(Below is a response to the fifth aphorism from Gershom Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”.)

I (semi-ignorantly) intuit that Hegel’s dialectic rises only as far as Da’at d’Yetzirah. I suggest Yetzirah, because Hegel clearly leads his reader beyond Assiyah, by effecting changes in enworldment through Yetziratic (Yetz-erotic?) reunderstanding, thus demonstrating (for cooperative, receptive readers) how Yetzirah forms and reforms givenness of reality.

I (semi-knowingly) believe that Voegelin’s critique of Hegel, expressed in his own Platonic language, was this: Hegel’s understanding to this point is legitimate, but he is unable or (more likely) unwilling to intuit a supraintelligible world who manifests intelligibility but who transcends the intelligible. Thus Hegel barricades himself inside the intelligible world, and becomes prisoner and warden of a “mind [that] is its own place…”

But that self-consciousness is catastrophically insufficient if it is not crowned with the question of transcendence: from whom is the self-awareness given? Hegel’s Da’at d’Yetzirah was uncrowned and unperfected, so the entrance to Beriah was closed. (As was my own until very recently.)

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Metanoia is necessary but insufficient. We must re-pense and turn to our creator: Teshuvah. An uncrowned philosophy is a dream of misapotheosis.

My current understanding of Da’at is that it is a personal self-consciousness of one’s own being within a given Sefirot — a Sefirot becoming self-conscious within the center of one’s self.

• Da’at d’Assiyah answers to the nickname Nefesh.
• Da’at d’Yetzirah answers to the nickname Ruach.
• Da’at d’Beriah answers to the nickname Neshemah.
• Da’at d’Atzilut answers to the nickname Chayah.

When addressed by the Crown, we answer from fourfold Da’at: Hineini.

But who shall I say is calling?

A halo is a luminous tunnel within whom one holy face appears to another.