Before any beginning is infinitude. Pure infinitude. Ein sof. Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut. At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, … Continue reading Designerly metaphysics
Metaphysics is the transcendent remainder of one’s own ontology. It is the surplus oblivion around what each of us means when saying and meaning “everything”. It is the radical surprise we anticipate when we attempt to expect the unexpected or to account for unknown unknowns. Nothing could be more personal than one’s own metaphysics.
I’m having a fruitful conversation with Digitalap3 in response to yesterday’s post, Pragmatic metaphysics. It inspired one possible answer to the question I posed: What pragmatic difference is there between pantheism and panentheism? I think the “difference that makes a difference” (to put it in Rortian terms) may be that pantheism sees nature as a … Continue reading Pragmatic metaphysics, continued
Obviously, we cannot conceive something inconceivable prior to acquiring the capacity to conceive it. But so what? Some realities are inconceivable. Some realities are incomprehensible. Why should we care? Is it such a problem that some things elude our understanding? It would not matter if it were not for this truth: the as-yet-inconceivable attracts our … Continue reading Pragmatic metaphysics
I’ve called my metaphysic a “metaphysic of surprise”. To get what I mean by this, it is helpful to keep in mind the basic terms of my metaphysical conceptualization, which are 1) metaphysical reality versus 2) our understanding of reality which is truth. In my view, truth is an adequate-as-possible person-reality interface, true to the … Continue reading Surprise vs comprise
To apprehend (“toward taking hold of”) is to intuit that something in one’s experience is significant, but one cannot yet conceive (“together take”) what is signified, and one is unable to orient (“find east”) oneself to the meaning of this situation (“placement” within a context). To comprehend (“together taking hold of”) is to resolve an … Continue reading Apprehension, comprehension, surprise and transfiguration
An appendix Thomas Kuhn added to later editions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a continuing influence on my understanding of design. In this appendix Kuhn explained that scientific paradigms should not be viewed exclusively in terms of thought. A paradigm is not just theoretical, or theoretically guided practice or practice informed theory (praxis … Continue reading The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe
Willfred Sellars said: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, … Continue reading Hanging with Sellars
A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but … Continue reading A note on “Creation redescription”
To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse? The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. … Continue reading Looping in on exnihilism
I used to say this often, but I haven’t in a while: a soul extends to the limits of what we mean when we say “everything”. Each soul is universe-sized. This is why I sometimes refer to everythings, plural. Materialists who believe that a soul (psyche) is an emergent property of our nervous system, and … Continue reading More than every possible everything
When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations. We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically … Continue reading Taste of infinity
Today I wandered through several books touching on irony. It began with Geertz. Irony rests, of course, on a perception of the way in which reality derides merely human views of it, reduces grand attitudes and large hopes to self-mockery. The common forms of it are familiar enough. In dramatic irony, deflation results from the … Continue reading Irony deficiency
From Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism: Hegel cannot accept Kant’s transcendental idealism because it presupposes a transcendent realism: the commitment to a realm that in principle can never be experienced by humans. In the margin I wrote “This is a good commitment; it is the essence of goodness.” … Continue reading Beautiful and most brave
From my phenomenological, hermeneutical and pragmatic inclinations and self-education, I cannot help but read Renee Guenon (and to a degree, Frithjof Schuon) critically, as conveying extremely sharp, clear and, above all, grounding insights into the human condition — that is the condition of finitude within and toward infinitude — but proceeding from these to unwarrantedly … Continue reading Lesser mysteries
Lately Nick Gall has been speaking approvingly of Quentin Meillassoux, and I decided to just take a peek at After Finitude, just to see what’s going on there. Meillassoux has been lumped with the Object-Oriented Ontology folks, who I’ve derided pretty savagely, albeit nervously — but (from what I’m gathering) he is slightly outside OOO … Continue reading Meillassoux!
I am going to quote several pages from Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that are relevant to my own project. I am going to break it up with comments of my own: The “revolution in the way of thinking” that Kant undertook within theoretical philosophy was based on the basic idea that the relationship … Continue reading Cassirer’s interrupted project
I have been re-re-re-re-re-reading Daybreak. Having taken such a long break from reading Nietzsche, but meanwhile having carried his concepts — thoroughly and permanently internalized, but largely inarticulate — out into my reading of other thinkers and into my professional design practice and personal life — coming back and reading him again is revelatory. One … Continue reading Ipseic/alteric moralities
I am looking in my anomawiki for a quote from Nietzsche about foreground and background philosophies. I am digging through one of the themes I’ve catalogued, “depth“, and noticing — somehow for the first time! — how many of these quotes involve water, and specifically cold water. Reading Nietzsche I slowly discovered a symbolic language … Continue reading Foregrounds and backgrounds
This is a series of rewritten, streamlined posts on the theme of shells and pearls, which I’m considering incorporating into my pamphlet. I’ll link to the originals. If you have time to compare, let me know if you think anything was lost in the chipping, sanding and polishing. Evert Announcing an exciting new vocabulary acquisition: evert. I have … Continue reading Shells and pearls