Dear Rosan and Kari-Hans,
Your two posts raise interesting issues. Some are historical, some
philosophical. I have been thinking about Kari-Hans's November 3 post
all month, and thinking on the way that it points to a synthesis of
important issues.
(1) Practicing philosophy and philosophical practice
I have been wrestling with some of these issues for a long time. The
ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of knowledge, sophia,
and techne. It is my view that there is today possible a new kind of
knowledge that synthesizes these two. This new kind of knowledge may
also involve some new issues that neither involves.
This can be stated in terms of Dick Buchanan's distinctions among the
kinds of universities. Sophia was pursued in the paleoteric
university. Techne was originally the province of the guilds, and not
a university matter at all. When technical institutes attained
university status, techne entered the university under the terms of
sophia, and the technical schools generally frame education in the
shape of the paleoteric university. The new kind of knowledge would
be found in the neoteric university. This new kind of knowledge does
not yet have a name, certainly not a Greek name.
In past papers and again during these last few weeks, I have managed
to wrestle come earlier distinctions into shape. I have not yet found
a description of the new knowledge that satisfies me.
This is halfway between thinking-out-loud and a working paper. It
addresses some of the specific questions you raise on practicing
philosophy.
(2) Three warnings on this post
First, it is long. If you do not want to read a long post, scroll on by.
Second, it digs deep into ancient Greek distinctions. It is
historical. If the history and development do not interest you,
scroll on by.
Third, I hint at the new knowledge but I cannot yet describe it. If
you want an adequate description of the new knowledge, at least as I
see it, scroll on by and wait for another post in a few more weeks.
(3) Practicing philosophy
To the ancient Greeks, practicing philosophy meant what is today
called "doing philosophy." The act of philosophizing was considered a
practice.
Doing philosophy was a practice in its own right. It is what
philosophers did. Discussing the motion of the planets was practicing
philosophy. Adducing geometrical theorems was practicing philosophy.
Considering the nature of truth, good, or justice was practicing
philosophy.
This practice is the act of constructing and considering theories. It
has implications in thinking, conversation, and politics, but not in
technology, or in most kinds of practical or daily action.
Making shoes, cooking, or farming did not involve practicing philosophy.
Deciding on the reasons for a war sometimes involved practicing
philosophy. Waging war and strategizing war did not.
This relates to an important question.
How - and in what ways - can design be the object of philosophical inquiry?
This might not have made sense to the Greeks in the same way that it
can make sense to us.
To unravel this issue, it helps to the kinds of knowledge involved in
the Greek conception of philosophical inquiry.
After exploring some of the old distinctions, I will point toward new
possibilities.
(4) Greek definitions and philosophical inquiry
Philosophy derives from the Greek term "philosophia," love of wisdom.
The word "philos" also embraces such concepts as affect or desire,
and the term philosophia may refer to a desire for wisdom.
The Greeks distinguished between "sophia," wisdom, and "techne,"
skill. For the Greeks, "sophia" involved what Socrates referred to in
Plato's Phaedo as "the explanation of everything, why it comes to be,
why it perishes, why it is." This form of knowledge was speculative
knowledge, knowledge anchored in theory.
Our word for theory is derived from the Greek word "theoria." This
word refers to viewing, speculation, or contemplation. It is akin to
meditation as the product of mental reflection rather than practical
engagement. It is related to the Greek word "theorein," a term that
deals with the search for the highest and most eternal principles.
The verb "theorein" means to watch with detachment, as the gods
observed the workings of the world from their Olympian heights. A
theorist, "theoretikos," was a person who followed the contemplative
life.
This person was a philosopher or a "scholarch," the term from which
our term scholar is derived. This person had time and leisure for
contemplation. The scholarch was generally unconcerned with the
practical matters of earning a living and doing things.
The Greeks distinguished between the knowledge that involved
understanding something, and the skill that represented the ability
to do something. To the Greeks, skills were NOT knowledge.
Knowledge, wisdom - sophia - involved theory, understanding something
from general principles. While it may have involved the ability to
apply general principles, knowledge did not mean the ability to do
something. That is usefulness, utility, and that was skill. The Greek
term for skill was "techne."
"Techne," skill, is related to practical matters. It is from this
that such words as technology and technician derive. While the Greeks
respected technical skill, it had a different nature than philosophy
did.
To practice philosophy meant something different than to practice techne.
Later European societies also distinguished between the theory-driven
knowledge of scholars and the skill-driven knowledge of the guild
masters. (It is worth noting that the guild master had greater
respect and higher social status than the theorist or scholar until
quite recently in history. Some guild masters still have far higher
status. This is the case for those who practice in the professions of
law and medicine.)
The distinction between theory-driven knowledge and skill-driven
practice was a distinction between kinds of activity.
Skill-driven practice was rooted and situated. While it may have been
possible to explain some aspects of skill, skill essentially involved
what we term tacit knowledge.
Peter Drucker notes that techne, for the Greeks, "was not knowledge.
It was confined to one specific application and had no general
principles. What the shipmaster knew about navigating from Greece to
Sicily could not be applied to anything else. Furthermore, the only
way to learn a techne was through apprenticeship and experience. A
techne could not be explained in words, whether spoken or written. It
could only be demonstrated. As late as 1700, or even later, the
English did not speak of 'crafts.' They spoke of 'mysteries' - and
not only because the possessor of a craft skill was sworn to secrecy,
but also because a craft, by definition, was inaccessible to anyone
who had not been apprenticed to a master and had thus been taught by
example."
It is in the world of "techne" that we find the challenge of skill.
The term practice derives from the Greek word "praktikos," pertaining
to action. That which is practical is that which relates to action.
The practical was distinct from the theoretical. The practical
pertained to action. The theoretical pertained to thought. Related
words and concepts included "praxis," "poiesis," and "phronesis."
"Praxis" referred to doing, performing, and accomplishing, that is,
to practical knowledge and to applied expertise. "Poiesis," was the
knowledge needed to make something, in contrast with a praxis, a
doing. "Phronesis," meant the practical knowledge needed to handle
political or ethical issues.
The issues of praxis, poiesis, and phronesis involve acting of the
criterion that Kari-Hans describes under the term judgment.
(5) Philosophy after the Greeks
Mautner defines philosophy in several ways, each reflecting one of
the senses of the word. First comes the sense of rational inquiry. In
earlier times, writes Mautner, "inquiry guided by canons of
rationality was called philosophy independent of subject matter. For
instance, physics or indeed natural science generally, was called
natural philosophy: Newton's major work of 1687 concerns the
'mathematical principles of natural philosophy.' Gradually with
increasing specialization, various kinds of inquiry have received
their own names, and are no longer called philosophy. Mental
philosophy, for instance, has become psychology. But the most
fundamental principles of thought, action and reality remain among
the subject matters proper to philosophy."
A program of rational inquiry and generalizable principles defines
philosophy. This sense is the sense in which the term philosophy
entered the world of the universities. When the English word
philosophy was first used in the 1300s, it referred to all learning
other than technical precepts and the practical arts. In the
universities, this came to mean the sciences and liberal arts but not
the professions.
When the degree doctor of philosophy emerged, it was awarded for the
study, understanding, and development of theory in sciences and
liberal arts, but not in medicine, law, or theology. These
disciplines had their own doctoral programs and degrees.
The liberal arts did not include the fine arts or the applied arts.
The fine arts and the applied arts were taught through the tradition
of studio apprenticeship or guild apprenticeship. This was the domain
of design until recently.
Developing a synthesis is difficult, partly because the forumns of
design inquiry have not been hospitable to philosophical inquiry.
In its older incarnation as craft, design inquiry and philosophical
inquiry would not have fitted together at all, certainly not within
the Greek conception of practicing philosophy.
Craft is techne. Philosophy is sophia. Techne is tacit. Sophia is
explicit. The world depends on both, but the kinds of thinking
represented by each were considered foreign to the other.
Precisely because the mysteries of the craft cannot be put into
words, one cannot imagine a philosophy of craft. If design is craft,
there can, by definition, be no philosophy of design, and there need
not be.
This may change in the future with the development of craft-based
industries. While inspired by and rooted in craft, these forms of
design develop into knowledge-intensive configurations of
professional practice. The tacit knowledge of the inarticulate craft
tradition needs no philosophy.
It is certainly changing in the larger framework of design knowledge.
Design has taken a new form in the current era, and this form opens
the way to a third kind of philosophy or thinking practice distinct
from sophia and techne both, deriving important possibilities from
both, and moving beyond either.
If we consider design in its larger frame of thinking and planning,
there are several senses in which philosophy may be applied to design.
With the development of design as a branch of knowledge, the activity
of design must be understood as praxis, a practice. Praxis, doing,
requires virtue. Making, poiesis requires techne, skill. The praxis
of design is a virtuous praxis, akin in some ways to the praxis of
statecraft.
The philosophy appropriate to design may also be a new kind of
philosophy that blurs prior distinctions. The knowledge economy is
blurring the boundaries between product and service, material and
immaterial, hardware, and software. In this context, nearly every
design practice has immaterial dimensions along with the material. In
a new way, therefore, design links techne with sophia.
Sophia itself is no stranger to the physical world. While Plato
considered our physical world a shadow of the ideal world of Forms,
he nevertheless considered governing the state as a suitable task for
philosophy. In many senses, design as defined here is an act of
conceptualization linked to the concept of governance or to the
industrial concept of control.
I will not attempt to stretch the metaphor of governance to a
breaking point. I raise the idea as a useful step toward richer
thinking. What is clear is that design is a mental process linked to
physical outputs in a world where the mental and the material are
increasingly interdependent.
(6) Philosophy and design
How shall we link philosophy and design? On what basis can design be
the subject or the object of philosophical thinking?
One aspect of design is the technology of design. This is a question
of engineering, and a question of design science. However, the issue
of how design relates to the larger bodies of knowledge within which
it is placed in a philosophical question. Questions of how design
affects the larger worlds and how the larger world affects design
are, in a sense, philosophical questions. Some specific questions on
design affect design from the level of meta-inquiry. Issues involving
the philosophy of science in relation to design and the broader
question of theory are philosophical questions.
Writing in another context, Georg Simmel summarized the problem we
raise when we consider philosophy and design. "The modern scientific
attitude toward facts," he wrote, "finally suggests a third complex
of questions Insofar as these questions are adjacent to the upper
and lower limits of this fact, they are [empirical] only in a broad
sense of the term; more properly, they are philosophical. Their
content is constituted by this fact itself. Similarly, nature and
art, out of which we develop their immediate sciences, also supply us
with the subject matters of their philosophies, whose interests and
methods lie on a different level. It is the level on which factual
details are investigated concerning their significance for the
totality of mind, life, and being in general, and concerning their
significance in terms of such a totality.
"Thus, like every other exact science which aims at the immediate
understanding of the given, [design] science, too, is surrounded by
two philosophical areas. One of these covers the conditions,
fundamental concepts, and presuppositions of concrete research, which
cannot be taken care of by research itself since it is based on them.
In the other area, this research is carried toward completions,
connections, questions, and concepts that have no place in experience
and in immediately objective knowledge. The first area is
epistemology, the second, the metaphysics of a particular discipline."
One reason the challenge became so appealing to me is the general
absence of a robust body of philosophical inquiry for the making
disciplines. I do not mean personal philosophies, for we have those
in abundance. Rather, I refer to a broad, general, systematic
consideration of how we can theorize and understand design. In a
sense, we have reached the point that information science reached in
the 1970s as a robust, significant discipline that seeks a foundation
in robust thinking.
In this context, it is interesting to quote B. C. Brookes. While he
was writing about a parallel discipline, this partly describes our
situation in design:
"Theoretical [design] hardly yet exists. I discern scattered bits of
theory, some neat in themselves but which resist integration into
coherence. So there are no common assumptions, implicit or explicit,
which can be regarded as its theoretical foundations. Information
science operates busily on an ocean of common-sense practical
applications, which increasingly involve the computer ... and on
commonsense views of language, of communication, of knowledge and
information."
We also lack a rich body of technical philosophy applied to design.
Here, too, there is much work to be done. All that exists takes place
in time and space. The physical world in which we live and the flow
of time that transforms our physical world are the basis of life
experience. They are therefore a central basis of philosophy. Design
acts in and on the physical world. One realm of philosophy should
therefore address questions that involve design. While philosophers
address the challenges of time and space, few philosophers have
ventured into the domains for which the making disciplines are
responsible. The lacuna leaves interesting work for philosophers -
and for design scholars whose interests bring them into the frame of
philosophy proper. Here, however, I use the term philosophy in its
larger sense.
I have been focusing on philosophy in the other sense, the sense that
Hamilton defined philosophy: '-- the science of things divine and
human, and the causes in which they are contained; -- the science of
effects by their causes; -- the science of sufficient reasons; -- the
science of things possible, inasmuch as they are possible; -- the
science of things evidently deduced from first principles; -- the
science of truths sensible and abstract; -- the application of reason
to its legitimate objects; -- the science of the relations of all
knowledge to the necessary ends of human reason; -- the science of
the original form of the ego, or mental self; -- the science of
science...'
(7) Philosophical practice
The question of a philosophical practice is somewhat different,
relating to Donald Schon and Chris Argyris's definitions of
reflective practice. Schon is more often cited than read or quoted
carefully, but he and Argyris often use the term "reflective
practice," to describe a philosophical or philosophized practice.
This means theorizing and reflecting on professional practice as the
object of inquiry among professional practitioners. It involves
bringing explicit philosophical depth to reflections on the practice
of a profession, in this case design. It requires rendered the tacit
explicit. It requires articulating and putting into words the
unspoken issues and questions implicit in a professional practice.
This also touches on the ways in which current philosophy and
cognitive science look beyond rigid boundaries separating thought
from emotion. This is the core issue in Antonio Damasio's work, and
it is seen in many of the writers working on knowledge management and
organizational learning.
(8) More to come
These are some thoughts abstracted from my notes on these issues.
Hope it contributes to the thread.
I am still seeking a good way to articulate the new philosophy that
seems to me to be on the way. The challenge is that a new practice of
philosophy for design must have a space for metaphor and creativity
while it is also true to facts in the sense of epistemological
validity. It must be applicable and flexible, that is, practical,
without becoming expedient.
Bringing these issues together in a robust way takes real work.
This is still tentative and incomplete. I will stop here since I
can't yet go further.
Best regards,
Ken
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University
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