Thunder perfect Lou

Chord

Lou Salome on the integration of contradiction in a perfect female soul:

Just as motherhood is the only thing that offers the full experience, in its totality, of a human relationship, and, for this very reason, that can be ceaselessly renewed, woman receives from life the gift of new beginnings, in a way that man could never imitate. And the truer this is of her, the more of a woman she is, the more she attains her greatness in these renewals of life-and the more she is able to capture vast possibilities, robust energies, to incorporate them organically into the totality of her being, however remote they may have been from her female nature, or however opposed to it. There is no particular trait or any special tendency, even when by their content they are proclaimed specifically “female,” in which she ever differs from the essence of masculinity; the only difference lies in this manner of harmonizing them all in order to bring them into relation with the very core of her life.

Hence, no doubt, the futility of the interminable discussions which, with largely equal reason on both sides, sometimes emphasize the complete opposition between women and men, and sometimes, precisely, celebrate the progress that consists in having gone beyond it; in which woman is alternately credited with or denied almost all possible and imaginable qualities, being represented, always more or less accurately, under the species of levity and seriousness, of folly and cold realism, of agitation and harmony, of caprice and profundity, of wisdom and stupidity, of delicacy and brutality, as chthonic demon or angel. For, in fact, without looking very far, the concept “woman,” broken down into particular traits, covers the most irreconcilable qualities: the woman is always contradiction incarnate, provided that, in accordance with her creative vocation, she carries life itself working within her.

In the margin, next to “interminable discussions which, with largely equal reason on both sides, sometimes emphasize the complete opposition between women and men, and sometimes, precisely, celebrate the progress that consists in having gone beyond it; in which woman is alternately credited with or denied almost all possible and imaginable qualities, being represented, always more or less accurately…” I wrote “Like Jews!” All totalizing understandings need an alterity concept, against which it may define itself.

“The Thunder Perfect Mind”

I was sent forth from the power,

and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,

and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.

Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one

and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,

and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,

and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father

and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.

But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in due time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,

and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,

and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,

and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,

and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
You who know me, be ignorant of me,

and those who have not known me, let them know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,

and you will find me in those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the dung-heap

nor go and leave me cast out,
and you will find me in the kingdoms.
And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who

are disgraced and in the least places,
nor laugh at me.
And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.
But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.
Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience

and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,

and do not be afraid of my power.
For why do you despise my fear

and curse my pride?
But I am she who exists in all fears

and strength in trembling.
I am she who is weak,

and I am well in a pleasant place.
I am senseless and I am wise.
Why have you hated me in your counsels?
For I shall be silent among those who are silent,

and I shall appear and speak,
Why then have you hated me, you Greeks?

Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks

and the knowledge of the barbarians.
I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt

and the one who has no image among the barbarians.
I am the one who has been hated everywhere

and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life,

and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,

and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one whom you have pursued,

and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered,

and you have gathered me together.
I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,

and you have been shameless to me.
I am she who does not keep festival,

and I am she whose festivals are many.
I, I am godless,

and I am the one whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon,

and you have scorned me.
I am unlearned,

and they learn from me.
I am the one that you have despised,

and you reflect upon me.
I am the one whom you have hidden from,

and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves,

I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear,

I myself will hide from you.
Those who have […] to it […] senselessly […].
Take me [… understanding] from grief.

and take me to yourselves from understanding and grief.
And take me to yourselves from places that are ugly and in ruin,

and rob from those which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me to yourselves shamelessly;

and out of shamelessness and shame,
upbraid my members in yourselves.
And come forward to me, you who know me

and you who know my members,
and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,

and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,

for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.
Why do you curse me and honor me?
You have wounded and you have had mercy.
Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have known.
And do not cast anyone out nor turn anyone away

[…] turn you away and [… know] him not.
[…].
What is mine […].
I know the first ones and those after them know me.
But I am the mind of […] and the rest of […].
I am the knowledge of my inquiry,

and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,

and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,

and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me,

and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,

and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
[I am …] within.
[I am …] of the natures.
I am […] of the creation of the spirits.
[…] request of the souls.
I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below,

and they come up to me.
I am the judgment and the acquittal.
I, I am sinless,

and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance,

and interior self-control exists within me.
I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone

and the speech which cannot be grasped.
I am a mute who does not speak,
and great is my multitude of words.
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,

and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,

and I listen.
I appear and […] walk in […] seal of my […].
I am […] the defense […].
I am the one who is called Truth

and iniquity […].
You honor me […] and you whisper against me.
You who are vanquished, judge them (who vanquish you)

before they give judgment against you,
because the judge and partiality exist in you.
If you are condemned by this one, who will acquit you?

Or, if you are acquitted by him, who will be able to detain you?
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Hear me, you hearers

and learn of my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing that is attainable to everything;

I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound

and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter

and the designation of the division.
And I […].
(3 lines missing)
[…] light […].
[…] hearers […] to you
[…] the great power.
And […] will not move the name.
[…] to the one who created me.

And I will speak his name.
Look then at his words

and all the writings which have been completed.
Give heed then, you hearers

and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,

and I have no one who will judge me.
For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,

and incontinencies,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting place.
And they will find me there,

and they will live,
and they will not die again.

Karl Schwab, monopolarchist

Metaphysics, Politics

I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.

I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.

First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.

Our role is to “buy in.”

We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.

Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.

Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.

Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.

We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.

Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.

And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!

And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.

Against altruism

Ethics, Judaism

Wikipedia:

The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.

My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.

Hineini void

Judaism, Politics, Star

The irresponsible cannot be held responsible for anything but they are guilty of every neglected call to respond.

“Where are you?” . . . Nowhere, never, nobody.

Non-present.

“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

Quantlocked

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.

An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.

Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.

Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!

So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.

And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)

With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.

Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.

Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.

Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.

I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…

…

Oh.

Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.

It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.

Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.

Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.

Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.

Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.

The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.

This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.

And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.

Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.

No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.

Materialized magic

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Polycentrism

A service is a collective, intelligent being.

A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.

Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.

The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.

A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)

All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.

?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?

I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:

A good service lives across worlds:

Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.

Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.

Beriah makes a service serve good.

Topology of mystery

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.

Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.

We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.

But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.

The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.

The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.

And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.

The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.

Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.

Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.

Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.

Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.

Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.

In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

An insincere exhortation

Ethics, Everso, Philosophy

This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:

We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.

The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.

Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.

Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.

Just justice

Ethics, Politics

Let us not valorize impassioned overcompensation for past injustices.

Justice is not an accounts ledger, and to treat it as such is a catastrophic category mistake.

Overcorrection does not balance the books of justice.

Justice is better seen as a pendulum seeking equilibrium. Judicious action damps, slows and narrows the oscillations making them gentler, subtler and more easily directed.

Overcorrection shoves the pendulum from one extreme to another. It inevitably swings back as a counter-overcorrection, raging back with wrecking ball force.

The remedy for automatically dismissing a group’s claims is not to reverse the attitude and to believe them automatically. Justice abolishes automatic belief and disbelief. Justice listens to all people and judges their claims on the merits of the claim itself, not on who makes it.

The remedy for bigotry is not reversed bigotry. Justice abolishes bigotry.

The remedy for domination is not reversed domination. Justice abolishes domination.

The “settling of accounts” model of justice is justification for revenge. It is false justification and it produces false justice.

Anyone who thinks justice entitles the aggrieved to a proper measure of revenge knows nothing of justice.

And beware the correctors of structural injustice. The restructuring is usually a scale of justice where half the balance weights are the fingers of their own all-comprehending hand.

Scalar being

Philosophy

My brain.anomalogue wiki is a double-decade grounded theory experiment. In this wiki are whole books, essays, poems songs and random scraps of text, divided up into significant verbatims and reorganized into webs of association, some of which have crystallized in symbolic themes.

Two of these themes: “composite being” and “scalar being”. Within both of these themes is a passage:

In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.

A footnote to this passage: “Terms of Scholastic philosophy: individuum: that which cannot be divided without destroying its essence, dividuum: that which is composite and lacks an individual essence.”

And I just found another passage and stitched it into the web:

…through his morality the individual outvotes himself

All this was supposed to be preamble to something I wrote early this morning: “‘Individual’ is an inadequate word. Individuals are desperately and routinely divisible.”

But in light of the passages above, perhaps the word individual is better than I thought. When we morally split ourselves, or immorally dis-integrate, or re-integrate in some overpowering political or religious faith collective, or lose and find ourselves in love… is it not precisely the individuum that is lost or re-found? But then individuality applies just as much to higher- and lower-order scales of being. Technically, “individual” doesn’t help us distinguish the I-fragment from the I or from the we.

In that same early morning writing, I considered the word “Person”.

Person is a fine word, but maybe not as a substitute for individual, for all the same reasons. “Person” describes something that also scales upward into super-individual collectivity and downward into sub-individual units: macropersons and micropersons.

Between macroperson and microperson is the possibility of mesoperson. Maybe this is the word I need.

Notice, I say mesoperson is a possibility. Mesoperson is not a basic unit of being, nor is it something we can assume to exist.

Especially in times like this, mesoperson is a possibility seldom actualized, and rarely for long.

In times like this, “individual” and “person” applies less to mesopersons than to cultures and complexes.

In times like this, if you we not actively cultivating personhood and individuality, it is likely that “we” are not an individual or a person. We are only organs or organelles of other beings, with little being of our own.

All this being said, none of us are persons or individuals if we are not also organs of someone greater.

Sense, common and uncommon

Design, Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.

Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.

Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.

These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.

Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.

Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.

The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.

And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.

(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)

Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.

We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.

And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.

And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.

What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?

(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)

I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.

We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).

But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.

The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.

We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.

It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.

Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.

The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.

What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.

Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.

It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.

Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.

And design is how I put my religious life into practice.

Design! Jewish! Not religious!

Not to you. Not yet.

Waa waa waa

Autobiography, Philosophy

An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to win credibility.

Think of it as increasing your intellectual credit score. With a high intellectual credit score we can ask people to lend us some patience or effort to understand what is not easy to understand.

With credibility, we earn the right to be taken seriously when we say something that seems untrue or unimportant — before it turns into a truism that everyone retrospectively knew all along.

But credibility simply doesn’t happen with most people. After a brief flash of recognition, the novel insight fades into the background of truth. “It was there all along, and now that I think about it, I kind of saw it, too. And it is just as mine as it is yours, now. In fact, I know more than you, because here’s some stuff I figured out with this new insight of ours…”

“…But this new thing you keep going on and on about? It is not true, and, anyway, it is not important.”

In the realm of ideas, it takes ability and effort to remember ignorance and to maintain gratitude.

Many intellectual gift thefts are innocent, but those who steal gifts innocently are not intellectuals.

People are happy to listen to you, but only if you do a good job of saying things they already know.

Folks who consume ideas others hand-feed them just help themselves to whatever’s served up on the steam tray.

If you dump your ideas onto a steam tray — if talk or blog at whoever is around — your credit score will suck and your loan applications, however small, will be declined. Folks are preoccupied with their own worries. They won’t notice and can’t focus.

Your fabulous pearls of wisdom are as painful as Legos when someone steps on them.

Serious thinkers read and are connoisseurs of ideas. They know the before-and-after of oblivion and revelation. They live this transformation every day. They live for it. This is where to build credit.

Waa waa waa.

Fromness

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy, Religion

When we obsessively look at things which are supposed to be seen from, we make one of our deepest category mistakes. We confuse subject with object.

The best tools are subject-object hybrids. In use, tools fuse with our subjectivity and extend our being beyond the frame of the body. They become transparent to us, like our own eyes, ears, hearts and hands.

We see through glasses. We write through pens. We transport our bodies through bicycles. We strike things across distances with bows and arrows. We summon sentences and images through software and digital devices. We envelop ourselves in clothing and buildings.

We attend to the world, interact with things and absorb ourselves in our activities through these tools, and when we do, tools are subject extensions.

But we can also turn our attention to them and take them as objects. Existentially, they evert into objects.

I believe gadget blogs destroyed the golden age of design. Design was something stared at, written about, chattered about, compared side-by-side, obsessed over — objectified like a woman.

As a designer, I love a tool that self-effaces into imperceptibility when we approach the world with it, but when we turn toward the tool, it reveals itself to us as beautiful and right.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Tools belong to the subtle realm (Yetzirah) — part subject, part object, wholly both.

Philosophies are known-from.

Religions are lived-from.

They should be beautiful to experience.

But most importantly — experience should be beautiful from them.

They are not beliefs. They are faiths by which beliefs are believed.

When they become objects, they empty the entire world around them: everted sepulchers.