Thursday, November 29, 2012


59. Flexibility, but not too much         

We are told that everything has to be flexible, because that is good for innovation and innovation is needed. It should be possible to easily break relationships, fire workers, and sell parts of firms, and organizations must continually turn themselves around. There is something to that. Flexibility is needed to prevent rigidity, to allow room for novelty.

But flexibility can go too far. Revolving door employment is not good. For a fruitful relationship, within and between firms, one must invest, and that takes time. Often, the investment is specific to the relationship, i.e. cannot be recouped outside it, so that the relationship must last sufficiently long to make the investment worthwhile. Otherwise, the investment will not be made and the relationship remains shallow. Specific investment is needed when one makes the high level, specialized products, with unique combinations of features, which yield the highest profit.

Flexibilization is often accompanied; see the US, with legalistic relationships. Shorter relationships are less personal, less based on personal trust. They require a more contractual control of relationships. That increases costs, and the irony of it is that it reduces the flexibility of relationships by locking them up in the straightjacket of a contract.

Ironically also the drawbacks apply especially to innovation, while that is where flexibility is most advocated. Innovation typically arises from surprising novel combinations, from people and firms with different capabilities. As a result, people do not immediately understand each other. They must invest in sufficient mutual understanding and that requires patience and is also a specific investment.

Relationships entail risks. First, the risk of mutual dependence, especially when one makes specific investments for the quality of the relationship. Second, the danger, especially in innovation, is that knowledge or the innovation is captured by a competitor.

Especially under the uncertainty of innovation it is difficult to cover the risks with formal, contractual means. Firstly, the uncertainty is too large for one to be able to specify all relevant contingencies. Secondly, a contract can impose a straightjacket that stifles initiative and leaves no room for the surprising turns that innovation can take. Thirdly, the demand for a detailed contract is readily seen as a sign of mistrust, which evokes further mistrust, in a vicious circle that is difficult to turn around in the building of trust.

When contracts are difficult, as in innovation, trust is more needed. Where it is not present at the start it has to be built up and that again is a specific investment that requires the perspective of a sufficiently durable relationship to make it worthwhile.

In sum, especially in innovation one should not strive for maximum but for optimum flexibility, in relationships that last sufficiently long to evoke investment in mutual understanding and trust, but no so long as to obstruct the change and renewal of relationships. 

Sunday, November 25, 2012


58. Innovation by interaction

In the previous item in this blog I discussed the importance of cognitive distance for learning and innovation, in collaboration between people or organizations. Such distance should be large enough to tell or show each other something new but not so large that there is no mutual understanding and tolerance. How, more precisely, does that work? Here I apply my theory of invention (nr. 31).

In the previous item I also showed that at any cognitive distance, people are faced with the need not only to fit their ideas into one’s own, but also the need to help others to fit one’s own ideas and practices into their cognition. Thus people can help each other to cross cognitive distance and trigger shifts of thought.

In terms of the cycle of invention discussed in item 31, this positing of one’s ideas into the minds of others entails generalization, the attempt to apply one’s ideas into novel areas. Depending on cognitive distance, this yields misfits in understanding that require adjustment. People will try to ‘put it differently’, thinking back to how they came to grips with the idea, what other ideas they tried, and what other ideas are related to it, in their experience. In terms of the cycle of invention, this entails differentiation. As people do this reciprocally, they are stimulated to try and fit elements of the other’s thought into their own thinking, in hybrids of thought and practice (reciprocation), which stimulate a novel integration of joint thinking and action (accommodation).

One can increase abilities to cross cognitive distance by an accumulation of knowledge and experience in the practice of crossing distance.  However, as one accumulates knowledge one needs to search at increasing cognitive distance to still encounter something new, finding fewer and fewer sources of further novelty, and increasingly one has only oneself to counsel. Geniuses and wise people are lonely.

The two-sidedness or reciprocity of the process of learning by interaction yields immense leverage, compared to interaction with non-human nature, since in the mutual adaptation of discourse the ‘receiver’ can shift his stance and outlook to catch a meaning and the ‘sender’ can adapt to such stance in pitching his meaning, and revising his metaphors and bringing in meanings from yet other contexts.

The cycle of invention is my answer to the old problem of object and subject, or of the outside and the inside, as I discussed in item 23. Are objects in the world causes of the cognition of the perceiving subject, in the form of representations in the mind, as empiricism claims, or are objects perceived in terms of prior cognitive categories of the subject (such as time, space and causality), as idealism claims, or are object and subject inseparable (as Schopenhauer claimed). According to the cycle all three are right. Objects are perceived and made sense of in terms of categories employed by the subject but those may be changed (in accommodation) in the process of absorbing perceptions into mental categories (in assimilation).    



57. The value of difference

Differences in knowledge, perception, emotion, feeling, views, ethics and culture, which I have called cognitive distance in my scientific work, are bothersome, because they are a source of misunderstanding and prejudice and make collaboration difficult. On the other hand they are also interesting as a source of learning. The challenge is to find partners with optimal difference: sufficient to be able to tell or show each other something new but not so much that one cannot understand each other or cannot deal with each other.

Empirical (econometric) research (that I did with associates) shows that such optimal difference yields economic advantage through improved performance in innovation. The ability to work together with people who think differently yields economic advantage. That yields hope for diversity and tolerance, because if those were economically disadvantageous they would hardly be viable.

The ability to collaborate has a cognitive component in the narrow meaning of intellectual understanding (absorptive capacity), and a cognitive component in the wider, also affective sense of ethics and morality, of views on good and bad. One should not only understand each other but also have empathy for each other.

The complement of absorptive capacity, the other side of the coin, is the ability to help others understand one, with the use of illuminating examples or metaphors that help them to absorb one’s thought into theirs. One can develop both types of ability, for absorption and for communication, by accumulating knowledge and experience in collaboration with people who think differently. This enables relationships at larger cognitive distance, offering a higher degree of learning and innovation. The positive effect of that has also been demonstrated in empirical research.

One can also make use of go-betweens that help to bridge cognitive distance, preventing or eliminating misunderstandings, clarify views and habits, and take away suspicion.

To the extent that relationships last longer and are exclusive, i.e. closed off from relationships with other, more distant parties, cognitive distance will in due course decline. One becomes so familiar with each other that one begins to see, think and act in the same way. That is convenient, in fast and easy agreement, but it can also yield intellectual incest and lack of learning and renewal. However, long lasting relationships can retain their cognitive vitality when parties also maintain relationships with different others that can feed the relationship with fresh ideas and perspectives.

In communities, the advantage of strong local connections is that they enable close cooperation, with social control, reputation effects and mutual trust, but they can also lead to rigidity and stagnation. Isolated, cohesive groups are in danger of losing the impulse of novel ideas and experience, and to prevent that from happening bridges should be built to connect with other groups. And for that one must overcome the inclination to distrust outsiders.

This analysis serves to give more substance to the claim from evolutionary theory of the economy (see item 30) that variety matters for innovation. Variety is not only needed for selection to work, but also to generate novelty and produce new variety.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

 56. Humanism

One definition of humanism is that it takes principles for human action and life not from nature nor from the supernatural but from humanity itself.

There are varieties of humanism. The term was applied to a stream of intellectual activity in the Renaissance. The term ‘rebirth’ refers to a renewed inspiration from especially the Greek classics. Earlier, classical thought had already had a large influence. First that of Plato, especially in neoplatonism that was a major source of inspiration in Christian thought. Later, in the 13th century, Aristotelian thought, which had reached Western Europe via the moors in Spain, gave a new impulse to Christian thought, e.g. in the work of Thomas Aquinas. From the 14th century philosophy was no longer only a handmaiden to theology. Earlier, in the 11th and 12th centuries, there was a development of cities, emergence of commerce and free professions, and a beginning of capitalism. That yielded a need for knowledge and contributed to the development of individualism and of science. In the 14th and 15th century disastrous failures, moral, political and military, notably in the 100 years war between England and France, of the church and the nobility, contributed to the long-term demise of those old authorities.

The early humanism of the 16th century, with Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, had two characteristic features. First, and above all, it was oriented towards the individual and its flourishing and freedom. It was not antireligious. Second, it had an Aristotelian appreciation of diversity, tolerance, change, intellectual modesty, individuality and context-dependence of judgement, with the intuition that human life does not lend itself to abstract generalization.

In the Enlightenment, the drive towards the freedom and flourishing of the individual, and criticism of suppressive authorities of state and church, acquired a new dynamic. Humanism acquired the connotation of a rejection of divine and other supernatural powers. The humanism of the Renaissance was criticized for its distortion of classical texts in subordination to convention and maintenance of Christian faith. In what some have called a Counter-Renaissance much of classical thought was rejected, such as the Aristotelian idea that processes in nature strive towards a goal (the final cause). There was a development of abstract thought, and especially English philosophers turned to empirical foundations of knowledge. The Aristotelian perspective of practical philosophy was replaced by a more Platonic one, in a striving for universal, immutable, context-independent truths, in clear and distinct ideas (Descartes) or adequate ideas (Spinoza). The Enlightenment was not, however, platonic in seeking the source of the true, the good and the beautiful outside the subject but sought it inside, and that became part of humanism.  

Nowadays the most current meaning of ‘humanism’ is an attitude to life based on reason, autonomy and self-knowledge of the human individual, and belief in the betterment of the human being, mostly on the basis of its own efforts. Also, everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and to have the opportunity for the flourishing and authenticity of the human being. 

Saturday, November 17, 2012


55. Self and other

 With this item I start a series on the theme of self and other. There, I will use bits and pieces from my book Beyond humanism: The flourishing of life, self and other (2012, Palgrave-Macmillan). In the preceding series, on morality and ethics, I gave a prelude to this theme, in the history of the self, a discussion of individual and collective egotism, and narcissism. If those are rejected, how, then, could the relationship between self and other be? In the present item I outline the subjects to come.

In the series I will deviate from the focus on the autonomous, rational self that can shape its own future, which is characteristic of humanism, with its roots in the (radical) Enlightenment, to arrive at what I call otherhumanism, a transformed humanism that focuses more on the other. I will start with a characterization of humanism.

Next, I will proceed with a few practical considerations. First, I will consider the intellectual and economic value of the other for the self, and of variety of insights and opinions, in contrast with universalistic notions of equality and universality of ideas. Second, I will consider the need for stability versus flexibility of relationships, arguing for an optimal, not maximum flexibility. That is part of the overall theme of stability and change that appears and re-appears in this blog.

Next, I will delve into philosophy, with a discussion, first, of Friedrich Nietzsche as an outspoken philosopher of the self that strives to manifest and develop itself, in its will to power. The appeal of Nietzsche lies in his call for the flourishing of life. But for him concern for the other human being, benevolence forms an obstruction. By contrast, I will then consider Emmanuel Levinas, an outspoken philosopher of the other. His appeal lies in a call, not for a vertical transcendence to God, but for a horizontal transcendence of the self, liberation from the prison of the self, by opening to the other. I will then try to find a path between those two extremes of Nietzsche and Levinas, in my proposal of otherhumanism.

How can one have a flourishing life and be a good person for others, without help from God and the threat of hell and the promise of heaven? The answer is simply that in order to have a flourishing life one needs others and one needs to have empathy for hem. I already gave an indication of that in a previous item, on freedom (nr. 47).

While this claim does not sit easily in Western philosophy, in Indian and Chinese philosophy, from ancient times (some 600 years BC) onwards, it was a mainstream view, in particular in Buddhism and Confucianism. When the present blog ends, after some 80 items, in a sequel I will take up Eastern philosophy. 

In the present series I will next look more in detail into opportunities and problems of relationships and into how they may work and develop, in give and take, also under pressures of competition in the economy.

That leads on to an analysis of trust: what is it, on what is it based, what are its limits, and how does it develop. But that constitutes a theme in itself.  .             
54. Self-interest?

Economic thought has its roots in utilitarianism, but originally the utilitarians (Bentham, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith) were oriented to the common good, and accepted that at times individual interest had to be sacrificed for the greater good of all, while in economic thought the self has increasingly become disconnected from the common good.

Economists do recognize enlightened self-interest, defined as taking interests of others into account, so long as after deduction of any sacrifice to the other it yields net advantage. I define altruism as making a sacrifice even if, within limits, it yields net disadvantage. The source of it can be love, morality, habit or instinct. In economics, altruism is almost always ruled out. The argument for that is that under competition in markets altruists would not survive. However, competition is seldom so stark, or ‘efficient’, as economists call it, as to leave no room for any altruism. I do grant that altruism is limited by conditions of survival. The sharper competition is the less room there is for it.

It is standard practice in economics to refer, in assumptions of self-interest, to Adam Smith’s argument of the ‘invisible hand’ (in his Wealth of nations), but Smith pointed out that self-interest can go against collective interest and then must be subjected to constraints. He also (in his Theory of moral sentiments) gave arguments against the notion that compassion (he calls it ‘sympathy’) is in fact self-satisfaction and further says  ‘That whole account of human nature, however, which deduces all sentiment and affections to self-love, which has made so much noise in the world, but which, so far as I know, has never yet been fully and distinctly explained, seems to me to have arisen from confused misapprehension of the system of sympathy’. That ‘noise’ in economic thought has resounded far in politics and policy and has carried us away from good sense and from humanism. It has institutionalized egotism in society. Everything had to go via the market and that was seen as a surrender to egotism. Erroneous notions in economic science have misled us. This is a scandal. I wish economists had read Smith better.

Earlier in this blog, in an item on freedom (item 47), I indicated that for the highest level of freedom, in determining what we find that we should want, we need others to coach us from our prejudice and misconceptions. Adam Smith (of all people) already said this: ‘We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.  But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them’. Smith already recognized the need for the other. Again, I wish economists had read Smith better.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012


53. Narcissism

With this item I deviate, for once, from the task I set myself of not using more than 500 words. 

While in Romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) the self is seen positively as a source of the good, for Schopenhauer (1788-1860) the self is the seat of an insatiable, uncontrollable, egotistic will to exist, possess and consume. It were better if we did not exist. One should try to escape from the self and its will in a Buddhist-like ascetic discipline. One can temporarily escape in art, in particular music, as a contemplation of the universal, from the will-driven individuality of the self.

By contrast, there is also a line of thought in literature (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dostoyevsky) that wishes to accept darkness and depravity as part of the existential force of humanity that can manifest itself in a raw beauty. In philosophy we find this acceptance of humanity as it is, with all its passions, and the acceptance, even love of human fate (‘amor fati’) with Nietzsche.

Both Schopenhauer (2010) and Nietzsche (2006) emphasize the self-sufficiency of the self. They both make the distinction between pride, as the perception of self-worth based on one’s own conviction, which they approve, and vanity, as the seeking of recognition of worth by others, which they despise. However, pride is based on the assumption that the conviction of self-worth is valid and free from delusion, while both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche themselves exhibit such delusion.  

By this time we have strayed far from benevolence as part of a providential, God given nature, and we arrive at a demasking of benevolence as hypocritical and suppressive of human flourishing. Such honesty about human nature cannot simply be brushed aside in moral distaste. Nietzsche demands an answer, and later in this blog I will give it.

According to Lasch (1991) mentality has shifted from devotion to work as a contribution to both self-interest and the good of all to devotion to personal wealth and prosperity by achievement. Next it shifted to status and the winning of competitions with others as a goal in itself, a profiling of the self even without achievements, rhetoric above truth, opinions above arguments, glittering in public attention above grey, anonymous mediocrity. If one cannot achieve this by oneself, then in the reflection of the glitter of idols. This satisfies yearning for a heroism that was lost in modernity.

Our culture has regressed into narcissism. Narcissism is not a synonym for egotism or selfishness, an excess of self, not a manifestation of personality but on the contrary a lack of self, a collapse of personality, an experience of inner emptiness and senselessness. That must then be filled with delusions of greatness that must be mirrored and confirmed in the environment, or by images of heroes to whom one mirrors oneself. Lasch (1991, p. 37) speaks of a ‘sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported’. The inner voice of nature turned out not to have much to say. There turned out to be no sources of authenticity present.

Lasch ascribes narcissism to the inability to learn to live with one’s shortcomings and with the fact that others don’t only exist to satisfy one’s wants. That shortfall increases as one sets one’s ambitions higher, beyond one’s limitations, regardless of the interests of others, to satisfy one’s ambitions and longings. Advertising and other pressures to consume have contributed to this, with an appeal to a craving for luxuries, beauty, glitter, power, and self-realization. Lasch even ascribes our obsession with technology to a narcissistic urge to lift limitations in the satisfaction of longing and protection (Lasch 1991, p. 244).

According to Lasch (1991) we have strayed into widespread narcissism in which the self no longer has a self from itself but finds an emptiness in itself that it fills with delusions of superiority that it demands to see reflected and confirmed in its environment.

Sunday, November 11, 2012


52. History of the self

In his Sources of the self, Charles Taylor traces the appearance in history of what he called the ‘disengaged self’. There are three forms of disengagement. First, disengagement of the soul from the body, and rationality from passions. Second, disengagement of the self from its natural and social environment. Third, disengagement from ‘higher’, transcendent values, in a denial of values that transcend individual human well-being.

After the classical views of Plato and Aristotle that the good and true lie outside the self, in universal ideas that we can try to grasp (Plato) or in forms to which life tends (Aristotle), the church father Augustine took a turn to the self as a source of inner light, generated by God, in which the self is transparent to itself, and which illuminates the path to God. The internal light is a gift from God and by turning inwards we reach God. We move, so to say, inward in order to turn outward.

With his turn inside Augustine can be seen as a precursor of Descartes but with the latter the self stays in itself, as a source of morality. Our capacity to reason construes both knowledge and morality, and is master of the passions. Here we see a double disengagement of self, from passions and from the world.

While in classical thought (Plato, Aristotle) rationality was substantive, i.e. referred to the making of good choices from a hierarchy of good things for a virtuous life, from Descartes on rationality increasingly becomes more procedural and instrumental, for the pursuit of optimal pleasure as the only good.

In humanism, emerging from the end of the 15th century, autonomy of the human being, in its capacity to form and give direction to its life, played a central role.

With the Reformation, around 1500, according to Taylor religion shifted from collective experience of being in the same boat, in which everyone had his place and where individual deviance jeopardized the salvation of all, to a direct personal relation to God and dedication to Him, without intervention by the church.

In contrast with the Augustinian view that love for the higher is granted us by the grace of God, Rousseau proposed that our inner nature is fundamentally good but, instead of the biblical fall, there is a perversion of this natural good by human culture. The root of evil lies in what others think and expect from us, and the pressure towards the satisfaction of pleasure. This turn of Rousseau deepens the look inside. Sentiments are no longer the movers of deeds for the good life but have intrinsic value as part of the good life. The realization of nature in us shows itself in the expression of feelings. The self, not the social, is the source of the self.

For Nietzsche, the self is not a given but something to be overcome and to be developed, created. There, even change of the self is up to the self.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012


51. Will to power

 Plato said that reason must manage a team of wild horses: the horse of passion (eros) and the horse of self-manifestation (thymos). Now (as happened before in history) reason has let loose, the horses have bolted and the chariot bounces behind in shambles.

Many philosophers, Spinoza among them, claimed that the fundamental drive of nature is conatus, the drive to survive and manifest the self. 

Nietzsche argued that the fundamental drive of nature is will to power, not survival. People often risk survival in order to manifest their will to power. For him, Christian morality is perverse in overruling the flourishing of life, and the demand for self-sacrifice is a ruse of the weak to control the strong.

So let us see. Does a teacher exert power over a pupil? The developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed the notion of the Zone of proximal development. A teacher draws a pupil into the next (‘proximal’) stage of development, to which the pupil by itself would not be capable. That can be negative, in forcing a child in certain direction, but mostly it is beneficial.

In the preceding piece I distinguished between positive and negative power, but the line between them is not always easy to draw. Suppose one wants to criticize a friend, because it seems needed to draw him away from trouble. How can one be sure that one is genuinely helping the friend, rather than, as Nietzsche predicts, asserting oneself, competing, or trying to establish superiority? To begin with, one should ask oneself that question, but crucial is the opportunity for the friend to disagree and set one right.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her plea for A morality of ambiguity asked: should one try to restrain someone at the point of suicide, by force if needed? Her conclusion is positive, provided one then also shares responsibility in what happens next. One may not then just leave the other to itself. Negative power to restrain the other should be accompanied by positive power to help find a new perspective.

In markets there is both competition and collaboration. In competition there is negative power in constraining the other’s options, in collaboration there is positive power to develop new shared options. In collaboration there is power in creating mutual dependence, and even in the best of collaboration there seldom is a precise equilibrium of dependence, but there is a willingness to go far in a process of give and take, renouncing opportunities to exploit imbalance of power. I will come back to this in a later discussion of trust. 

Imperialism, the striving to apply over there what one has developed over here, can be a step on a path to transformation and learning, as I argued in item 31 in this blog, but it succeeds only when it fails, when it cannot impose itself on others and is forced to adapt or break through familiar structures and assumptions that were taken for granted. Imperialism triumphs only when it is defeated. 

Sunday, November 4, 2012


50. Power

A customary definition of power is: the ability to influence the actions of others, by influencing the options from which they can choose or the choice they make. Such power can be negative in reducing options or by imposing the choice, but it can also be positive in creating more options by offering others new insights, means and room for choice. Power becomes negative when it becomes coercive, eliminating freedom by lock-in or exclusion. A monopoly excludes competing producers and thereby locks in consumers.

The exercise of influence on others is inevitable and happens all the time and everywhere. It contributes to subjugation but also to creative tension and the flourishing of life. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a celebration of that. A debate without power for which Jürgen Habermas strove is an illusion and is undesirable. People need each other’s opposition and opposition also is power. However, power relations must not be pre-determined, institutionalized or unassailable, and there must remain the opportunity of opposition, for the creation of counter-power or escape from power. 

Power arises not only on the level of individuals but also on the level of collectives such as markets, professions, industries, regions, and states. In other words, power is also a matter of systems. In a preceding item (nr. 48) in this blog I showed how people get swept up in collective interests. It goes further. People are carried along in tacit presumptions, notions, visions, habits, practices, norms, values, and expectations that are part of cultures on different levels. These are what Said in his Humanism and democratic criticism called the ‘cultural structures of reference and attitude’, and what Foucault in his technologies of the self called ‘power of habit’. Repression or exploitation are culturally sanctioned and made immune to criticism, expelled from the arena of legitimate discourse. Foucault showed how cultural systems are internalized, how both those who exert power and those subjected to it may take it as self-evident.

What now? First of all, absolute freedom and justice cannot exist. One cannot abolish all limitation of means and possibilities. Everything that enables people to think and act also entails limits to them. One cannot look in one direction and at all others at the same time. That limitation one also imposes on oneself. There is no life without constraint.

How, then, can one escape from negative power? One can try to form countervailing power with arguments or with coalitions. That is the way of democracy. However, often arguments will not work because they go against what is taken as self-evident. Under the Soviet regime critics were seen as lunatics and put away in asylums. In democratic countries one is not imprisoned but simply ignored. Only if one commands a significant package of votes can one command attention. Ultimately, one can step outside and walk a path of one’s own. That is what entrepreneurs, intellectuals and writers do. In the end that was also the way out for Michel Foucault: build your own life as a work of art.