Beyond paleomodernism

November 7, 2026Design, Philosophyanomalogue

Here’s you a preposterous hypothesis:

The field of design has one foot in corporate paleomodernism and another foot in a rapidly dissolving postmodernism.

The professional-managerial class (including designers who uneasily belong to it) is suffering from a collective philosophical anosognosia.

Tl;dr: Postmodernism rose to prominence, and, once there, by its own self-critiquing ideologic promptly set its own platform on fire. As anyone who’s indulged it knows: reflexive-compulsive self-skepticism is incompatible with action. But not to worry: if “nothing is true and everything is permitted”, why not permit oneself methodological modernism? Why not avail ourselves of the advantages of our less reflective and more convinced opponents, and act as if we believe things we know better than to really believe? There is no cosmic referee to blow any whistles. But there is a political game to win or lose, and we need an even-or-better playing field.

This is my mythical summary of Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap.

Postmodernism allows, and maybe demands, principled methodological hypocrisy.

And, just in case I sound as if I disapprove, my own designed philosophy of design suspends itself along (sic, sorry) this same nonexistent “strategic essentialist” platform. (But I say if we’re going to essentialize, let’s go all in. Modernism is such a timid relapse compared to neoplatonism. Skip to the end for more…)

And all would be more or less ok if it weren’t for a tendency for methodological stances, by performative habit, to turn substantive. And by “tendency” I mean iron necessity.

Because let us not forget, the whole purpose of this methodological suspension of disbelief was to harness the power of instinctive naive realism. You can hold onto this kind of ironic practice for a generation, maybe two, but eventually, once the postmodern problem loses its intensity, that ironic tension will go slack and loose and instinct will start grabbing whatever’s most grabbable. Oopsie.

So here we are with a generation who thinks postmodern thoughts with all the naive realism, grand narratives, scientism, technocracy, positivism, objectivism, essentialism, prejudice, fanaticism and incapacity for self-reflection of the most extreme modernists — and most of all about anything taken to be political.

Postmodern ideas have been reduced to sacred dogma of a paleomodernist cargo cult, worshiped as objective truth, magical precisely because they transcend all practical understanding. Postmodern practices are rituals of procedural propriety performed under appropriate conditions, for example to show courtesy to an Other, neutralize a subjective bias or counterbalance a power differential.

The one and only place where postmodern practice has survived and even flourished as a postmodern praxis (however partially, unreliably and uneasily) is human-centered design, or as I like to call it, design. (Design, like postmodernism, has that magical aura of elusive thatful-but-whatless significance — belimah.)

But as I said in my opening aphorism, the field of design has one foot in corporate paleomodernism and another foot in a rapidly dissolving postmodernism.

As postmodernist practice dissolves, evaporates and atrophies — even as its theoretical formulas get mouthed far and wide — design praxis is increasingly cut off and isolated. Designers find fewer and fewer allies outside design — people who learned to think, feel and respond postmodernly but who chose other professions than design.

Postmodern sensibilities that once saturated culture and reinforced postmodern attitudes have been replaced with ideological didacticism. Even the technologies encourage monologics. The message in mass media is modernist, even as the content remains postmodernoidal. The most important medium of all, the matrix behind all media, is corporate managerialism. It can almost go without saying that corporations provide every cultural platform and generate much of the content pumped through these platforms. But the people who use the platforms, consume the content and produce much of it live inside a medium of corporate life as participants who actively sustain it.

Designers must inhabit this environment and participate in it. Designers at best are amphibious, code-switching praxes, to the degree they have a second environment conducive to design.

When this second environment — a fragile ecosystem — is threatened, as it is today, design risks self-forgetting. The amphibian who spends too much time out of its element might find its evolution has made it unfit for its native habitat. The former slippery amphibian is now a cool, dry reptile.

Now I will abruptly shift metaphors, from ecosystems to boxing.

Designerly postmodern praxis has suffered a concussive one-two punch to the head.

Punch one was the hyperpoliticization of everything. Postmodernism learned (correctly!) to see politics in everything, down to the most intimate interpersonal events. But when paleomodernism addresses these postmodern insights with modernist conceptualizations and reactions, the resulting conflicts are addressed as late modernity addressed them. Wherever a political issue arises in the midst of design work, two hats compete for the same head — the cultivated second-natural hat of design and the base instinctual impulses of human nature harnessed by paleomodernism. Which do you suppose prevails?

Punch two was delivered by AI, and the force behind the punch impacted the velocity, the means and the objectives of business practice. Things instantly became faster, more complex, more chaotic, more anxious, less thoughtful — all conditions highly unfavorable to design. At the same time, economic conditions deteriorated, and every organization began focusing on operational effectiveness and efficiency, in order to protect margins. Customer experience stopped being a competitive front. Design work dried up. Modernism is optimal for these kinds of conditions. Suddenly things got really damn objective and quantitative. Modernist management was the right tool for the job. As unpleasant as all this is, however, it is only backstory for my tale of brain trauma. Designers responded to all this with a paleomodernist embrace of modernist managerialism. The old dreams of design became outmoded idealism in a time where hard-nosed realism is needful.

But has anything really been lost?

No. This is evolution of the field. It is not a loss, but maturity. It is progress.

Design has never been sharper or more competent or more able to articulate its value to business.

Some designers feel an unease that something has been lost, but real design leaders with a broader view of design know otherwise.

This is my preposterous hypothesis.

If, perchance, any motherflippers ask where you got it, tell them it came from Steve. Steve!

Earlier I mentioned my own postmodern strategic essentialism, which adopts pragmatism’s instrumentalist understanding of truth. Ideas are true to the degree that they work for their intended practical purposes.

My view is that much postmodernist philosophy, when applied to itself, has done the paleomodernist move.

It tries, with gruesome seriousness, to discover a dogmatic truth about the constructedness of truth, as if such a thing is there to discover.

But what if we simply behave as if it is not there to be discovered — or at least not there to be discovered like lost keys, or a continent or a new species of reptile? Perhaps it must be created? Instaurated? Courted?

What if we approach philosophy as a design problem?

How might we change our relationship to reality in order to live better human lives? How can we render literally everything more intuitive, more valuable, more practicable?

What if Liz Sanders’s framework for good design experiences — useful, usable, desirable — became our standard for good philosophy design?

Supposing truth is a design problem — what then?

Designerly hypostatization

November 6, 2026Design, Design Instrumentalism, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

Ruach (Spirit) can intuit existential threat, just like Nefesh (Soul), but where Nefesh returns to dust (Hyle), Ruach returns to Neshamah (Nous). In both cases, finite being anticipates its dissolution and reabsorption into the indefinite nothingness from which finite life emerges.

Ruach, however, can ascend through the veil of nihilitude, and dissolve in Neshamah, before redescending, reconstituted ex nihilo in a newly given world — without returning Nefesh to the earth.

This is what “born of the spirit” means: Ruach is reborn from Neshamah, and Nefesh finds itself re-selved and re-enworlded.

Neshamah is the superpersonal Self in the hypostasis of creation-revelation ex nihilo known as Beriah.

Ruach is the transpersonal self in the hypostasis of transcendental subjectivity known as Yetzirah.

Nefesh is the objectified person in the hypostasis of objective actuality known as Asiyah.

Nihilitude separates Ruach from Ruach, and all Ruach from Neshamah, in whom every Ruach subsists. Ruach dreads the piercing of nihilitude and the inconceivable indefinitude beyond everything.

Exnihilation and annihilation are indistinguishable from below; from above the distinction is unimportant. To Neshamah, birthpangs, deathpangs, graves and cradles are all alike — finitude desperately and futilely defining itself against its infinite ground. To Nefesh, every pang is a potential threat to present life, and life is to be preserved at all cost.

Existential dread is the herald of transcendental reformation. Nefesh fears demise. Ruach fears damnation. Neshamah repels as it attracts, leaving the choice open.

Is this the metaphysical truth? No.

Are these Neoplatonic hypostases hypostatized? Yes!

It is a design meant to faithfully situate and orient any self who adopts its implicit transcendental subjectivity — as a fully present I-here-now, aware of and responsive to its transcendent ground.

The transcendental subject is its “hermeneutic presequence“. Its pragmatic consequence is an evolving world rendered intelligible, livable and valuable, inexhaustibly renewable ex nihilo, liberated from nihilism.

Its given reality is manifestly valuable: our material world, nature and artifice alike; our inherited past and our future bequeathal; our inner potential unfolding in participation in life with others.

What makes this philosophical design true is the faithfulness of its situating ideas to its given world. It harmonizes given reality and given truth, and at times the two even seem one and the same. Circular? Spiral.

Why the arcane language? Partly its aptness. Partly because our situation convenes a plurality of ancestral inheritances — Hebrew, Indian, Greek… — and we owe gratitude. I cannot prove this, but neither can I doubt it.

…

So, what can I do to get you to drive home today in this shiny, terrific new enworldment?

Comments on “Intertranscendental”

November 5, 2026Philosophy, Politicsanomalogue

I added some comments to my “Intertranscendental” post.

One is an application of this idea to the plight of design under corporate managerial hegemony:

This same dynamic, by the way — transcendental subjectivity imposed on discourse, both substantively and procedurally — is what can make dialogue between designers and corporate managerials an exercise in futility. The managerial subject cannot operate outside its own horizon, which it assumes, with that confidence obliviousness alone affords, is absolute and comprehensive.

This is a complaint as old as philosophy, usually with natural consequences also as old as philosophy.

The other comment was more bellyaching about leftist metacognitive (metasophic) incompetence projecting its own deficiencies upon its Other.

This is the reason why right-conservatives in the 80s and 90s rolled their eyes at left-liberals’ incessant overtures “to dialogue”. The liberals invariably imposed their own ideological transcendental subject on the proceedings, not only on what content was indisputable, but on the form and regulation of the forum itself. But because it was their own transcendental subject being imposed, liberals were constitutionally oblivious to what struck conservatives as ludicrously tilted. Because, to themselves, they were self-evidently smarter, more radical, more self-aware, better intentioned and less naive realist than their interlocutors, they resorted to theories explaining the psycho-ethical deficiencies behind all the balking. All without a trace of that vaunted “liberal irony”. So the left gave up entirely on dialogue, which was the same as giving up on liberalism. Ironically, they knew about the dynamics, but refused to apply them universally and reflexively, and were unable to “practice what they preach” to a degree sufficiently radical to diagnose and treat their own profound and systemically enforced injustice. “The work” they’ve done to date is superficial and not only leaves their self-ignorance and vices unaddressed, it is now used to justify their unrestrained exercise.

The contemporary illiberal left — progressivism — having given up on both dialogical gestures and liberalism, now uses its hegemonic power to enforce the view that it is either victimized by hegemonic power, or threatened by the imminent hegemony of a nefarious power which, unlike it, seeks total dominance, and therefore warrants the use of extra-democratic means to save “our” democracy. Unless it is mercilessly suppressed, silenced, marginalized and otherwise prevented from voicing its views and arguing its case, it might gain power and misuse that power to silence marginal voices and oppress those who cannot resist it.

By the way, the target of both comments is one and the same collective.

Despite all attempted appearances, progressivism is corporate managerialism applied to politics. By the same coercive sleight of hand by which it exercises hegemonic power in order to be the champion of the hegemonically oppressed, it gets to oppose corporate capitalism while being corporate capitalism.

They are in the corporate world, you see — but not of it. But while they wait in tense metastatic expectation for political salvation, they play corporate hardball, and they play by the rules and they play to win — dreaming, on one hand, idealistic dreams of dismantlement of this unjust system, and, on the other, practical dreams of a lowkey lavish retirement on a fat 401(k).

James Burnham was right.

Intertranscendental

November 5, 2026Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrismanomalogue

The word transcendental is becoming increasingly important to me. I just did a search for the term “transcendental” and there are surprisingly few returns. But those few packed some interesting insights, if only autobiographically so. One in particular is incredibly relevant to my current (postneoplatonic?) project:

…subjectivity can be thematized in two radically different ways, namely in a natural or psychological reflection on the one hand, and in a pure or transcendental reflection on the other. When I perform a psychological reflection, I am interpreting the act reflected upon as a psychical process, that is, a process occurring in a psycho-physical entity that exists in the world. This type of self-consciousness — which Husserl occasionally calls a mundane self-consciousness — is just as worldly an experience as, say, the experience of physical objects, and if one asks whether it can provide us with an adequate understanding of subjectivity, the answer is no. Natural reflection presents us with a constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject, but it does not provide us with an access to the constituting, transcendental dimension of subjectivity.

It is here that the pure or transcendental reflection is introduced, since its specific task is to thematize a subjectivity stripped from all contingent and transcendent relations and interpretations.

This excerpt is from Dan Zahavi’s Husserl’s Phenomenology.

It makes a technically precise distinction between the “lower” two selves of the Kabbalah. Nefesh (soul) is the “constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject”, and Ruach is the transcendental subject. Back when I was into poetically claiming that souls are universe-sized — or that a soul comprises the fullest pragmatic consequence of what we (each of us) can mean when we say “everything” — or when I’d say that “everythings vary in size” and that “some everythings are bigger than others” — or when I wanted to write a book called Ten-Thousand Everythings — and so on — what I was talking about was Ruach, in the plural: spirits, transcendental subjects.

The principle animates one of my favorite provocations: a personal subject and an academic subject are both subjects in the same sense. And that same sense is that both are essentially transcendental subjects. And, as happens with all transcendental subjects, the transcendental subject gets reduced to the objective subject matter, or rather the content, since much of the content is not material at all, though it is frequently materialized in application and examples.

I assess mystics and philosophers by how aware and alive they are to the peculiarities of transcendental being, which is always participatory, and never directly accessible to the comprehension of the objective mind. This knowing is far more performative than epistemic.

What interests me at this moment is one particular word: intersubjective.

When philosophers use it, the subject in question is a transcendental subject.

But if we are not careful, we easily vulgarize intersubjectivity into interactions between objectified subjects, and thematize it into interpersonal psychology, politics or the like. It turns into explorations of differing feelings, values, “lived experiences” and so on, and, even if “priors” are ritually listed, the transcendental “a-priors” are naively, innocently but often aggressively smuggled in as “objectively” true and inarguable. This type of intersubjectivity almost always imposes a transcendental subject upon participants in any “dialogue” it conducts, and it renders authentic dialogue impossible.

Because dialogue constrained and refereed by one transcendental subject, when precisely that transcendental subject is what is in question, is not authentic dialogue at all. It is conversation between two objectified subjects dominated by one transcendental subject.

Authentic dialogue is intertranscendental. Dialogue is a meeting of two transcendental subjects who answer to something beyond either, whose truth transcends the objective given truth of each transcendental subject, and which is neither objective, nor transcendental, but determinative of transcendental possibility and all objective validity.

It is to this source of appeal that rabbis refer when they speak of machloket l’shem shamayim (argument for the sake of Heaven) as a kind of disagreement with a truth of its own that is truer than either side of the dispute.

In order to engage in intertranscendental dialogue we must maintain loyalty to something higher than our own transcendental subject and whatever objective reality and truth are given by it.

This appeal is made to a transcendent being — transcendent vis-a-vis any transcendental subject — a transcendent superpersonal “self” called Neshamah.

And this is what my postneoplatonic framework is indicating — for those with enceptions to conceive what is given.

Note: In case it is not obvious, “postneoplatonic” is meant to be funny.

“Enception”

November 4, 2026Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

I’ve struggled to develop concepts and language around the idea of “enceptions”, a capacity to take-as-given some form of experience, whether concept or percept. These forms are received as gestalt wholes, and poking around etymonline.com I’ve succumbed to the temptation to steal some Heideggerian jargon and use it in a clashingly confusing way: gestell. A gestell or enception — I am using them synonymously — receives some experience as a gestalt.

An enception is not — and necessarily cannot be — an intentional object of experience, but is rather a condition for any objective given. To steal and misuse yet more jargon from eminent Germans, an enception (or gestell) is a transcendental “category”. My Kantianism is akin to Cassirer’s.

So givenness of a form is dependent on a capacity to take it. This much is simple. But how does one account for enceptions, especially with respect to acquisition of new capacities?

One central fact must be considered: enceptions rarely, if ever, occur in isolation. They tend to change entire fields of experience, as if crystallizing a supersaturated solution of perplexity. A re-understanding of one particular truth seems to ripple instantaneously across one’s understanding of everything, on the whole and in every part.

I’m re-rereading my all-time favorite book, by Richard J. Bernstein, and in it he quotes Thomas Kuhn saying:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

But does the change really originate in the particular idea? Does the change of understanding radiate outward from the idea in question?

The question reminds me of our casual notions of lightning. We tend to assume movement from some set point of origin in the sky. But the apparent movement of lightning is not an object moving from one place to another — bolts mythically hurled from clouds — but, rather, a charged field, the site of a complex resolution of destabilized difference, that dramatically strikes certain objects in the path of change. What seems to be the origin is sometimes the destination, or one of multiple origins destined to meet at one or more cracking midpoints.

Increasingly, enceptions strike me as articulations of an all-inclusive field, and that the field itself somehow determines the natural jointing of the articulations. And our own linguistic articulation tends to follow the forking fracture-lines of this field, producing the famous and disputed correspondence between word and thing.

According to this conception, the field itself — the all-inclusive “everything” — is what changes, and the focal object, the thing that induced the change to the field, is one of myriad simultaneous effects in this restructuring of the field.

The field is all-inclusive everything both actual and possible, beyond which nothing can be conceived, and therefore exteriorless — at least objectively.

This is what Levinas called a totality. And Heidegger’s gestell (as opposed to my own) is clearly (at least as it seems to me) an example of one totality that takes givens in a distinctive way.

Some totalities confuse their apparent all-inclusivity with infinity.

But a totality is a quasi-infinitude. Each totality is only one of a plurality — one within One — a real, realistic image of a reality that infinitely exceeds its comprehension.

Each totality strives to contain all others, and to the degree it succeeds, it fails.

Despite the philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds — “Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes) — I would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing — up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And supposing that Gods also philosophize, which I am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons — I have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new fashion — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even in holy matters. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Conception articulates ideal forms from an all-comprehensive, exteriorless whole — a quasi-infinity. The articulations are capacities to take as given a set of possible and actual forms within a given reality.

This is why our fundamental conceptions matter so much to us — our metaphysics, our key symbols, our founding stories, our given truths — literally everything and every given thing is at stake.

Construction combines givens into systems of various complexity and scale.

Construction builds up larger units from smaller ones, but every unit is given by conception, each articulated from the largest conceivable universal unit.

But some construction can destabilize the conceptive order.

And some construction can force a partial or total reconception.

Like forking lightning the totality shatters the whole into new articulations and new shards, new givens.

“Transcendental tinkering”

November 3, 2026Design, Esoterism, Philosophyanomalogue

“Transcendental tinkering” is a nice slangy expression of what theosophy actually does.

What theosophy claims to do is much better handled by design. I will say it again: Design fulfills alchemy’s hopes.

This fulfillment only happens, however, when design does its deep work of transcendental tinkering.

When it limits itself to aesthetic and functional tinkering, design betrays its promise.

Third runner-up: “psyche hacking”.

Designerly praxis, hexis, psyche, nous

November 3, 2026Design, Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

Faith is a subjective integral stability that takes reality as given in some particular way.

I have understood praxis as the reciprocity between practice-informed theory and theory-guided practice. I think this is right as far as it goes. But praxis always has a knowing-doing subject, and that subject is developed through praxis.

Is it habit? Certainly habit is necessary. Social constructivists would love it to be sufficient.

It is not, however, sufficient. Not every construction, however habituated to it we might become, is spontaneously recognized as a gestalt. Some complex forms stabilize as simple gestalts, where others remain familiar complexities that we are able to construe with increasing speed and ease. Contrary to constructivist prejudice, gestalt recognition isn’t double-plus fast construal and construction. It is a spontaneously recognized form latent in a person’s given sense of everything, much as stable crystal formations are latent in a supersaturated solution. Perceptive and conceptive wholes — gestalts — articulate within a metaphysic supersaturated with formal potentiality. With apologies to Heidegger, I call any capacity for gestalt gestell. (Technik is only one degraded possibility of gestell, just as the They is only one degraded possibility of public being.)

Beneath habit — and often in existential tension with it — is faith.

(When faith stabilizes on an atomistic, reductionistic understanding of reality and forms habits of distrusting gestalts and accepting only systematic accounts, the tension between habit and faith snaps, and social constructionism becomes self-evidently true. Your skepticism is selective, o ye of excessive habit.)

At the heart of praxis is faith-in-motion that integrates and stabilizes in the midst of the practice-theory cycle. Faith is both the cause and the effect of praxis.

This morning I wrote an email to a professor, to get advice on possible programs of study. In this email, I described what I have been doing in the wee hours of the morning for the last quarter century:

Background: I have been working as a human-centered designer (HCD) for the last three decades, while spending my mornings trying to find adequate conceptual framing and language for HCD. Design work is material and systematic, but it is also intersubjective and conceptual; ultimately, it involves as much transcendental tinkering as it does material craft. Designers tend to strategically suppress these esoteric undersides of our craft. I think the field would benefit from clear articulation of the realities of our work.

My studies have led me into some iffy corners of the philosophical world. I wouldn’t call these regions irrational, but they might not be acknowledged as philosophical in some philosophy departments.

My reason for pursuing a degree is that I have been working in isolation for decades, without any critical accountability or community, and I think my work has suffered for it. But the wrong kind of criticism can be worse than none.

I have developed a design praxis. I want to convey this praxis to other designers so we are equipped to explain and justify ourselves to others. Some of that equipment will be arms and armor.

Seven theses on conceptive-systemic wholeness

November 2, 2026Design, Philosophyanomalogue

Metaphors carry meaning over — meta- “across” + -phor “to carry, or bear.” Etymonline quotes Aristotle:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. [Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1459a 3-8]

My question is: meaning of what specific kind?

This question of kinds of meaning goes directly to the heart of design, because the best designers, like artists, intuit more types and nuances and depths of meaning, and try to convey (carry, bear) these meanings between people and collectivities.

Some meaning is objective. It is cognitive and recognitive know-what. You can define an object over against what it is not, then analyze its construction to see what elements make it up, what relationships obtain among the elements and what ways the elements interact to make the object what it is. And objects need not be material. They may be conceptual, too. What makes an object an object is its definite form — what the entity is in opposition to what it is not. Objective knowledge is know-what.

Recognition of what a thing is requires intuition — a tacit know-what — occurring an instant before objectivity, making objective understanding possible. Designers are keenly concerned with this intuitive recognition. When it fails, and people are unable to grasp what a thing is, it causes anxiety, antipathy and disengagement.

This is one reason designers rely on metaphor to make complex new things seem like familiar old things. But, perhaps beyond popular consideration, metaphors carry even more consequential meanings than objective recognition, namely practical know-how and felt know-why.

And this is where knowledge ends for a great many people. Knowledge is objective comprehension. Everything else is subjective opinion or imagination or emotions, all insufficiently rational to deserve the status of knowledge.

Designers, however, know that some meaning is purely practical. We do not stop and define terms and assign language to what we encounter. Rather, we simply act in response. Are these responses natural instinct? Are they acquired habits? Designers don’t have to care. Whether something is natural or second-natural, the goal is naturalness — to remove the burden and distancing of verbalization, and allow people to intuitively interact with things, so they become transparent extensions of our own being. Polanyi called this kind of intuition tacit knowledge — and here it could be called tacit know-how.

Confusingly, words themselves are things that can become transparent extensions of being. Spontaneous fluency makes words extensions of the speaker or writer, bearing one’s being to listeners or readers. But when words must be used to understand other words — when translation or construal of meaning becomes necessary — the words lose transparency. Each use of words to understand words creates intuitive distance. Perhaps a metaphor can make what I mean here more immediate: Imagine using a robot arm to operate another robot arm to operate yet another robot arm. Such is the use of words to understand other words (or using concepts to understand other concepts) versus having an immediate intuitive grasp of the matter at hand. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the language of experience-near versus experience-distant to express this, which, ironically, does a wonderful job of making this concept itself experience-near. Experience-nearness is a quality of usable systems.

Further, and crucially, some designers also know that some of the most important meanings are felt value. It moves us emotionally. This is the sense of meaning intended when we say something is deeply meaningful to us. Let us follow Polanyi’s pattern by calling this kind of intuition tacit know-why.

Some theses.

Thesis 1: Conceptive givenness precedes and conditions objectivity. It is by conception that all units of construction are perceived and conceived.

Thesis 2: Conceptive givens are articulate articulations of a comprehensive sense of everything that differs among people, and that can even change over time for one person. The comprehensive sense of everything is what is expressed by metaphysics, but exists prior to metaphysical expression, and all belief, as faith. Faith predisposes a soul to intuit in some particular way.

Thesis 3: Metaphor is one vehicle for conceptive givenness. Other vehicles are story and symbol, including presentational and performative symbols.

Thesis 4: It is by conceptive givenness (conveyed by its various vehicles) that know-how and know-why are intuitively conveyed.

Thesis 4.1: Metaphor, and concept in general, is not only a cognitive aid to help users identify what a designed artifact is. It is the primary vehicle of practical and emotional engagement.

Thesis 5: Concept and system should be intentionally kept in congruent relation. Neither determines the other. They must each maintain their own respective wholeness (for concept, articulate gestalt and for system, logical-causal integrity), as well as their conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Thesis 6: The conceptive-systemic wholes requires correspondence of articulate gestalts with systematized units across scales, from the smallest to the largest.

Thesis 7: Concept cannot be deferred until after the construction of a system. For conceptive-systemic wholeness, concept and system must be developed together, each in response to the other.

All too often, objectivists (here meant as people whose understanding is limited to objective cognition) tend to believe systems do more than they can.

The systems theory concept of emergent properties is stretched to imply that all kinds of mysterious and unpredictable things might emerge — what, how and why meanings — even if the parts don’t seem to promise them in sum. The possibility gets carried over into expectation. Whether objectivist systematizers think it explicitly or assume it implicitly, they behave as if systematic construction alone is sufficient to get things to where they need to be. Whatever desired properties don’t emerge on their own can be added after the system is constructed. But first, there must be something to which these desired properties may be added. The metaphor is something like: You can’t ice a cake that hasn’t been baked.

The upshot is that systematic construction is the first order of business, and that conceptual meaning (conveyed by metaphor, story, model or other means) can come later. In my experience this is the wishful thinking of people who are impatient or anxious to show immediate progress to impatient bosses. They will claim to aspire to genuinely inspiring, intuitive products — because to say otherwise would feel weird — but in practice they are perfectly satisfied with something functionally adequate that can be figured out with a reasonable amount of effort. Barely good enough is good enough.

Design at its best aspires to more. Design pursues conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Design is humankind’s best hope for overcoming nihilism. It conceives and constructs worlds we naturally care about. And the design process itself induces exnihilism.

Design is essentially polycentered

November 1, 2026Design, Philosophy, Polycentered designanomalogue

I keep returning to my recent thinking on design, especially the latest one on rendering experiential intent.

In that latest post, which focuses on a landmark 2014 article by Jared Spool, where he introduces the definition, my complaint is about emphasis.

While “rendering of intent” is a necessary condition of anything called design, it is not sufficient to illuminate what makes human-centered design (HCD) so incomprehensible to people who haven’t participated in HCD.

And I argue (maybe a little shakily) that when a designer is asked “ok, so what is it that you do, again?” that this is not a request for the common characteristic of every activity describable as design, but, rather, something closer to, “If your job is to make things, then why are you always flying around the world to visit people in their homes and workplaces and get them to teach you about their lives?”

Qualifying the intent to be rendered as including experiential intentions helps for sure, but this qualification not only buries the lede — it buries the lede alive. It creates the impression that what human-centered designers do is just like what everyone else does — because everyone renders intent, everyone designs, everyone is, in fact, a designer — it’s just that what human-centered designers design carries an additional set of experiential intentions.

My argument is that the difference between general rendering of intent and rendering experiential intent across subjective difference is decisively, ontologically different, and it is this ontological difference that matters most.

It is the difference missed by builders of systems, and, in fact, is what these builders often reject as nothing, or at least something of negligible importance.

This difference is what ought to be emphasized in any definition of design as human-centered designers practice it.

And further, the difference is so profound that human-centered design oughtn’t be treated as a qualifier of “design”, but rather design is the qualifier of what, in a design context, has been called human-centered.

More and more, though, what design seems to me to be is not human-centered but polycentered.

We are humans. We are each born into the center of reality as given to each of us. We are essentially, inescapably human-centered, and never more than when we understand truth in that most human of ways: objectively.

What is much, much harder for us is to recognize that we are not the only center of the universe. And that our objective understanding of objective reality is not the only given objectivity. Objective truth does not exhaust truth and truth does not exhaust reality.

Design is one of many possible responses to the polycentered insight.

What design has lost is polycenteredness.

Design has degraded to monocentered rendering of managerial intent.

Spool’s definition masks this degradation.

Polycentered design renders a plurality of interlapping intents.

No design artifact is a tree.

Zeno’s Golden Rule

November 1, 2026Ethics, Fructivism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

Years ago, I got embroiled in a debate regarding the value of the Golden Rule.

My philosophical sparring partner said the rule invited superficial abuse. We run the risk of doing to or for others what we would want, instead of what they would want.

My argument is that application of the Golden Rule itself is also subject to the Golden Rule. Would you have another apply the Golden Rule superficially to impose their preferences upon you? No? Then how would you have the Golden Rule applied? Do that.

Now let’s say that even this meta-application of the Golden Rule results in something unwanted by the recipient of our well-intentioned act. Now what? Apply the Golden Rule again. Perhaps we would have them learn what we want (or even if we want something done) before doing something to or for us? Maybe we would have them ask us about it, or even ask for our explicit permission.

But even here, preferences vary. For example, if I were to ask my wife permission before kissing her, she would have refused every time, each time with intensified disgust. But she did want me to be attuned to her and not just barge in whenever I got an impulse. The Golden Rule required me to learn to read the waters over an alien and mysterious psyche, and, further — crucially — that I maintain respect precisely for this mysteriousness. Trying to explicate the mystery meant instant ick. Ok! I got to work learning how to intuitively navigate this incomprehensible terrain, because I have my own weird ways, too, and I wish to have them respected as a condition of deepened intimacy.

How many recursions of the Golden Rule was involved in this last example?

As many recursions as intervals of space traversed by Achilles in Zeno’s thought experiment.

Achille infinite traversals are an artifact of the framing of Zeno’s problem, not individual acts of traversal. Only by confusing cognition with being does motion seem impossible, despite motion.

Ultimately, the Golden Rule, understood radically, points to a reality that cognition renders impossible.

We intuit that transcendent being — being who transcends intelligibility.

Some of this transcendent reality lives in the people around us.

And some of what we have decided to honor as Transcendence is the most immanent thing of all, the graven images of our own intelligible imagination!

Mystical experiences, inspiring ideas, answered prayers — they are all so easy compared to the infuriating arbitrariness of a spouse, friend, neighbor or enemy.

“What resists is real.” — Bruno Latour

Crystallizing ring

October 31, 2026Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Religionanomalogue

Faiths are profoundly weird things.

To start with, faiths are not things at all, nor are they made out of things. Faiths are not constructions, and they cannot be constructed.

The logic of a faith — and faiths always do have a logic — is a logic that emerges from it. The faith precedes and produces the logic.

This is true even when they express themselves as arguments, as they do in ideological expressions.

Hearing the testimony of a convert persuaded by an ideological or doctrinal argument, it rarely seems as though the logic of the argument was what compelled belief. The logic serves more as an adhesive for constructing an idea that, once assembled, can be recognized — conceived as a whole — a crystallizing ring that reorders all, centrifugally and centripetally. Or it is the processional order (seder, liturgy) of a participation that keeps moving after the ritual concludes. The logic does not prove, it animates one’s thinking, speaking, acting and feeling. One is moved by faith.

It seems that this animating conception, once conceived and in motion, takes the believer in. This taking-in reconstitutes the believing, the believed-in world and the believer.

The reality remains as it always was, but inhabited differently. And this inhabiting is not even primarily theoretical. It is practical. It is material. Such conceptions transform and re-enworld a person and that person’s relationship with the givenness of literally everything and every possible thing everything comprises.

Once moved by faith, belief itself moves by faith, is animated in faith.

An incomprehensible truth: The particular beliefs themselves are not the material of the faith or its enworldment, though they seem to be, but rather a product of the faith and an artifact of the enworldment. They are the fruit by which the faith is known, but they must never be confused with the faith itself, which cannot be grasped by the fruit. One does not possess a tree, much less an orchard, by eating apples.

To treat a faith as a belief-system, or to speak of faith as if it is a degree of strength of conviction that a belief-system is true — these indicate profound religious confusion. Religion is only expressed as doxa, it is not constructed from doxa. Anyone who tries to build a religion out of doxa is more likely to be buried alive in word rubble than to penetrate the roof of heaven.

In nature, conception initiates gestation. Cells grow and divide, differentiate and multiply, within a viable environment. In spirit, conception initiates an articulate gestalt within an intelligible All. Givens divide and grow, differentiate and multiply… eventually into constructible quantities. In both cases we are like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous joke. “How’s the amniotic fluid, embryos?”

How’s the faith, spirits?

What the hell is faith?

Be careful what you inhabit, for you will become of it.

All this is a reflection on a wayward mystic friend, addicted to online edgelord content, somehow in lockstep agreement with edgelord doxa. Anyone who comes to second-naturally despise India, Indians, Jews and Israel — two peoples of mystical genius — will cacophonize against my own faith. It’s all doxa, for sure, but its opinion on what is ortho is wrong — diabolically wrong. In ancient Hebrew it is the heart — lev — who thinks. Do not presume that abstract mourning is less felt.

Billions

October 29, 2026Musicanomalogue

I found a beautiful video of Carl Sagan saying “billions” billions of times. I had to make an mp3 of it. Here you go:

Under the managerial gaze

October 29, 2026ANT, Autobiography, Design, Philosophyanomalogue

Studying the sociology and history of the physical sciences I have learned to see science and technology as inseparable, differing not in kind but in intention and emphasis. Technoscience is not the combination of science and technology but an essentially mingled field of activity that produces both abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts. Both the abstract knowledge and the concrete artifacts may be reinvested in yet more technoscientific activity to produce more of the same. The activity of inventing new concrete artifacts may generate new abstract knowledge. Among invented artifacts are instruments used to generate new abstract knowledge. New abstract knowledge might enable the invention of new artifacts. Generally, scientific knowledge is validated by technoscience itself through applications, both in the general public and in scientific facilities like laboratories and observatories.

This technoscientific validation, as I understand it in my own simplistic lay-scholarly way, is the essential difference between premodern and modern science.

I want to apply this understanding to my own world, the world of design.

I would like to propose a particular subset of technoscience, which, being technoscientific, can be understood on a continuum between abstract knowledge and concrete artifacts — all generated by the essentially mingled field of technoscientific activity.

In this particular subset of technoscience let’s place social science toward the abstract knowledge end of the continuum.

And on the right: design.

And let’s call that blooming, buzzing, semichaotic but rational middle region sociotechnoscience.

Except — surprise! — this is not a subset of technoscience. It is its superset.

Technology is the logos of techne — of making. Science and technology studies has followed in the footsteps of pragmatism, and in some ways has materialized pragmatism, to show how science is, in fact, a social phenomenon, and that social phenomena are largely material.

Years ago, at the peak of “Design Thinking” — when all the most fashionably visionary managerials were running around headquarters holding forth on “designerly” ways of thinking and working — my friend Stokes and I were having lunch on a bakery patio, reflecting on the fervor.

We were both veterans of the dot.bomb era, and had seen design go from chopped liver to divine golden utopian promise and back again to chopped liver. Apparently we were back to divine golden utopian promise, again.

We were both skeptical, but Stokes’s skepticism was better. It was informed by years of formal science and technology studies and anthropological fieldwork. He casually tossed off a remark that blew my mind and permanently changed the course of my life.

He said that there is, in reality, very little difference between how scientists and designers think and work.

He said that the popular view of scientific rationality and rigor is distorted and mostly mythical. It is a misconception of science that could be called “scientism”.

He said that if scientists were made to conform to the image and norms of scientism, they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs anymore. They would be unable to produce new knowledge or devise new technological artifacts. To the degree that they cooperated, they would be paralyzed and rendered unproductive. If they were to succeed, they would do so despite the imposition of “scientific rigor”.

He said that this is basically what happens when corporate managerials get all scientific and rigorous, as they do periodically, when being the visionary guru goes out of fashion and being a hard-nosed, rigorous realist is what wins admiration and prestige. They tighten up their belts and start imposing scientistic rigor on anything that attracts their attention, and everyone trapped under their managerial gaze gets so uptight and preoccupied with producing quantified evidence and ironclad arguments that it becomes damn near impossible to produce much else.

Then came the good part: The only way to escape this scientistic imposition is to be so unimportant that the managerial gaze never gazes upon you. This is why design was able to develop designerly ways of producing good stuff.

Design, according to Stokes, was too unimportant to attract managerial attention and demands for scientific rigor. Because it evaded aggressive management, design was able to work productively. Reflection on how this productive work was done eventually became a methodology and was packaged and marketed by enterprising nerds as “design thinking”.

By the way, this was only the second-most consequential thing Stokes has told me.

…So now managerials had a shiny new thing to grasp onto, distort, mythologize, misconceive and impose upon whatever strikes them as mission critical.

Rigidity, logic, argument, quantification, deliberation, linearity, safety, left-brain rationality are out. Inspiration! Empathy! Insights! Creativitivity! Nonlinear, lateral, liminal, right-braininess! Double-diamonds! Take risks! Sketch! Post-its and paper plastered on all surfaces. Methodic madness. And so on! Everybody’s gotta do fun, silly icebreakers, and do arts n’ crafts stuff with markers and pipe-cleaners, because brain science and innovation and all that. It’s all so zany.

We could, if we want to, call this “designism”. And I do want to.

Designism is every bit as counterproductive as scientism.

Anyone hoping to be productive is better off working in unmanaged obscurity. The minute the managerials pick up the scent of importance, they’ll be after you seeking accelerated production of whatever golden eggs you lay.

After one or two cycles of this, you learn to brace for the hard-nose hangover to come.

I’ve seen three so far. We are in the third right now, and it is the worst yet.

I am weary of this managerialist faith, this technik faith, this instrumental unreason.

I am weary of listening to its various strains and ideological expressions critiquing one another. Corporate capitalism, technocratic socialism, progressivism, “radical” leftism, theocratic fundamentalism — they are all just different flavors of the same poison. When they get radical, they only become more radically managerialist, and managerialism is the root of our problems.

I am savoring my momentary break from managerial attention. I am not sure I can make myself reenter its sphere and subject myself to its icky, icky gaze.

I have some golden eggs to lay, and I can’t waste any more time fleeing KPI-wielding productivity butchers.

Yes-anding “design is the rendering of intent”

October 28, 2026Design, Polycentered design, Polycentrismanomalogue

Many designers have adopted Jared Spool’s definition of design: Design is the rendering of intent.

Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as “the rendering of intent.” The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

We’ve found this definition seems to resonate with people more than any other. People can see the relationship between the intended outcome and the process that renders it.

There is much to like in this definition. It is crisp, compact and elegant.

The definition is broad but still meaningfully constrained. Design renders but does not execute, produce or otherwise actualize the intent. The rendering specifies a future actualization.

The more I reflect on it, the more I like this definition — at least as the most universal definition of design.

Anyone who says they are designing anything means at least this.

My only question concerns whether this definition of design really answers the question people are asking when they ask professional designers what they do.

For some time now, it has been de rigueur to claim that, because everyone designs, everyone is a designer.

Spool affirms this explicitly:

An implication of this definition for design is how it changes our notion of who is a designer.

In any organization, many people share what they’d like to see as the intentions of the design. The business people have intentions with regards to how the business makes money. The technical people have intentions to best use servers, networks, and other technical resources. The legal team has intentions on how to best protect the organization from legal threats.

As these people use their influence to define the outcome of the design, they are, in effect, designing. There’s an old saying, everyone thinks they are a designer. Well, everyone who participates in the rendering of their intention is a designer, using this definition.

So by Spool’s definition (and also Herbert Simon’s, Nigel Cross’s, etc.) everyone does render intent, or devises a course of action meant to turn an existing situation into a preferred one, etc. Whenever we make a shopping list we are designing an upcoming trip to the store. Whenever we plan our day we are designing it. What could possibly render intent more than a checklist?

For Spool, the main difference between the design that designers do and the design that all people do is what the intentions include. Designers intend experiences:

Experiences are the journeys that people take before, during, and after coming into contact with our design. We can choose our intentions for what we want our users’ journeys to be. And when we render those intentions, we’re designing for our users’ experiences. Experience design is rendering intentions of the user’s journey.

But here is the problem. Does Spool’s general definition of design really get at what people are implicitly wondering when they ask designers what they do?

Does anyone wonder this way about making plans or shopping lists? I suspect not. Even narrowing the definition of design to what engineers mean when they talk about designing (for example, an algorithm, microchip or suspension bridge) seems to miss something essential. Do people really wonder what engineers are doing when they do engineering design? I seriously doubt it.

Not to get meta, but questions of exactly this kind — questions concerning focus of interest, about different qualities of various experiences, including experience of curiosity, of implicit questions animating explicit questions — are all examples of the kind of thing designers must think about when practicing design that focuses on experiential intent.

Spool deemphasizes the essence of design, and elides the heart of the question, in the effort to provide an accessible definition to non-designers.

It is the experiential intent that a designer’s work is all about. It is this experiential intent — not intents in general — that gives the kind of design that designers do its aura of elusive significance. These are what motivate questions about what design is. People aren’t requesting a compact definition of a general field of activity. They are asking for insights into a field of work that feels important in an elusive way they can’t quite pin down.

The definitions offered by Spool, Simon, Cross and the rest neglect this essential difference, and do less than nothing to elucidate it. They answer a question, but not the relevant one. These answers falsely demystify design. Rather than elucidating the mystery, they suppress and flatten it.

To put it in philosophical language, these general definitions of design identify necessary conditions of all activities that are referred to as designing, but are insufficient to define or clarify what designers do.

But this isn’t just a theoretical philosophical problem. It isn’t idle definitional hair-splitting. It is a practical problem with extensive consequences. Experiential intent changes everything.

Designing across subjective difference is an essentially different activity than planning something that can be understood objectively. The inclusion of subjective factors changes why design matters, and how the work must be done and what conditions and resources are required to do it well.

If experience design is taken as just one more variation on rendering intent, differing only in the scope of the intention, it is natural to assume the activity is essentially like making a checklist or producing a schematic of a microchip. It is reasonable to assume that it involves the same kinds of activities, and differs mainly in what expertise gets applied to the intent-rendering problem.

And if you listen to designers about what gets in the way of good design, you will hear exactly this misconception behind it. The process of shaping an experience another person will have introduces challenges other intent-rendering fields do not face. Designers need iterative contact with the people for whom the design is intended, both to inform the intention and to ensure that the experience will actualize as intended. Further, the process of shaping experiences involves developing systems, but not only that. It also must make sense to people, it must matter to them, and it must be intuitive to deal with — and different people respond very differently to things.

The flattening of design into something like the planning activities of managers and the system-construction activities of engineers simplifies the challenges designers face, and pushes them back into designing things instead of experiences.

Everyone might render intent, but not everyone renders experiential intent.

And rendering experiential intent requires a deep shift in understanding that very few people have undergone. It requires a pluralistic capacity — at minimum an ability to intersubjectively switch between alternate objectivities — and ideally, a capacity to conceive entirely new ones.

It is precisely this capacity that gives design its mysterious importance.

It is a mysterious importance that is felt as different from the utilitarian importance of business people rendering their intentions of making money for the business, or technical people rendering their intentions to use servers, networks, and other technical resources effectively.

And, as Spool himself describes, experience designers must coordinate all these intent-rendering activities so they contribute to rendering an experiential intent.

If designers stop doing this, they may still claim to design in the general sense, but they are not designers in the sense that intrigues and provokes questions. They are planners, list makers and system constructors.

And now with service design, experiences are no longer intended for solitary people, like users or customers or patients and so on. Service designers intend experiences that multiple persons with differing (and potentially conflicting) goals, understandings, attitudes and sensibilities will experience together simultaneously. Part of what these people experience is each other in their various roles in the experience. Polycentered design requires capacities of another order beyond that of mono-centered design fields.

Polycentered experiences (that is, experiences with multiple first-person centers) motivate behaviors that collectively produce emergent properties in social systems (polycentric systems with multiple independent agentic centers, a la Polanyi and Ostrom).

The barely good enough experience

October 28, 2026Brand, Designanomalogue

Organizations are investing less in design, not because they have found ways to offer good experiences with less design investment, but because organizations believe they can offer worse experiences and succeed anyway.

These organizations are not aiming for the best experiences. They are aiming for barely good enough ones.

The ideal of the barely good enough experience skirts a fine line between passive and active dissatisfaction.

Active dissatisfaction is where people do something about the bad experiences they are having. They leave or refuse to cooperate, and these actions have a negative business impact.

Passive dissatisfaction is a state where people are unhappy but not so unhappy that they do anything. They grudgingly stick around and do what the organization wants. Consequently, the displeasure has no negative business impact.

Many organizations see passive dissatisfaction as the sweet spot. If customers or employees and partners are too happy, that indicates that the organization left money on the table. Money that can be spent on operational efficiency, or strategic investments of various kinds (AI, new markets, consumer-choice-restricting acquisitions of competitors, etc.), or on growth, or on executive salaries. These, it is believed, will serve the organization better than wastefully excessive happiness of customers or employees.

Think about it: Are your consumer experiences improving?

Are you having better and better experiences receiving services from organizations? Do you feel less frustrated with the organizations in your life? Do you feel better served than, say, ten years ago?

Is your digital life improving? Are the apps you use less confusing and frustrating than the ones you used ten years ago? How do you feel when you see an app update on your phone? Are you excited, or filled with apprehension?

Are your employment experiences improving?

A hopeful coda: A market dominated by passive dissatisfaction is ripe for disruption by companies who choose to compete on experience, and promise active satisfaction to people weary of diluted abuse.

Transcendental pluralism

October 25, 2026Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

Transcendentalism across its varieties claims that experience, including thought, imagination and perception — in other words, inner and outer and everything between — has some necessarily a priori structure by which it is given, which conditions that given world.

I am what could be called a transcendental pluralist.

The psychic order by which experience is given can legitimately vary, sometimes radically, but these various orders are not arbitrary. Only some transcendental orders are possible.

An authentic transcendental structure clicks and crystallizes into an articulate sense of everything, to which experiences are given and conceived together. This is what a subject is, when understood properly, that is, nonobjectively.

The conditions of any possible transcendental order are the metasubject of metaphysics, and its truth is the furthest thing from objective. It is the source of subjectivity, and subjectivity is the condition of objectivity and the phenomenon of objects.

Transcendental orders can be induced to change. Such changes are conversions.

The event of conversion — whether a minor insight on some aspect of one’s life about which one (literally) changes one’s mind, a scientific paradigm, a philosophical turn, or a religious conversion — these are all top-down reorderings of transcendental organization.

Conversions are hard to understand and talk about. They are impossible to understand without reference to an actual experience of conversion.

But those without such experience go ahead and understand them anyway, by whatever understanding of everything they already have. These misunderstandings are the stuff of religious and antireligious fanaticism.

The strongest opinions on religion — for and against, alike — are held by people lacking all religious experience. Some have altered their belief systems, but only the irreligious can confuse belief systems with religion, or strength of conviction that these belief systems are true with faith. There is fervent emotional passion about beliefs — pro and con — but this fervor is not religious, but in fact the diabolical opposite.

Faith is transcendental organization, and faith “in something” is a function of fit between the articulate organs of faith’s essential organization and some conceptual, material or practical system.

What constructivists (and relativists) miss is the question of responsibility.

Any construction that aspires to truth must respond to matter and it must respond to transcendental authenticity. This does not mean that it must obey matter or transcendental authenticity, just that it must respond to them in good faith. It means that our belief systems are only authentically believed to the degree that they articulate what we actually experience both inwardly and outwardly. Mismatches can and always must exist, but good faith requires candid confession of confusion, unclarity, doubt, even local disbelief, and these mismatches are rarely clear or easy to pin down.

We tend to ignore or suppress these mismatches, because they all threaten to destabilize our transcendental order. They seem to be existential threats to truth, to our sense of identity, to literally everything — because they, in fact, are. But there is more to reality than any particular everything. And precisely this moreness is the essence of religion.

These perplexing mismatches between faith and system are where the light of infinitude shows through the cracks of finitude and threatens to submerge it in holy reunification.

Now I will speak religiously to the religious:

Yetzirah responds both to Asiyah — what materials will and won’t do — and to Beriah — the simultaneous plurality of all possible transcendentalisms.

In Yetzirah, we are Ruach, the transcendental formation to whom the world is given as an articulate, exteriorless whole, and by whom its given world and all its given truths, possibilities and entities are received in Asiyah.

In Asiyah we take what is given as given objects of perception and truth and construct from them. To the best of our ability, we construct systems that combine into interoperating units with emergent systemic wholeness.

These systems may or may not correspond with the articulations of Ruach’s articulate everything. If they do, they are experienced as meaningful, natural and might resonate with Ruach’s sense of personal purpose and at-homeness. If they do not, they will feel unnatural and alien.

When “modernity” is used pejoratively, often this refers to refusal to seek transcendental ratification for systems. If a system functions, that is sufficient. This fills the world with unnatural and alien systems, and makes reality itself feel overwhelmingly meaningless and complicated. When people stop expecting meaning and lose sight of meaning as a goal, or even possibility, when we stop expecting to feel at home and no longer believe we have a right to personal purpose, we succumb to nihilism.

Organism is the intersection of articulate everything without exterior and every thing systematized without interior.

Thing without interior is empty shell, klippah.

When we see an image of a tzadik, saint, bodhisattva or angel with a halo, it is natural to assume the light is radiating from them into the world around them. It is important, though, to understand this radiance a second everted way, for in Beriah relationships evert, and in Yetzirah, Asiyah and Beriah interpenetrate.

From Beriah, light radiates into its focus, centripetally. The halo radiates into the soul, before radiating back out into Asiyah.

The angels on Jacob’s Ladder ascend and descend, and this is the respiration of light.

The circular sefirot is sometimes depicted with a flame-like perimeter. It is a macrocosmic halo, and the flames are actually descending into finitude ex nihilo from the infinite Ein Sof, the infinite One.

Angelic being invites infinite light to concentrate ex nihilo in Ruach in order to reflect and refract into the world.

Diabolical being blocks everything from beyond Ruach and has only darkness to reflect or refract. Ruach envies the Infinite One and wants its quasi-infinitude to be absolute. It casts whatever defies it into nonexistence, and whatever will not perform nonexistence for it will be annihilated and made nonexistent.

Eversion reverses relations.

Totalitarianisms seek to displace and replace Neshamah (transsubjective selfhood Beriah) with themselves.

In Asiyah, you objectify reality. In Beriah, reality subjectifies you!

The Russian reversal joke performs this truth. In Soviet Russia, for example, television watches you.

Diabolical means thrown across. Dia– “across” + –bolos “thrown”. Diabolical means both throwing part of infinitude out into nothingness, and being thrown out from infinitude into quasi-infinite finitude without interior: klippah.

Being chosen, though, also means choosing to take one’s given place within infinitude.

Exnihilism is annihilation everted. Exnihilism prays epiphanic irruptions through the veil of nihilitude from inexhaustible infinitude. Birth is everted death; birthpangs and deathpangs are crossings between infinite and finite being.

One profound conversion may seem like a crossing from a false world to a true one.

Two profound conversions may seem like a crossing between two contingently true worlds.

Three profound conversions, something truer and realer than any true world may reveal itself.

I-X

October 24, 2026Philosophyanomalogue

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.” — Nietzsche

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

Martin Buber spoke of Thou and It, not as entities, but as relations with I. They are terms of either I-It or I-Thou. The choice is existential, and concerns the subject, I, as much as the object or fellow-subject.

These two relationships, I-It and I-Thou, are incommensurable — essentially different, ontologically different — belonging as they do to different dimensions of being: Asiyah and Yetzirah, respectively.

The question of I-It or I-Thou is the difference between meeting one’s other as mere Nefesh (defined, objective soul) in Asiyah alone, or as Ruach (defining, subjective spirit) in Yetzirah.

One primary value of marriage, and family in general, is being stuck with someone.

When people are too easily escaped, rejected, or made “dead to us” we neglect our most momentous and potentially transformative challenges, which nearly always involve an existential choice between meeting another who disturbs us as a transcendent -Thou to our own troubled I-, or reducing them to another tamely immanent -It, a thing among things within our own solitary everything.

Our human tendency is to stay in the comfortable objective givenness of Asiyah. Convenient breaking of relational bonds, escaping or ostracizing disturbing others, ideologically objectifying others as identities — these are all ways we imprison ourselves in collective or individual solitary confinement.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

An objective mind assumes, from within its objectivity, that not only truth but reality itself is objective, and that an absolute truth, as truth, must be objective.

To make an analogy, looking at an optical illusion and noting the marks that constitute it is further from the absolute than the mysterious act of seeing its various multistable gestalt states. After we have seen multiple gestalt states, reflect on the experience and call the image an “optical illusion”, this is an improvement to our objectivity, but we are back to objectivity. We were closer to the absolute when we were between stabilities.

Conversations with designers

October 22, 2026Autobiography, Design, Philosophyanomalogue

Yesterday I had two unusual conversations with fellow designers.

In each conversation, I started from fire-snorting righteous rage. But in each conversation my anger failed me. It disintegrated as I spoke, and I felt it slip away. And though I felt relief losing the rage, I also missed it.

In the first conversation, I was doing that managerial design leadership legitimacy critique I’ve been developing. But even as I sermonized I felt compelled to temper what I was saying with acknowledgement of the difficulty of any leader’s position. Every leader has a duty to those who depend on them and to those who entrust them with a leadership role. These duties give them a right to make judgment calls regarding the welfare of their organizations. The ideals of design are and should be one consideration weighed in these judgments, but this is not the only one, and it is far from certain that design ideals ought to predominate over other values.

Design ideals, like all other ideals, can become extreme and excessive, succumb to destructive fanaticism, and an ideal is never more vulnerable than when it fancies itself immune to excess or so essentially good that it is exempt from limit and restraint.

I believe the version of myself who acknowledges this is morally superior to the design fanatic who insists otherwise. This does not mean I agree with the calls that managerialist design leaders make. I strenuously disagree. But my disagreements are better when I disagree with strict agonistic discipline.

I do believe design — design as I practice it, know it and love it — is not only in tension with managerialism but incompatible with managerialism, in practice and understanding. I believe design’s greatest value is in providing a different and more humane vision of social organization. To put it in the familiar Kuhnian framing, it is a rival organizational paradigm that is the stuff of crisis and revolution.

But what kind of revolution? In his essay “A Cautious Prometheus” Bruno Latour suggests that a design revolution should start with revolutionizing revolutions. He noted five characteristics of design:

Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than foundational acts of creation.
Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.

So far, I’ve mentioned two thinkers I love, and alluded to a third, Chantal Mouffe, when I mentioned agonism. What is agonism?

Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).

Modern science as much as any domain, and arguably more than any other, is strictly agonistic. It was born with liberal democracy (for a gorgeously involved account of how and why, I recommend Leviathan and the Air-Pump).

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this time with a recommitment to strictly practice it: If I could impart one idea to humankind it would be agonism. It is the cure for what ails us and threatens our existence as a species.

And agonism is a precondition of design creativity — again, design as I practice it, know it and love it.

Which brings me to my second conversation. Here I was making my usual distinctions between art and engineering — and now managerialism. My friend was asking me extremely simple and relevant questions about all the various uses of the word design, and what was common to them. It began to feel like a Socratic interrogation.

I gave many of my usual criteria.

Design crafts things intended for other people.

“Is cooking a kind of design?” Well, no. Design specifies form, function and material, but does not produce the final materialized, functional form. Cooking is a handicraft.

“What about writing a recipe?” Yes. Recipes are designs, informed by the handicraft of cooking. The cooking is analogous to prototyping.

“What about the design engineers do? For example, microchips are designed.” Yes, but in a different sense that specifies form, function and material for something that will eventually be produced. And admittedly, it is produced for other people. But it is specified without reference to how others will experience the thing…

“So art is design?” Art is intended for the artist, made to the artist’s satisfaction. Great art speaks to whatever is universal (or at least greater) in the artist. It reveals what is most intimately shared between the artist and those who respond to the work.

“But Dieter Rams was answering to his own judgment alone.” I consider him, and many other famous designers, to be more artist than designer.

Etcetera, etcetera.

And as we talked, and as I tap-danced, hair-split, ramified and qualified and improvised, I noticed that my intensity was calming. The intensity was not diminishing, but it was a less jagged, jangly, aggressive kind of intensity.

Maybe the vision of design that has gripped me is just one species of design. I care about it a lot, but maybe a sprinkle of Rortian irony will improve its flavor. And maybe design has become a practical vehicle for something else I care about. And maybe I can serve what I care about better if I stop running around brandishing my philosopher’s stone and smashing things with it. There’s enough brandishing and smashing and bellowing and threatening out there right now. Since quoting heroes seems to be my lot today, I’ll channel Marty Neumeier and suggest that maybe some zagging would be a nice contrast.

For whatever reason, my anger has diminished over the last month. Even when I write aggressive words, they come from a less vitriolic place. Susan is also undergoing some profound changes in a peaceful direction. We are both no longer under the direct control of managerialist administrators, both of whom were uncannily similar in certain respects. I cannot promise this mood will stick, especially once projects are underway. I am never going to deny or repress what I experience. I find that kind of emotional self-manipulation to be both counterproductive and non-credible. But I do prefer this to the mood of the last several years.

Complacentia

October 22, 2026Enworldment, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

Asiyah is the objective dimension of nature and artifice.

Yetzirah is the transcendental dimension of soul (subject).

Beriah is the metaphysical dimension of spirit (relative infinitude).

Atzilut is the transcendent dimension of infinitude.

Objective reason is an inadequate mode of knowing beyond Asiyah. The attempt to grasp soul/subject and metaphysics objectively is the supreme category mistake, made by materialists, positivists, managerials, psychologists and metaphysical dogmatists, alike.

Objectifying the superobjective is the human species’s analogue to a dog chasing its tail.

Isn’t this framework objective? Yes, it is objective, but not merely objective.

This way of understanding things has become my latest and best naive realism.

I am unable to doubt it. I cannot avoid understanding everything in its light.

Worse, I find myself entirely disinclined to interrogate it.

This is an abject failure of philosophy, but a triumph of faith.

It is an enworldment to inhabit, a palatial sukkah.

…Palatial … palate … taste, sophia…

Saint Friedrich of Sils-Maria said:

Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).

Years ago I noticed that I asked Why only when I could not feel Why.

Rerereading Richard J. Bernstein

October 21, 2026Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatismanomalogue

I am once again rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.

I’m reading it with a thesis: that the Greek word phronesis roughly corresponds to Hebrew derash and refers to the same domain of truth.

My obsession with alternate domains of truth and modes of knowing originates with this book. I’ve wandered pretty far abroad, along divergent traditional paths, and now I want to bring it all home and see how things look.

And modes of knowing is only one of several enduring influences this book had on me. Almost every book in my sprawling library is three or fewer degrees from its bibliography, most fewer.

I am pretty sure it was my first encounter with Jewish styles of thought. At one point I thought Bernstein had invented an entirely new genre of literature. He seemed to be expressing his own ideas through the medium of other people’s dialogue. After a decade of Jewish life, I now know to call this talmudic. Many thinkers and friends drew me into Judaism, but none more than Bernstein.

He also gave me my first exposure to phenomenology and pragmatism, both of which provided crucial philosophical grounding (ironically!) for a philosophical understanding of design. I think more than three-quarters of my design philosophy is represented by and directly attributable to this one book.

Richard J. Bernstein died in 2022.

For me, his memory is a constant blessing. I would like to believe his living presence in my life is a share in his immortality.

anomalogue blog

design of philosophy of design of philosophy of design

Beyond paleomodernism

Designerly hypostatization

Comments on “Intertranscendental”

Intertranscendental

“Enception”

“Transcendental tinkering”

Designerly praxis, hexis, psyche, nous

Seven theses on conceptive-systemic wholeness

Design is essentially polycentered

Zeno’s Golden Rule

Crystallizing ring

Billions

Under the managerial gaze

Yes-anding “design is the rendering of intent”

The barely good enough experience

Transcendental pluralism

I-X

Conversations with designers

Complacentia

Rerereading Richard J. Bernstein

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: