Inspired by “The Net (111)”
Error as Grace, Capable and Virtuous Letting-Be, Beauty, and Efficiency for Surprise
Shepherding being as shepherding error for beauty.
To us an example from Thomas Jockin that came up in “The Net (111),” which inspired this piece: imagine we traveled to a university to give a presentation on our work, and we arrive in the auditorium to find the sound system broken. Worse yet, it turns out that the administration forgot to reserve the room, so suddenly some other students come in for debate practice. We must leave, but fortunately the university tells us they reserved a bar in town at which we can give the presentation. We smile, travel there, and find the place in full swing: we thought it would be reserved just for us. It’s not, and we’re told to present. What now?
We could blame the university for failing miserably on the logistics, couldn’t we? That would be reasonable; after all, this isn’t our fault. Should we try to give the presentation and then blame the circumstances if it doesn’t go well? That too would be reasonable. But there’s another way, a way possible because of a capacity we have developed: we could project our voice over the crowd, off the ceiling and architecture. We’ve had training in oration and teaching, and this is a capacity of ours that we rarely get to use or draw attention to without being egotistical or “showing off.” An opportunity has arisen: we could “show” our capacity without “showing off” (“fitting”). Such is the grace of the error, a beautiful and memorable opportunity.
The presentation goes well (“as if” it could have gone no other way), and we return to the university. An odd question arises: should we work to make sure nothing is corrected or fixed so that we can “show (off)” our capacity again? In other words, should we make sure the logistics are not improved so that we might present in a bar again? No, that would not be fitting, and you would also know that you intentionally arranged the mistake for your own benefit, which would not be virtuous. And so we then act “rationally and efficiently” to assure that the logistics are taken care of, so that we can truly be surprised if something like this happens again. Without rationality, efficiency, and technical knowledge, we couldn’t genuinely arrange circumstances so that you could be surprised again and blessed by “the grace of error” — so that we could “let be” (as Thomas Winn discusses) our capacity and it be a matter of “showing” and shinning, not “showing off” and egotism.
I
As our example suggests, there is a unique relationship between virtue, surprise, encounter, capacity, showing, and beauty, where strange tensions arise where (as an example) it seems impossible to seek a good for its own sake, but if we seek a capacity that we never know when we will use it or how, then we are “practically willing” to develop a good that we never know for sure we will use — meaning we must be willing to cultivate it for its own sake. Also, how can we be sure that a person is being virtuous for the right reasons and not to “get ahead” of others? Through “the test of the surprise,” per se, which is to ask, “How does someone act when they don’t know what is going to happen?” As discussed in O.G. Rose, inspired by Timothy Keller, if someone is to avoid egotism the person must maintain “self-forgetfulness,” but maintaining “self-forgetfulness” requires great capacity so that we can handle whatever is thrown at us so that we don’t reflect on our inadequacies and hence back on ourselves (“The Unarmored Test” that “Owen at Agon” discusses comes to mind). Also, what is the difference between “pretty” and “beauty?” Well, there is something about beauty that is a strike and able to “rise to an occasion” that is not predicted or expected ahead of time, which is to say it does not fit within any “preset complexes” (as Walker Percy discusses). Indeed, to be able to rise to the occasion of a surprise and thrive is memorable and beautiful, and yet it is such precisely because it was not planned, which means beauty requires of us to be prepared for surprise and encounter. How is that possible? By sacrifice and by gaining capacity we never know if we will use — capacity we must be willing to get “for its own sake.” And if beauty and virtue are connected, then this act of beauty could be a testament to beauty.
We cannot will surprise, error, and/or “encounter” directly though, and if error is needed for virtue and “showing beauty” (for example), then we cannot will the conditions needed for glimpses of virtue and meaning. All we can do is prepare for error, and this would also suggest that a world which seeks through efficiency and technology to remove all error is a world which will lose opportunities and “graces of error.” And then the world might see less beauty and value and so have good reason to believe these “philosophical notions” are silly and not worth our time — much better to focus on “rationality” devoid of such “nonrational” considerations. And so we can give ourselves over entirely to rationality and technology…
Also, if we encounter a “surprising error” though, it seems plausible to believe that “it’s not our fault” if we fail, and so if we fail (as might be rational for us to emphasize), then so might also vanish evidence that we had an opportunity for something graceful and beautiful. And at the end of our lives then, we might look back and never see moments or episodes in which it felt like beauty might be possible — but that might be because rationality hid and concealed these moments and episodes (rationality “vanishes”). Life might seem meaningless, we seeing few episodes or examples in which meaning might have arisen. And indeed, there might not have been any such examples, for we were not ready to help them emerge as testaments to what life might become.
II
In this way, error can be a gift, but only for those who are ready to (surprisingly) “encounter” it (which is perhaps the only way we can really encounter “the face” of Levinas, “man on the side of the road” of Illich, or “Thou” of Buber, which is to say ethics might not be valid from any other basis than “encounter”). “The error” can provide a rare chance to “show” without “showing off” (which by extension means we might “show love” versus “show off love” to “the other”) — and could this not be beautiful? Meaningful? Sacred? Yes, but once the moment has passed, what then? Here, we might come to understand a role of rationality, technology, and efficiency, as rightfully critiqued by thinkers like Heidegger who saw in “technological thinking” a tendency to turn the world into “standing reserve” (sending us on a path discussed by Nick Land). This is because once we encounter an error and opportunity to “show” capacity, we need to fix that error so that we can be surprised again: if we just left the mistake and error, they might be errors, but they would not be surprising like they were the first time, easily removing from the conditions their potential to cultivate virtue and shine forth beauty.
“Error” can have the positive effects we discussed if it is a surprise, and a role of rationality can be to work to make sure that “non-surprising errors” (we might say) are corrected, so that the errors which do occur are “surprising errors” and so potentially beneficial to subjects (rationality must also work to make sure no error is fatal, for that too would mean no virtuous or beautiful development would be possible). As discussed by Alex Ebert through his tremendous “Fre(Q) Theory,” a true limit must be surprising, and it is in the encounter of “the limit” that we might realize “the limitless” in moving and adjusting that limit, an act which can realize virtue, beauty, and the like. This in mind, when we discuss “error” we are also discussing “a limit(ation)” (which we are encountering and thus having to respond to “on the fly,” like an improvisational artist).
A role of technology can be to keep the world changing in profoundly unpredictable ways so that there are always “new surprising errors,” helping us from ever running out of them to encounter (losing of which would be to deprive us for opportunities for virtue and surprise). Furthermore, if we could increase efficiency and yet don’t, there’s a way where this couldn’t be a “surprising error” but rather must be an intentional one. That, or it might be an intentional burden we place on ourselves, which doesn’t seem like an “encounter” but a principle, which might have benefits, sure, but “limiting technology” only seems to me like it could have these benefits to the degree such limitation helps us “encounter” better. Perhaps if we don’t know we could technologically do x instead of y then y could still prove a virtuous opportunity, but once we know x is possible, y might lose its capacity to empower beauty and virtuous. Hard to say.
Anyway, the point is that efficiency, rationality, and “technological thinking” are needed after surprise and error versus more so beforehand to avoid them (as we seem to think), precisely so that we can keep being surprised and keep having opportunities for development and virtue (furthermore, using rationality to address something that concretely “actually happened in the world” could increase the probability that the rationality was used in service of life versus fall into “autonomous rationality,” as warned about by David Hume). After an error and encounter, reason and rationality would rightly compel us to fix the conditions which caused the error (for otherwise the error wouldn’t even really be an “error,” seeing as we in a way intended it purposively, through negligence, etc.). Also, here, we might note that there is often a point in philosophical discussions where someone says something like “there is need for both reason and imagination, both justice and freedom, both x and y,” and perhaps what we glimpse in this is that there is no way for us to rightly tell the precise way and to what degree we are to order, implement, incorporate, etc. x and y except in the encounter or surprise (otherwise, we might risk totalizing or making a mistake in employing the dialectic as we think best). But if that is so, then “dialectical living” would require the capacity for us to handle surprise; otherwise, we might only engage in “dialectical thinking” versus something concrete or actionable. (“A dialectical notion” is not enough, for we still need to discern and judge how to be dialectical, balanced, proportioned — however we might language it.)
There is a real sense in which it would be wrong for us not to increase efficiency as much as possible, but in another way a drive for efficiency is problematic — how are we to think this tension? Encounterology might help, for efficiency is more so for the sake of maintaining “conditions of surprise” versus to remove surprise; we are to be “efficient” to the degree we are “better at surprise,” per se (or else “The Real” of Lacan or “Otherness” will overwhelm us, like a Beatrice who smiles to early for Dante). To put this another way, we could say that we must never use efficiency in such a way that we rarely ever have to take a risk or cultivate courage. In the act of making the world as efficient as we could, we might train ourselves into losing the capacity to think according to surprise and encounter. And this could be the loss of the miraculous…
III
As I spoke with Matthew Allison about, perhaps the point of regularity and law is so that surprise might occur and be meaningful to us as “surprise.” We tend to associate the regular and consistent with “most real,” but what if “the most real” moments of our lives are those which we could not predict before “the encounter?” Perhaps what we find in Hume, Buber, Levinas, Lacan, Illich, and the like is thinking which wants to shift our association of “the regular” with “the actual” to the unpredictable? So it is with efficiency and planning: the essence is the failure. The break. The crack. The point when we might encounter “The Real” and thus perhaps “The Beautiful.” Is this what we mean when we speak of getting back to the body? Is this what we mean when we speak to using our hands?
There is grace in mistake — in an opportunity to “show” versus “show off” — there can be a “sacred space” of genuine surprise, of genuine beauty versus a counterfeit. A place where beauty can unfold. Virtue too, for virtue is not merely a notion of the good versus the bad, but a capacity to reply to encounter and surprise (even spilt blood can be for life). Without efficiency, there wouldn’t be environments for surprise, only chaos or things wouldn’t work and we’d expect them not to work — no surprise. The workings of the world can be for when they break. And perhaps the grace of AI is that it will be truly surprising when AI fails us, and so the opportunity for beauty and virtue will be all the greater? Perhaps, but will it be too much? Will we be able to handle it? Is that up to us?
Surprise, error, improvisation, encounter — these are what AI can be a “forcing function” into making us consider, which if indeed these are the spaces in which virtue, beauty, mystery…can be experienced, this is arguably a moral and human advancement (before what II.1 causes “The Causer” in honor of Alex and Andrew’s work). Given our current conditions, it is hard to imagine a world where the average person has the timenergy, example, etc. to develop into Childhood, but this is precisely what AI as Causer could bring about. Not necessarily easily or pleasantly, but its nevertheless possible. If AI compels us to face our finitude, we might become those “shepherds of being” Heidegger discussed in precisely “shepherding error,” for error can be a “sacred space” in which a “strike of beauty” might occur.
Surprise is relational, for we cannot will for ourselves that which surprises us (surprise must choose us, per se). Where there is surprise, there is reason to believe the world exits beyond us; where surprise is removed, perhaps in the name of efficiency, we lose reason to believe there is any “there, there.” There is a deep relation between virtue, error, efficiency, capacity, and beauty, but how these things all relate and go together seems indeterminable except in the encounter and surprise, which is when we might prove lacking of the capacity necessary to determine them rightly. But again, if we are training for capacities that we might never use, we must be willing to “do something for its own sake” and as its own good, which is nonrational. O.G. Rose speaks extensively on the necessity of nonrationality to avoid Game Theory dilemmas, and what we see in gaining capacities we can’t be sure we’ll ever use is a calculus and way of thinking that can avoid Nash Equilibrium and “suboptimal results.” Indeed, if we do not get back to where surprise can occur, we have not “gotten back to the body.” We are not with “The Real.” To remove error is to remove truth for Hegel, and perhaps here we see why (we lack a reliable test of surprise to find what really comes out).
IV
Thomas Jockin warns of the danger of “collapsing the good into the beautiful” and of calling the good “beautiful” too eagerly, and perhaps that is a mistake which arises more readily when we start calling the lack of error and presence of pure efficiency “beautiful.” If surprise and error are necessary for virtue, might we refer to this “purely efficient state” as an “anti-condition,” per se? Indeed, we might call “smoothness” something “perfect,” but I think this is a mistake. “Perfection” is a word that should be used to refer to the quality of a response to a surprise and encounter (to “fittingness”). What is “fitting” for the surprise? Well, the only one who can say and so do is the one who is virtuous. And if we fall for the mistake of wrongly assessing “the anti-condition” as “perfect,” we might deem it right for our world to be “attracted” to a world in which all our like Eichman, as described by Hannah Arendt. Why is this? Because Eichman kept order. He followed efficiency (like “truth”) to wherever it led. “A (global) banality of evil.” “A doing-what-was-efficient.” “A just-doing-our-job.” Metrics. Numbers up. Is this the ultimate end of the logic of a world without Encounterology and beauty? A world in which we just increase efficiency “thoughtlessly?” Remove all the errors. Find the “Final Solution.” Remove all the opportunities for grace. Then, life everlasting? Or a life that won’t end?
In conclusion, we must maintain spaces of error, where grace might be found, which means we must work for rationality to survive surprise versus in the name of efficiency remove its possibility. Looking to Belonging Again, we could associate this with a life of “faithful presence.” A life where we work for capacities we never know for sure we might use, where we do our best to be good at something we might never get to “show.” And as II.2 discusses, this will require infrastructure like the Liminal Web so that this possibility and its models might spread. Spaces of lifelong training for surprise. Encounterology. Beauty can save the world, as Dostoevsky said, but only if the world is cracked and we ready for cracks. Death is the death of cracks. Human is “The Real” not just the practical (beware of idols). But now we are pointing ahead to the possibilities of the Liminal Web, and that will require more work at another time…
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