, bike mechanic and author of Shop Class as Soulcraft. But I bet they would not have been surprised at all.

Posted on February 9, 2010

Interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work. That understanding gets turned into diagrams, charts, and maps that, whether accurate or not, come to define the work that person does each day… . This brings a new dimension of responsibility to our table as interaction designers. Not only do we need to worry about our interfaces being simple, or elegant, or usable, or accessible; we also have to make sure they’re honest. Do they accurately portray our clients’ processes? Do they faithfully represent the relationships between different bodies of information? Do they tell the truth, or do they lie? Ultimately, whatever they say is going to define how our users think of their work, how they understand it, and how they do it.

User Interfaces that Lie & the Users that Believe them.

Posted on February 8, 2010

It is common today to locate one’s “true self” in one’s leisure choices. Accordingly, good work is taken to be work that maximizes one’s means for pursing these other activities, where life becomes meaningful. The mortgage broker works hard all year, then he goes and climbs Mount Everest. The exaggerated psychic content of his summer vacation sustains him through the fall, winter, and spring… . There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in the one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in the manner of a transaction between sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life.

Crawford, 2009, on work, leisure and full engagement, p181.

Posted on February 7, 2010

The things we know best are the ones we contend with in some realm of regular practice. Heidegger famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of it and using it. For him, this was a deep point about our apprehension of the world in general. The preoccupation with knowing things “as they are in themselves” he found to be wrongheaded, tied to a dichotomy between subject and object that isn’t true to our experience. The way things actually “show up” for us is not as mere objects without context, but as equipment for action (like the hammer) or solicitations to action (like the beautiful stranger) within some worldly situation. One of the central questions of cognitive science, rooted in the prevailing epistemology, has been to figure out how the mind “represents” the world, since mind and world are conceived to be entirely distinct. For Heidegger, there is no problem of re-presenting the world, because the world presents itself originally as something we are already in and of. His insights into the situated character of our everyday cognition shed light on the kind of expert knowledge that is also inherently situated, like the firefighter’s or the mechanic’s.

Crawford, 2009, on thinking as doing, p163-4.

Posted on February 6, 2010

curvedwhite:

“Gun Pattern 2” by Johnny Wan

also: “Gun Pattern 1”

Posted via Curved White on February 6, 2010 with 8 notes

Vectors are your friends

Directionality, such as one for the other, is as important as Proportionality, the relationship of values of the items in question.

Posted on February 5, 2010

given that we fleshly beings can think abstractly, abstraction itself is not a bad thing. But pursued to its limits, its dehumanizing effects are the fruit of Modernity.

Posted on February 5, 2010