All posts by anomalogue

Who is Moshe Idel?

Kabbalah

Lately, I have been reading Moshe Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives.

While I’ve been reading his writing, I haven’t gotten a sense of who is is as a person. Mainly I just knew his reputation as the successor of Scholem.

So I started digging around and found an inspiring video about him.

It is filled with amazing quotes, and I want to excerpt some of them here, to share them and to have them for later, when I need to quote Idel.

And if someone looks for only the constant, like theology, he doesn’t see the change, and doesn’t see what, in my opinion, people who live Judaism are thinking about.

And Kabbalah is the same.

They have a process, and this process is going on all the time. You don’t have a static topic. That’s a lesson that I learned. Yeah I’m studying the text, time and again, but I cannot study exactly the same because there are new texts coming. And new interpretations.

Can you imagine someone would say, I know science. I know literature. You will laugh. You’ll say, what is the meaning? What do you know? You know something.

With Kabbalah it is exactly the same. … I know better some forms of Kabbalah, less other forms of Kabbalah. And they are different. And I don’t attempt to … offer an answer which unifies.

Same thing happens today a lot in the popular Kabbalah. People are teaching and making millions by telling people what is Kabbalah, that we know. I am very far away from it. Meaning, I don’t attempt to simplify. Because that would be a betrayal of what I know.

What I am saying is, I don’t know Kabbalah.

There is no Kabbalah.

My experience of reading texts is that you should come with less questions to the text, and allow the text to speak to you. That’s what I call “freeing the text from the agenda of scholarship.”

I was in Romania all the time up to ’63. ’63 August I arrived here. When I came to Israel I didn’t know anything about Israel. I knew French. I couldn’t read Hebrew. I couldn’t read English. People were very welcoming.

There were also a lot of other shocks. For example, coming from a dull intellectual background of the Communists, I discovered books on yoga. I bought immediately. Whatever money I had, I bought books. Ten books on Hindu philosophy and yoga.

So, that was a huge discovery: the fact that you are free — intellectually free — that’s amazing. I mean, in Romania I knew there are things you don’t say. It’s dangerous to say. So something — meaning, very, very powerful. Later, I understood how powerful it was. To understand that you are free, it’s an amazing discovery.

First, my reading of the Hebrew Bible and Talmudic literature is a literature which is not theological.

Let me attempt to define theology. Normally theology is considered to be a systematic description — meaning, what is theo-logy? Logos? That’s… we discuss the abstract part of it. That is systematic. That’s coherent.

In the Bible it’s not so coherent. Jewish philosophers, or Kabbalists, infused in the observance of the commandments a variety of meanings. For them it was not robotical. It was to participate in the divine life, in the cosmic life, in the inner life, by the commandments.

So that seems to me to be the emphasis found in Kabbalah and not the theological.

Theology can exist in Kabbalah, but that is, how do you call it, subsidiary. It’s not absent — I don’t claim it’s absent — I claim it’s subsidiary.

Theology was not the dominant modus of thinking in the Bible and in Rabbinic Judaism. What was more important is: what do you do?

Since my emphasis is not so on the abstract part, the theological part, but much more on what those people did and how they lived — the rituals, the techniques, the experiences. That is to write not only about texts, about the past; you’re writing about personalities, living personalities, who had an impact on others.

I spoke with the Kabbalists. Things which was a little bit forbidden. I didn’t care.

I attempted to see how the text is performed.

I can see that the topics I’m dealing with are living topics.

I emphasize phenomenology because I believe that otherwise it’s not only dry, it’s not productive to write without it. For instance, I don’t believe there’s one, single good definition of ecstasy. Ecstatic experiences are part of something bigger.

…Look, I said to free the text from theology. Like not to be very simplistic, assuming that two different people reading the same text will have the same reaction. Texts are very complex, and people are seeing different issues, not because they have an agenda, but because they’re different from their character. I’m interested, by saying “free” to allow the surfacing of the complexity. Texts speak about the author, they speak about the period, they speak about the field. They speak about the audience.

From this complex melody everyone is listening to something different.

I believe it’s important to see all those different aspects of complexity and not to say “what’s important is what is the message,” as if there is one message encoded there.

The text is not a mailbox.

It is much more complex.

The language is changing. Even the person writing at the beginning of the book, is changing in comparison to what happened in the end.

That’s life.

I find this video liberating.

Every religion has its orthodoxy or orthodoxies.

But ultimately these orthodoxies are a formal consensus on matters beyond the institutions, just as current scientific orthodoxies are consensus on nature. What is considered true refers to realities that transcend knowledge.

If we believe — as I do — that religious dogma is a kind of truth about realities that transcend truth (especially objective, factual truth — we cannot approach these truths as closed and final — something passed down — an understanding to which we must conform ourselves.

History certainly confirms this. Only mythologized history is simple or coherent.

There is no simplicity or order in the past — not for us.

Our ancestors might have experienced meaning from which that we have become alienated. But we will never repossess that meaning by returning to past forms of life.

We must learn what we can from the past, to help us retrieve meaning from the future.

I love that Idel calls Kabbalah a “living topic”. I call it a subject. It is a medium of understanding, carrying messages (content) about realities that transcend it.

I just learned of a newish book by Idel called The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah.

This volume addresses the complex topic of the preeminent status of the divine feminine power, to be referred also as Female, within the theosophical structures of many important Kabbalists, Sabbatean believers, and Hasidic masters. This privileged status is part of a much broader vision of the Female as stemming from a very high root within the divine world, then She was emanated and constitutes the tenth, lower divine power, and even in this lower state She is sometimes conceived of governing this world and as equal to the divine Male. Finally, She is conceived of as returning to Her original place in special moments, the days of Sabbath, the Jewish Holidays or in the eschatological era. Her special dignity is sometime related to Her being the telos of creation, and as the first entity that emerged in the divine thought, which has been later on generated. In some cases, an uroboric theosophy links the Female Malkhut, directly to the first divine power, Keter. The author points to the possible impact of some of the Kabbalistic discussions on conceptualizations of the feminine in the Renaissance period.

I have quite a bit of negative feedback from Kabbalah experts on my latest dialectic Sefirot design. But the premise described above is precisely what that design is saying.

I think I will print it.

Myths all the way back

Philosophy

History is all too human. Viewed factually, it is confused, vicious, fragmentary and only occasionally inspiring.

We can mythologize history, and it appears that we must.

If we approach history factually, we still encounter myth. A crucial content of history is past histories, mostly mythologized. Historical figures drunkenly mythologize the actions of myth-drunk heroes and villains, who mythologized their equally myth-drunk ancestors. Ah, sahib, it is myths all the way back.

But lose those myths, and you’ve lost your future.

Sefirot reference sheet

Kabbalah, Letterpress

This is the latest version of my Sefirot reference sheet. I’ve made both layout and content refinements, and I’m close to ordering a plate and scheduling time in the letterpress studio. I may print this over the holidays.

Now that I think about it

Esoterism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

A broken faith is experienced by the faith-breaker as revelation of a new meaning with a new story.

One tells a revisionist story that invalidates the old story by which one lived. “I mistakenly believed x-story, but I can see now that y-story is true, and was true all along.”

Broken faith says: “Now that I think about it…” and proceeds to reverse hero and villain, angel and devil, love and hate, virtue and vice, sacred vow and vile enslavement — producing wave after wave of estrangement. Whoever was closest is cast out with the most violence.

A person of weak faith, who lacks social and relational structures to hold them in a steady psychic state is always teetering on the edge of betrayal. Whoever is friends with such a person on one day might meet only an enemy and a ghost the next.

And, by person, as always, I mean any cohesive psychic unit — an individual, a family, a sub-culture, a people, a nation, an inter-national class. Personhood is scalar.

Dialectic transcendence is a whole other kind of change. In it, oppositions are not simply reversed but sublated within higher-order truths. It is not just metanoia, it is t’shuvah.

Dialectic sefirot

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I got the idea for this Sefirot from whoever this is via whoever this is. I might have to letterpress it.

I made some changes to improve the aesthetics and to make the dialectic even denser.

The original image was designed to highlight the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic structure inherent in the Sefirot. The addition of the Kav penetrating directly into Malchut makes even more explicit the synthesis of the Iggulim and Yosher forms of the Sefirot in the original diagram.

A third synthesis occurs between Malkhut and Shekhinah, and (fourth) worse — possibly incorrectly — between Shekhinah and Keter. (These two might be an indirect expression of Moshe Idel’s idea that Kabbalah is a synthesis of antithetical theosophic and ecstatic traditions.)

Additionally, this diagram synthesizes the traditional vertical (higher-lower) conception of metaphysics with one that is eversive (inward-outward), by bending the verticality around the egoic center of Malkhut, from which all finite beings receive the givens of revelation.

I wonder if this image was influenced by having Berenice Abbott’s “Interference of Waves” as my desktop image for the last five years.

Berenice Abbott. Interference of Waves. 1958-61 | MoMA

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

Design, Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Trefoil

Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.

Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.

The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.

Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.

Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.

Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.

Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.

Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.

Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.

Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.

Exnihilist maxims

Exnihilism

Meaning irrupts precisely from nothingness, nowhere, never.

Nil and inconceivability are indistinguishable.

Impossibility and inconceivable possibility are indistinguishable.

Meaninglessness and inconceivable meaning are indistinguishable.

Nonexistence and inconceivable being are indistinguishable.

To finite beings like us, infinity seems less than zero.

Our comprehension can only grasp what we can conceive. Only forms can be conceived.

Meaning flows infraformally and supraformally. The Midas touch of objectivity freezes meaning solid in universal form.

Sacred study

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I am thinking about sacred study in the context of Idel’s theory that kabbalah has two complementary foci: theosophic and ecstatic. My biased inclination is to understand theosophic kabbalah as centered on sacred study.

Study as religious practice

Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Religion

It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.

This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.

One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.

Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.

The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.

If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.

The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.

Mistaking is theft

Philosophy

Depth psychology is itself a religious faith (with multiple denominations) that competes with and, if adopted, displaces whatever religious faiths it claims to explain. This is why, in the vacuum left by Christian faith, Freudianism, Jungianism, Lacanianism sometimes flooded in to replace it, and was sometimes pumped in to flush the old faith out.

This is why, if I catch a whiff of depth psychology in a book supposedly on the subject of religion, the author immediately loses me.

This is tenfold true if I detect the odor of Marx, and a hundredfold if Marx is combined with depth psychology. How I can even slightly enjoy Zizek is a mystery.

Faith is our specific receptive capacity for givens. What we cannot receive remains ungiven, cloaked in oblivion, like light falling on a birth-blind eye, unperceived, inconceivable.

There is a name for (mis)taking what is ungiven: theft.

Alien faiths steal the givens of other faiths by misunderstanding them as their own belief.

Marxism, depth psychology, academic study, identity politics — these steal the given meanings of religious faiths and possesses them as information.

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette

Philosophy

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette.

Exoteric etiquette protects members of a spiritual community from that apprehesive angst intrinsic to esoteric difference.

Some things are just not discussed in society.

Spiritual programs

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Half the people I know believe that religion as we have it today is sheer nonsense and that spirituality is a fanciful free-for-all — just psychological play done for the pleasure of it.

The other half thinks that religion is wisdom that was originally revealed whole, but subsequently lost — an ancient treasure squandered, that we must now recover, before something dire happens.

As always, I disagree with everyone.

I think religion is institutionalized spirituality, with all the advantages and disadvantages entailed by institutionalization. When I say institutionalization, I mean something more like scientific institutionalization, enabling systematic challenge, response and progress, more than what spiritual-but-not-religious haters of “institutionalized religion” mean.

Indeed, individuals dabbling unassisted in spiritual matters would be as advanced as individual physicists could accomplish — each working in isolation, starting from scratch with their own theories and homemade laboratories. Or imagine amateur physicists watching hours of YouTube videos about the history of natural philosophy and using them to launch their own programs of physics research.

I think religion and spirituality refer to realities that can be understood or misunderstood. I think these realities are not comprehensible in objective terms. They require different intellective modes that few of us engage when we “seek truth”.

An idea to entertain: different religions are analogous to the research programs of Imre Lakatos, with their own lifecycles of birth, ascent, flourishing, decline and dying out, and their own technological innovations, meaning, literally, technique systems, a.k.a. methodologies.

The resemblances among religions are due partly from borrowings across traditions (which is how a spiritual research program is preserved) but also because the truth they pursue is the same and these traditions only thrive and endure insofar as they succeed in that pursuit.

But that truth pursued is not essentially objective. That truth includes objectivity, but transcends objectivity, subjectivity and all distinctions between object and subject.

Spelling it out for the idiots

NOTA

If you are the type of person who thinks the war Israel fought against Hamas was a genocide, you are probably also the kind of person who would need to be told that my “Hiroshimite genocide” post was satire. No, Hiroshima was no more a genocide than what occurred in Gaza. Got it? It is a little tour of moral-historical absurdities that are instantly recognizable as absurd by non-absurd people.

Hiroshimite genocide

Politics

The bombing of Hiroshima was clearly a genocide of the Hiroshimites — the indigenous people of the land of Hiroshima.

The population of this land was tiny — only 350 thousand — to America’s 140 million.

By 1945, Hiroshima had already been militarily degraded to the point of defenselessness. This is why American bombers could fly in and release their payload with impunity.

The attack was entirely unnecessary. Only a few hundred thousand more American deaths would have sufficed to win a ceasefire.

Worse, to this very day we do not know how many of the Hiroshimites were loyal to Hirohito and how many were innocent victims. But we can be almost 100% sure the support was far short of universal — especially when we count the children and women who always only want ordinary, peaceful lives, like you and me.

But if you look at a spreadsheet and calculate the death ratio between Americans and Hiroshimites, the objective facts speak louder than anything else. Virtually no Americans died in this operation, compared to nearly 140,000 Hiroshimites.

That is approximately 40% of the Hiroshimite population — just wiped out.

If you compare this to other genocides, for example to 66% of the the European Jewish population who died in the Holocaust (while Europeans either joined in on the killing or low-key prevented Jews from escaping), or the more recent genocide in Gaza where 3% to 4% of Gazans were killed in treacherous urban warfare (where Hamas did everything it could to get their own population killed so they could photograph them and use the images to emotionally manipulate know-it-all progressivist ignorami), you can see that the Hiroshimite genocide sits squarely between the 4% and 66% of two of our most paradigmatic genocides, and is therefore, quantitatively, objectively genocidal.

So it was an unnecessary, deadly and indiscriminate attack on a tiny population perpetrated by a much larger and better-armed power. Those who perished might have included dissenters and unenthusiastic supporters of Hirohito. These Asians were allegedly killed to prevent the death of Americans, whose lives were considered more valuable than Hiroshimite lives. This was true not only of Americans, but Europeans, most of whom were white. And there it is again: race. It’s always there if you look for it with eyes capable of seeing only that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it, unless you learn other ways to understand the world.

Perplexity lifeguard

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Overcoming painful perplexities is one of the most rewarding parts of my work as a strategic designer.

Perplexity is incapacity to understand a difficulty, so thorough that the difficulty cannot even be expressed negatively as a problem or question. As I’ve said millions of times over the last thirty years, perplexities induce intense mysterious anxiety in people. It is not “discomfort” with “ambiguity”. It is excruciating and disturbing, and it makes people behave atrociously.

If we are to believe Wittgenstein, perplexities are essentially philosophical problems: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”

But the majority of people are unphilosophical. They lack all awareness of the existence of the phenomenon of perplexity and the language to recognize and diagnose it — much less methods, skills and mindset required to overcome perplexity.

And people are not merely unphilosophical. They are aggressively unphilosophical. Philosophical thought annoys people. It is socially acceptable to disrespect it and anyone who does it. Even open-minded “good listeners” stop listening and tune out if they detect philosophy in a line of thought. And if you press it further, the resistance presses back even harder. The trajectory is very much hemlockward.

Here is the problem: one of the horrors of my job is the everpresent risk of being trapped in a collective perplexity with collaborators who are unwilling to confront and grapple with it for what it is. In such situations, one is a participant in an emergent collective being who transcends each individual person. Each person is immersed in the pain that has gripped the group, but is entirely powerless to overcome it alone.

Overcoming the perplexity requires a concerted and coordinated effort.

But many perplexed people behave like drowning swimmers. Instead of cooperating with the lifeguard’s attempt to rescue them, they instead try to climb over the lifeguard’s body to get oxygen. This is why most of lifeguard training is learning break-holds. Often a lifeguard must subdue a drowning person in order to rescue them. If the drowning person gets control of the lifeguard, everyone drowns.

Perplexed people who lack awareness of perplexity instinctively flail and grope for whatever control over the situation they can get, but whatever control they exert only defers and amplifies the confusion and anxiety. Instead of finding a better way to conceptualize the difficulty so it can be framed as a problem, people desperately try to ignore or bypass the perplexity or bludgeon it with mismatched techniques and expertise — and everyone drowns together.

Being is scalar.

Collective being is just as real as individual being.

Collective beings can be perplexed.

Collective beings can also be depressed, anxious, delusional and psychotic.

Entire classes and societies can go mad. Nietzsche said it: “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Leadership differs from management in that management treats only systematized parts of organizational life. Leadership participates in the collective being of an organization, addressing its personhood from within — as a part.

I would dearly love to work at an organization that would acknowledge and value my philosophical work. My best work is unappreciated, unsupported, unacknowledged and uncompensated at best. If I speak about what I do and how I think about it, the best I can expect is tolerance, but the usual response is vapid or jocular dismissal and disrespect. “There he goes again.”

Nothing, however, is more respectable and more valuable. I know this even if nobody else does.

This whole age is convulsed in perplexity. People will fight wars before confronting and resolving a perplexity.

Against red oil

Design, Politics

I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.

Eternal recurrence of the metatragedy

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah

I accidentally jumped ahead in Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives and stumbled upon a familiar and deeply significant drama.

Idel’s central claim is basically that Kabbalah has two distinct but related foci — a theosophist Apollinian focus, and an ecstatic Dionysian focus. These two foci stand in tense union with one another, exactly as they were (according to Nietzsche) in Greek tragedy. The two foci complement, but can, at times, seem to oppose one another.

But both together oppose something else — and this something else is philosophical rationalism. In Birth of Tragedy the rationalist was Socrates. In Idel’s metatragedy, the rationalist is Maimonides. I see the religion of Maimonidian excess as Reform Judaism (JewUU), a form of religiosity within-against which I have rebelled since age 10. This is what has me so charged up this morning.

I should have known my participation in Reform Judaism was doomed from the start when the head rabbi at my synagogue laughed and told me that a Unitarian-Universalist kid would find Reform Judaism very familiar.

I’ve always identified Hermes with the Apollo-Dionysus union — not because of any special affinity with either Apollo or Dionysus, but because Hermes is the god of divine conjunction (as symbolically expressed in Janus-faced boundary herms). Divine communication occurs not across distances, but through elimination of distance in ontological union.

Let us never forget that it was Hermes who bound and chained the benevolent but hubristic rationalist titan to the rock.

Perhaps this tragedy of vital intellection (toward transcendence) vs rationalist hubris of pure immanence recurs eternally.

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.

Resolving perplexity is the work

Biography, Design

Resolving perplexities is the most important work designers do.

Resolving perplexities is not a precondition to doing the work. Resolving perplexities is the work. Again, it is the most important work.

Attempting to ignore perplexities never makes them go away. It makes the work impossible and hellish — and the perplexities compound exponentially as they go unresolved.

Anyone who cannot tolerate perplexities is unfit for strategic design work.