Not long ago, I realized that none of the authors I love to read cut readers a break.
I love hard, compact, flashing books. Stand up and move around, strain and turn to find the correct angle, the light shines in. Sit dully in place, and you get less than nothing. You get flat, mystical gist.
I will make every effort to be clear, and no effort to be accessible.
If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.
Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.
We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.
Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.
We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.
And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.
Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.
Speaking ethnologically, the most brutal titanic collective solipsism appears to its own initiates as the most elevated monotheistic universality; its innumerable agents pose as divine messengers bearing transcendent truths.
Now speaking mythically, would denial of monotheistic universality banish the titans of self-certainty? Or would it just invite in new titanic universalities? A myriad-eyed giant of relative values? Presided over by a benevolent value-neutral technocratic dictator?
Sloterdijk teaches us that an astronaut venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere must carefully envelop himself in portable atmosphere. Whoever ventures beyond Eden’s atmosphere must do the same. Perhaps a halo is an Edenic space helmet, an envelope of luminous everted fact.
For a decade I have struggled with an enduring aporia, a question concerning enception. (An enception is a capacity to receive a given of some particular form.) My question concerns whole versus part, but even just saying it this way gives me the missing answer.
At various times I have talked about enceptions in terms of a holistic ordering principle among capacities (or faculties) and at others as the capacities (or faculties) themselves to be ordered.
When approaching enception part-to-whole we emphasize enceptions as multiple capacities of reception of givens — a capacity to -ceive / take in a reality of some particular form, whether through perception, conception or intuition. Without enception for a particular form, that form remains submerged in oblivion. With the enception the form can be taken as a given — a perceived given reality or conceived given truth.
Enceptions operate at every scale. The perceptions of our five senses are taken-together (con-ceived) gives us sensus communis (perceptual common sense of what is real). And our social participation mediated by language gives us another common sense of shared understanding of the world with others of our community. Communities collaboratively build varying enceptive systems of understanding, each with its distinctive knowledge and practices.
This scaling brings us to the other use of enception, the whole-to-part approach. Here an enception which is a principle of holistic ordering, which crystallizes or harmonizes multiple capacities/faculties into a stable and self-reinforcing subjective system with its own ontology and objectivity. According to this view, the enception is not so much a function of parts, but of the stability of some ultimate, ordering enception. By this view, with a change in ultimate enception, givens can both irrupt into givenness or vanish back into oblivion. This seems true.
How I managed to not see this all along is beyond me: The hermeneutic circle is also the hermeneut lifecycle.
I knew this.
West and autumn and evening:
Establishing,
Perfecting,
Immortalizing.
North and winter and night:
Questioning,
Breaking,
Liberating.
East and spring and morning:
Playing,
Experimenting,
Discovering.
South and summer and day:
Believing,
Committing,
Conquering.
Beings cycle through phases,
each phase a relation of whole and part,
with its own mood and thrust.
In west and autumn and evening,
beings participate in the order.
In north and winter and night,
beings revolt against a world
unable to comprehend them.
In east and spring and morning,
beings wander freely,
groping for possibilities of relation.
In south and summer and day,
a movement emerges,
persuading and enlisting –
proceeding from the most yielding
to the most resistant.
To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?
The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.
Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.
Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.
The Israelites received one of the earliest Axial Age transmissions on Sinai.
But even after the revelations through Moses, the Israelites begged for a king. Human beings, Jewish or otherwise, crave kings.
And they got what they wanted. In the words of H. L. Mencken, they “got it good and hard”.
Later, in the enslavement in Babylon, Jews lost kings and temple and were re-liberated under the One.
Back to the wilderness.
Back to the portable Mishkan — now sacred text.
Back, finally, to the Axial root of the faith.
Under a new angel?
Within finitude, Chesed must be bound by Gevurah, limitless mercy by limiting justice.
Both Aeschylus and the Zohar teach this.
Zohar: “The Binding of Abraham and Isaac”
“It came to pass after these devarim that Elohim tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as an ascent-offering.’” — GENESIS 22:1-2
Rabbi Shim’on said,
“We have learned that the expression “It came to pass in the days of” denotes sorrow, while the phrase “It came to pass”, even without “in the days of”, is tinged with sorrow.
“It came to pass after the lowest of all upper rungs.
Who is that? Devarim — as is said: “I am not a man of devarim, words” (Exodus 4:10)
Who came after this rung?
Elohim tested Abraham, for the evil impulse came to accuse in the presence of the blessed Holy One.
“Here we should contemplate: Elohim tested Abraham.
The verse should read: tested Isaac, since Isaac was already thirty-seven years old and his father was no longer responsible for him.
If Isaac had said, ‘I refuse,’ his father would not have been punished.
So why is it written: Elohim tested Abraham, and not Elohim tested Isaac?
“But Abraham, precisely!
For he had to be encompassed by judgment, since previously Abraham contained no judgment at all.
Now water was embraced by fire. Abraham was incomplete until now
when he was crowned to execute judgment, arraying it in its realm.
His whole life long he was incomplete until now when water was completed by fire, fire by water.
“So Elohim tested Abraham, not Isaac,
calling him to be embraced by judgment.
When he did so, fire entered water, becoming complete.
One was judged, one executed judgment, encompassing one another.
Therefore the evil impulse came to accuse Abraham, who was incomplete until he had executed judgment upon Isaac.
For the evil impulse appears after devarim, coming to accuse.
“Come and see the mystery of the word!
Although we have said that Abraham is written, not Isaac,
Isaac is encompassed by this verse through the mysterious wording:
Elohim tested et Abraham.
It is not written: tested Abraham, but rather: tested et Abraham — et, precisely!
This is Isaac, for at that time he dwelled in low power.
As soon as he was bound on the altar, initiated into judgment fittingly by Abraham, he was crowned in his realm alongside Abraham, fire and water encompassing one another, ascending.
Then division became apparent: water versus fire.
“Who would have created a compassionate father who turned cruel?
It was only so division would manifest: water versus fire crowned in their realms,
until Jacob appeared and everything harmonized, triad of Patriarchs completed, above and below arrayed.”
The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.
The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.
Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?
Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.
Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.
Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.
The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.
But back to where we began: What is truth?
Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.
(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)
Factual honesty is common. Much of it has less to do with principle than cowardice. A factually honest person might only lack faith in his ability to lie, and calculates that the risk is not worth the reward.
A braver and therefore rarer honesty is one that pursues truths where lies cannot be exposed: the truth of faith, which lives in this question: How much do I truly believe this?
If we are faithful, we can rarely answer: Wholly.
If we are faithful, we often dislike where we answer: Wholly.
What do we believe wholly? Base truths. Ordinary truths. The truths we despise and would love to transcend.
What do we believe only partially and ephemerally? Higher truths. Moral truths. The truths we most love.
The base truths we would most love to doubt into oblivion we believe wholeheartedly and stubbornly.
The higher truths we would most love to believe wholeheartedly arrive and depart by their own whim, condense and evaporate, oscillate between utter persuasion and incomprehensible nonsense.
Many, and maybe most, are factually honest. Vanishingly few are faithful.
The faithless are so negligent toward faith that it no longer occurs them to question, much less lie, about what they truly believe. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” If you don’t question, you do not know, and what you say cannot be a lie, and of you do not lie that makes you honest.
Ordinary faithless people outsource their faith labor to those with whom they agree, all of whom have done the same. Is there anyone in such communities of faith who is believes from the heart, in whom the communities belief is rooted? Nobody asks because all are blind, deaf and numb to such questions. Everyone agrees to agree.
More exceptional faithless people “do the work” of forcing beliefs upon themselves — and beliefs about how strongly they believe these beliefs. They self-bully their way to the strongest possible conviction.
Might it be these self-bullying true believers who are the nucleus of belief communities? Are these the exploited workers in the sweatshops of ideology, to whom the faith labor is outsourced?
Faithful people offer truths to their heart and witness with urgent interest how the heart responds. Does she smile and accept the gift? Does she scornfully reject it? Does she ignore it as unimportant?
A faithful philosopher crafts elaborate ideas to offer his heart. He makes the highest and most beautiful and most promising ideas he can conceive. Most immediately fall flat. Some are accepted for a moment, played with for a moment and abandoned. The higher the truth, the more fleeting the joy.
Once, twice, maybe thrice in a lifetime, the heart keeps a high truth for her own.
Such high truths are enceptive seed crystals of strange enworldments.
This I know.
“Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”
Truth is not a woman. But wisdom is, and her name is Sophia.
Any idea she loves feels true.
If wisdom loves an idea, we will bet our own life on it.
But her sister determines whether we win our bet and live or lose it and die.
Wisdom’s sister is fact, and her name is Material.
A general is a philosopher who dies if he is wrong.
Hatred of Am Yisrael — variously expressed throughout history as anti-Judaism, antisemitism and now, anti-Zionism — is a reliable earmark of evil.
In the 20th century we have in the lineup some of the most distinguished villains of history: Nazis , Bolsheviks and Klansmen. In the 21st century the new lineup includes Islamist theofascists, the alt-right and progressivists.
I have been unable to find any credible secular explanation for this one and only point of agreement of so many horrible people, the destination reached by so many dark, snaking, spurious paths.
What feels most credible to me is that evil instinctively hates whatever is holy. Each evil being hates according to its own contorted logic and distorted lenses, and produces novel ideologies and justification for the hatred, but invariably each seeks in its own way to do the same thing — to displace and replace the covenant.
I abduce a hidden, unconscious, occult motive. Whatever and whoever wants to be God hates whatever reminds them of what they are not.
Non-mutual empathy is submission.
This LinkedIn post illuminates the source of my current dismay with the direction service design has taken, which is toward journey management.
None of this is a complaint about journey management per se, only the notion that journey management is a natural extension of service design — something for which service designers should feel affinity.
Journey management is an emerging field, with few trained specialists to fill the roles it creates.
Service designers are among the most qualified.
This is not unusual. Designers often find themselves at the edges of emerging fields, and often flow into these domains, and infuse them with designerly sensibilities.
The tragedy in this case, however, is that here design has flown too close to the sun, or rather, taken the elevator too close to the sun, up in the top floors of the glass tower where the executives hold court.
Up here, some key parts of the service design skillset are indispensable.
All except the design part. The design part is not only useless, it is a liability.
All those specialized methods human centered designers learn in order to be service designers are retained. But the heart of the discipline — design — is checked at the boardroom door.
All service, no design.
This is a tragedy because the radical promise of design is collaborative decision-making. It involves everyone exercising empathy, together. It is exercised mutually, by all involved. It is not exercised in order to spare executives the burden of thinking outside their own narrow focus, as der Veer suggests.
Empathy is not, cannot and should not be done asymmetrically for someone else, who is not expected to reciprocate. That is not empathy. That is submission.
Nobody should be exempted from the challenge of relating as a human to other humans — least of all the most powerful people whose duty it is to lead.
The whole point of design is to humanize the world. When, in the name of empathy we spare the most powerful people in the world the duty to lead empathically, design has betrayed both itself and the world.
Journey management is not a design discipline.
It is a strain of management consulting that systematically organizes customer data to inform business strategy decisions. In this time, in these conditions, journey management is a necessary and important improvement on older, more piecemeal ways of understanding customers.
Service designers might be able to transition to journey management, but they cannot make this transition as service designers. At best, they will harness their vestigial design skills in service of their new managerial function.
For service designers — and all designers — effective collaboration with journey managers will be an essential skill. It will expand design’s sphere of effectiveness.
But make no mistake: if journey managers “win a seat at the table” this is no more a win for design than when product managers won their seat. These “offering management” disciplines add new organizational layers between design and leadership, and rather than representing design, they push design further from power.
In an AI age, typos, mis-punctuation, bad grammar, and so on are all evidence of a human heart, mind and hands behind the written word. I can imagine these flaws becoming precious rarities in an age where fewer and fewer people know how to express themselves, or can even find a self to express.
You know, I think from now on, I’m going to go back to rawdog writing, and let the errors live. But this is not a final decision, even though I’m expressing it that way. (Sometimes, if I overdo the booze, I’ll tell people “I’m never drinking again, for at least a week.”) I’m trying on a permanent resolution, just to see what it’s like and how my feelings toward it evolve.
(Please note, though, I have never allowed AI to do any of my writing for me. I have, however, gotten AI’s reactions to my ideas and retained some of my own spontaneous responses to its objections. And I have asked it to proofread what I write, just for errors, not for style. What I’m contemplating is excluding AI from my work flow altogether.)
I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie.
I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more historically important than it is freshly relevant to the anomic situation we face today.
To summarize, Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie is that, at the individual level, without external societal constraints human desires are unlimited and lacking form. Society, by imposing limits, gives us norms, goals, defined desires and milestones for assessing the progress of our lives. When society stops providing this structure, we lose our bearings, and we are lost in a horizonless chaos, where motion is just arbitrary difference without any reference point by which biographical progress can be experienced.
Though now, just in the process of writing this summary, it is starting to feel freshly relevant.
In the spirit of showing my work, I am changing the original thrust (which was to expand anomie beyond Durkheim’s conception) to seeing how much I can find within it.
For years, I have played with a term, “misnorm“. Think of misnormality as a cousin to anomie. A misnorm is more or less a social category mistake. We misunderstand the essential nature of some domain of activity, and misjudge the behaviors that sustain it. We have a false image of how things happen, and so, when things go as they should go and must go, we judge that things are going wrong. And if we are in a position to control the situation, we will force it into conformity with what we think should happen, thereby making things impossible.
(Misnorming happens to designers all the time, and most of my career has been spent battling them, in order to win conditions for good design work. Someone who expects design to work linearly, with steady progress toward a straight goal, without moments of confusion, doubt, conflict and intense anxiety, in complete and polished iterations does not know what design is. And if such person attempts to lead design projects, he literally does not know what he is doing. Such a person is likely to misrepresent design to his organization, or accept misrepresentations of design, and sets himself and his team up for a truly traumatic failure. Either the design team will insist on doing design the way design is done and fail to conform to the wrong expectations of the ignorant leader and his ignorant stakeholders. Or the design team will try to work under impossible conditions within impossible constraints and fail to deliver good design, which is, frankly the fate to which most designers are damned. Either way, the project will fail, and it will fail because, once again, the leader failed to win conditions where success is possible. No amount of demanding, or bullying, or bullshitting can change this fact. And, by the way, this failure is even more a failure of leadership as it is failure to understand design: such people also suffer from misnorms of leadership. They confuse leadership with tyranny.)
Misnorms cause us to compare the human condition to a fantasy norm, and to misjudge something normal and relatively good as something atrocious and deserving destruction, or, as today’s timid radicals put it: dismantled.
Today’s misnorms are fed by fictional images produced by our media — news, entertainment, and the blending of the two in the propagandistic missions of various political movements. This propaganda projects misnormal ideal positive images into the world, in comparison to which everything real is distorted as inadequate, and ideal negative images blamed for the inadequacies. And at the theoretical level, we have ideologies and weird theologies which purport to enlighten us to what’s really going on, but in fact dysilluminate the world with false clarity, which always “reveals” the world as hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable and irreparable, requiring nothing less than total ground-clearing and rebuilding from scratch. It is hard to avoid wondering if all this need for rebuilding from scratch doesn’t just serve as justification for sating an insatiable appetite for destruction.
And so a great many people wander around interpreting everyday, ordinary frustration as evidence of something extraordinarily bad, while misinterpreting disproportionately violent responses, and corrosive policies meant to correct nonexistent problems, as good and necessary. And it all makes conditions of normal life increasingly impossible. And it is very difficult to maintain, repair and improve something that is being undermined, bombarded, and demolished from within, so the critiques gain credibility through their own negative outcomes: the deterioration of what they critique.
And so, today, instead of experiencing lack of references, orientation and sense of progress, as with anomie, we have impossible and deeply phony references and perverse misorientations and rapid regressive velocity.
Anomie : misnorm :: nonunderstanding : misunderstanding
I see very little difference between the far left epistemology of emotion (feeling as fact) and far right epistemology of faith (intuition as truth).
Both commit a sin of antisocial gnosis, claiming privileged access to some preexistent given truth that can be accessed like a datum. The very making of such claims performatively contradicts the claim that one knows. The move demonstrates ignorance of what truth is and how it comes to be known. We approach truth collaboratively with others, and refusal to do so shows that we are mistaken about what truth is and what it does and how we relate to it.
Feelings are data. Spiritual and intellectual intuitions are data. Perceptions are data. Any datum can be mistaken. Only by forming, testing, reforming, retesting, iteratively and forever tentatively can we arrive at truth. Data can give us very compelling leads, but they are the start of possible truth, not conclusions.
The process of developing possible truth and seeing some succeed and some fail, and others succeed for a long time only to fail later, or to see two conflicting possible truths each succeed for a long time, or to see one truth yield to another without ever fully failing, or best of all, to experience the surrender of one truth to accommodate another, and discover an even more successful truth… this experience of the plurality of truths and their interactions opens up a yet higher level of truth, but with radically different character from the ones that revealed it.
Gnostic epistemologies are elaborate category mistakes.
Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.