As I see it, the ultimate purpose of philosophy is to guide people in developing an optimal strategy of living. Such an effort breaks up into two parts. The first seeks to provide as accurate and complete a description as possible of the situation we have been born into. This job falls to metaphysics. The second is to present the best set of guidelines we can for how to act within our situation in order to flourish. This is the role of ethics.

As an English professor, I saw literature as a companion to philosophy in this effort. That is, fiction can present and critique strategies for living using the devices of setting and narration to set up th situation and those of character, dialog, incident, plot to test out alternative ways of acting within it. My doctoral dissertation applied this approach to analyzing the strategies for living embedded in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and I continued to use it in all the literature courses I taught during my tenure at Olivet College.

Now, all that got put aside when I transitioned into a career in business, but it continued to percolate in the background. What is a marketing campaign if not an attempt to show how your company’s offerings can help a prospect flourish? What is a VC pitch if not a narrative that describes a situation ripe for disruptive innovation linked to a story line for how to capitalize on it? What is an annual plan if not a fiction that the enterprise seeks to make real? So, perhaps it should not be a surprise that at this point in my career I am extending my perennial interest in strategy and frameworks to include the biggest strategy questions of all, the ones that philosophy has traditionally laid claim to, namely What the heck is going on around here anyway? and What am I supposed to do about it?

The Infinite Staircase represents my initial foray into this arena. The first two thirds of the book is organized around a metaphysics based on contemporary science. Its key metaphysical concepts include entropy, self-organization, and emergence, organized in a staircase of systems ranging from physics, chemistry, and biology at the bottom, desire, consciousness, values, and culture in the middle, and language, narrative, analytics, and theory at the top. Its claim is that all of reality can be understood in relation to these eleven systems, each one emerging from the one prior.

The last third of the book is organized around a model of ethics that is organized around four spheres of action, set up in terms of two distinctions, the first between first-and-second person relationships (us) as opposed to third-person relationships (them), and the second between private interpersonal interactions as opposed to impersonal public ones. Each of the four spheres is anchored by a core value, kindness and fairness for the private interactions, and morality and justice for the public ones. Each value is shown to emerge on a different stair in our staircase, tying ethics to metaphysics, and creating an evolutionary view of the emergence of both.

Of course, there is much more to explore, and bless the blog format because it creates a great place to engage with other people’s ideas. All of my posts end with the same tag line, one that I hope someday will inspire you to participate: That’s what I think. What do you think?