The awareness of the indeterminate substance — Infinite, Keter, Tao — a reality beneath truth that can be partially but never perfectly or finally ordered, an indeterminacy that consents to some attempts at order while defying others — is the divine ground of pluralist religion. What is common and necessary in all these possible orderings? Here transpires the hazardous pursuit of the Absolute by the finite.
All posts by anomalogue
Aristotelian means
The premise of the Aristotelian Mean is that virtue is situated between vices of deficiency and vices of excess:
Deficiency (vice) – Mean (virtue) – Excess (vice)
This is obviously at odds with many of our popular ethical views which see minute traces of some character traits as slippery slopes directly into the most abhorrent vices, and virtues as qualities that grow more valuable as they grow more extreme.
For a long time, I’ve viewed borderline and autism as existing on a continuum. This smuggles some assumptions into the problem that may obstruct some productive possibilities.
I am wondering if there might be something to be gained through approaching these two conditions as independent. This is especially important in these times, where it seems that we are plagued with simultaneous autism-like and borderline-like on a mass scale. (To be fully open about it, I believe the dominant ideology of the professional class effects these conditions in the class as a collective. If you happen to be a progressivist and feel confused or angry — or as you put it when diagnosing others if you are feeling some class fragility or class rage — that might because I’m prodding at your condition as well as refusing to honor your class privilege of unilaterally determining who gets to critique whom.)
I am experimenting with two new candidate means that seem intuitively to be the two means in play: integrity on one hand, and empathy on the other.
I believe borderline is the DSMification of integrity deficit, and autism of empathy deficit.
The formulation of the problem then is:
(Integrity Deficiency) — Integrity – (Integrity Excess)
(Empathy Deficiency) — Empathy — (Empathy Excess)
I am looking for just the right words:
- Integrity deficiency (anomie? akrasia? decadence? borderline? …?)
- Integrity excess (dogmatism? closedness? fundamentalism? absolutism? …?)
- Empathy deficiency (solipsism? sociopathy? autism? …?)
- Empathy excess (selflessness? codependence? decenteredness? hyperempathy? …?)
Perhaps it is so hard to find a word for vicious empathy excess because our culture views excessive empathy as a virtue.
Equality
Few are equal to equality.
Pluralism is not vulgar relativism
Pluralism is similar to vulgar relativism in that both reject monism (in the sense of there being only one truth).
Pluralism differs from vulgar relativism in its belief that some truths can be accepted as true or rejected as false. Vulgar relativism claims all truths are equivalently true or false.
This means only vulgar relativism is faced with self-contradiction when it claims that monism is false.
Pluralism can, without the slightest contradiction, assert that monism is wrong.
Obviously, at some point I might change my mind. I might someday come to see monism as right and pluralism as wrong. But then again, a monist, if they can find it in themselves to question the apparent finality of their monism (a huge “if”) might, after finding on the other of a transcended finality, yet another finality, and another and another, come to see pluralism as right.
The only difference is that a pluralist, by virtue of their pluralism, is aware of this possibility and entertains it, where a monist’s monism precludes it. This certainly tends to weaken the pluralist’s resolve, but it doesn’t have to, and perhaps it should not be allowed to.
Perhaps the pluralist should counter the monist’s fanaticism with indignation at the aggressively presumptuous ignorance of the immature who still actually believe their itty-bitty reason can deduce reality.
The economy of wisdom
Wisdom is for the few.
Most people are busy and occupy themselves with production and consumption of goods other than wisdom.
But a few love wisdom and see it as the highest good.
Of these few, some are producers. They are the unique being born into the center of the cosmos, who hold wisdom in their hearts and bones that others only talk about with words. In the wisdom economy, these are the suppliers.
Others, far more numerous, are consumers. They seek wisdom. They seek fulfillment. They seek themselves. In the wisdom economy, they create the demand.
Wisdom may be a niche market, but to lovers of wisdom it is everything.
Conversation as performed truth
Our way of conversing is a performed truth — perhaps the most important truth. In conversation we perform how we understand reality, truth, ourselves, other selves and the relationships between them.
Petty gods
We must never confuse the Absolute per se with what is absolute for us. To do this is to reduce the Transcendent to an immanent representation of transcendence. We must never do this, but we cannot avoid doing it, incessantly, forever.
We must never confuse the Infinite per se with what is infinite for us. To do this is to reduce the Transcendent to an immanent reference to transcendence. We must never do this, but we cannot avoid doing it, incessantly, forever.
We are bound tightly by the ontology we have developed within the narrow horizon of our personal experience so far. We count the beings we have taken for given and imagine ourselves counting forever, and we call this infinite. Then we stare at the glaringly blank inner surface of our intelligence — a spherical horizon with everything inside it and nothingness outside it — and finding anything beyond this inner surface unintelligible, declare the contents of the sphere absolute.
Our knowledge makes us as gods — tiny, stupid, unimaginative, incurious, petty gods — terrified to discover that we are the furthest thing from absolute or infinite — terrified to relate ourselves properly to the Transcendent who absolutely and infinitely exceeds, envelops and involves us.
“Ah, sahib. It is metacognitive incompetence all the way down, and all the way out, in every direction.“
At the end
At the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
lie about on the ground
like broken branches.
Popular versus classical didactics
If you do not subscribe to the dominant ideology of your time all its art forms will seem as false, stilted and contrived as popular art from the past — and for precisely the same reason.
Popular art always reinforces the current dominant ideology, by presenting an image of reality formatted according to its ideals, prejudices and delusions.
When we collectively move on from one decade to another we move on from one grotesquely willful misrepresentation of reality to another equally (if not worse) grotesquely willful misrepresentation, and from there we look back and jeer at how naively awful we were back then.
*
I solemnly swear, we are so unbelievably much worse right now that we’ve ever been before, it will make the ludicrous distortions of the 70s and 80s positively pale in comparison.
You don’t see it? You don’t understand? It’s not because there is nothing to understand. It is because you are failing to understand something glaringly real. Wait. You’ll see.
*
You’ve judged the past according to today’s standards, and you refuse to listen to those who have tried to explain how time works.
Your values are absolute and everyone should have acknowledged them all along.
To you I offer Anaximander’s Maxim: “Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.”
*
For those who have done enough truly independent thinking — which means overcoming the dominant ideology of their youth and of the current time, and which also entails asking questions we are not permitted to ask (which are most certainly not the utterly harmless “dangerous questions” our cultural elites pat you on the head for asking — popular culture starts stinking of the most ham-fisted didacticism.
If that stench prevents you from enjoying art, you’ll have to flee to unpopular art, which is formatted by lower-frequency ideals — ideals which endure not just months or years like today’s moral “fast fashion” but whole decades and sometimes centuries. Some of this unpopular art is genuine high art whose appeal to higher sensibilities might help it outlast its time. Though timelessness is never guaranteed, and often fails hilariously, the aspiration to timelessness can encourage less overtly propagandistic art. Some other unpopular art is low art — art so low it penetrates beneath the dirty, depleted and eroded surface of today, into the deeper soil of our species.
You are normal and ok
The more radical changes a person has undergone, the less that person will take seriously the claims others make of having reached a final conclusive truth.
Every radical change of understanding re-presents the world in light of a new truth. These truths seem conclusive and final. This characteristic of apparent finality, however, is not in any way evidence of actual finality. Apparent finality, if treated as only apparently final, can give way to new truths that appear equally final.
If an apparently final truth does, in fact, become actually final — that is, if a person or group of people refuses to allow more radical changes to happen — this is due to the fact that radical truths are not only theoretical, but also perceptual, practical and moral.
Radical truths are less matters of thought content than they are enworldments.
Enworldments penetrate beneath language, into that dark wordless ground in which language is rooted, from which words grow, and without which words lose meaning and wither into abstraction and nonsense. Enworldments provide the very givens of our experience.
Enworldments project fields of relevance that determine what in our daily life we notice and what we ignore, the degree and kind of relevance we perceive in what we do notice. Enworldments give us the givens of perception.
Enworldments also project fields of intelligibility that determine both the spontaneous connections we intuit in our present and past experiences, as well as the kinds of connections it occurs to us to make if we attempt to consciously think some matter through. Enworldments give us the givens of understanding.
Enworldments also project fields of possibility that determine our actions, both the spontaneous reactions we have before before thinking, intentional responses we think through, plan out and execute and habits we cultivate. Enworldments give us the givens of action.
Perhaps most importantly, enworldments project fields of value that determine what is moral or immoral, virtuous or vicious, attractive or repulsive, good or bad. Values may be what we spontaneously experience, and they may also be codified rules for calculating or assigning values. These values determine where we scrutinize, challenge or attack a value as an illusion, delusion, bias or distortion and where we embrace a value as given and defend it as self-evident truth. Enworldments give us givens of morality.
Values are the primary guardians of enworldments, protecting them from entertaining irrelevant data, from uncharitable or skeptical interrogation, from potentially undermining experimentation. These challenges are bad and should not be suffered or tolerated.
Morality is what preserves and stabilizes the other givens and allows an enworldment to endure. If one wishes to radically change, it is primarily the morality of that enworldment that must be overcome.
This is why Nietzsche was an immoralist. He sought new ideals, new enworldments, new human ideals — ones that we believe from the heart and not just from ethical algorithms and societal conformism.
Earlier, I mentioned that “values may be what we spontaneously experience, and they may also be codified rules for calculating or assigning values.” Codified rules can harmonize with and reinforce spontaneously felt values. Or they can clash and contradict. When this happens we are at a fork in the road. We can ignore taboos and prohibitions against questioning moral fundamentals, and investigate matters to see if we can resolve the contradiction.
Or we can reject codified morality in favor of felt values.
Most of us, however, cleave to codified morality. We train ourselves to mistrust, disregard and repress our spontaneous, felt valuations. We affirm only what we are supposed to affirm and condemn what we are supposed to condemn — even with respect to our own personal moral responses. Perhaps we see our own subjectivity as manipulated and corrupted and in need of rational corrections.
If we do this too much, eventually our value-sense weakens and numbs until we no longer feel it. Many of us become ethical automatons, alienated from our feeling selves, no longer able to exercise personal judgment. We become dependent on analysis provided by others, and we lack all inner resistance to arbitrary valuations. We see something ugly, or hateful, or vicious and we can without much difficulty assign it the opposite value.
It is only superficial truths that are concerned primarily with how we think and speak. They stay obediently within an enworldment, and work within its givens — especially its perceptual and moral givens. Superficial truths can be delightful to play with, they can be daring, transgressive and fanciful in the ways interesting games must be if they are to be absorbing, and they can turn up useful cognitive instruments, but they are inconsequential to our fundamental experiences.
I find that play tedious and at odds with my project, which is to overcome intellectual and moral dishonesty and the self-alienation it causes. Far too many people are obedient to moral ideals they must lie and labor over, with greater and greater difficulty. And now the lies are so fragile that the liars require cooperation from everyone to maintain them to keep unwanted feelings fully repressed.
For people in this state, honesty is an existential threat.
But they are too afraid to break taboos and ask themselves the kinds of questions that can restore harmony between our felt and codified values.
The only solution they can conceive is to control external reality and to prohibit all honest expression so dishonesty becomes internalized through habit, and our new contrived “truth” seems equal to the faint repressed memories of spontaneous given truths.
—
We Americans just cannot kick our puritan addictions, can we? We finally free ourselves of our need to assert the existence of a thoroughly unbelievable “god”, only to enslave ourselves to other equally unbelievable nonsense. We seem unable to make peace with truth.
But know this: You do not have to believe what you cannot believe.
You are allowed to ask questions, even taboo questions,
If that feels unsafe to you, you are right. It is unsafe. Most people like to feel comfortable, to feel like good people, to frolic in the playground of permissible rebellion. The majority of people choose to keep on lying and lying.
So, if you are a liar, that is ok. It is normal.
If you need to celebrate your lying as virtuous, that is also ok. It is normal.
If you need to call the most dramatically abnormal abnormalities normal, that is ok. It has become normal.
But some of us think being normal is beneath our dignity, and choose abnormality. We do not want to be ok. We ask prohibited questions and produce incomprehensible answers.
That incomprehensibility is fortuitous for all you liars. It doesn’t make any sense. It needs to not make sense. You are in a safe space, a place of its own, a collective enworldment set adrift from anything immediate.
Late-stage managerialism? Postmanagerialism?
I am going to channel Burnham by applying his 1940 analysis of capitalism to its successor social order, managerialism.
Burnham claimed that the capitalism versus socialism framing inherited from Marx’s analysis of 19th century industrial capitalism omitted the social class best poised to take control over production in the 20th century, namely the managerial class. He left them out because this class emerged as a result (and cause) of the exponentially compounding complexities of industrial production. They were not significant enough as a class for Marx to consider them as rivals to the proletariat as inheritors of production after capitalism collapses.
Burnham’s claim is that with the onset of the Great War, capitalism did collapse, and that instead of the worker’s revolution promised by Marx, the world got, instead, a manager’s revolution. This is why Soviet Russia never got anything anywhere near a free, classless society, but instead something nobody could quite nail down. It certainly wasn’t capitalism, but society remained just as classist.
It only became thinkable once this third class, the managerial class — the new dominant class, was considered, and treated as a dominant class with sharply differing class interests from that of the capitalist class and the working class.
Most “leftist” managerial class members still imagine their interests as aligned with the working class, and when workers accuse the managerial class of being oppressive and contemptuous, ask themselves “What’s the matter with Kansas?” with no intention of letting anyone besides themselves answer. (And of course, refusing to listen to objections and entertaining their validity, preferring instead to diagnose the objectors as deluded, manipulated, vicious and afflicted with false consciousness is precisely the kind of contempt that so infuriates the working class.) But these interests are the furthest thing from aligned, and the better the managerial class did, the worse the working class has fared.
Burnham claimed WWI was the end of capitalism and that WWII was the first great managerial class war. He saw Russia and Germany both as rapid and radical managerial revolutions, which accounted for their violence. He saw the New Deal as a primitive beginning of a managerial revolution in the United States, and that full entry into the war (still over a year away at the publication of his book in early 1941) would accelerate the process.
I believe Burnham was largely right. Much of what he predicted did happen. I’m too lazy to list it all out, but if you are curious, I do recommend reading the Managerial Revolution. It is fun to read — as long as you aren’t attached to popular managerial class ideological narcissism that has well-educated, well-compensated pampered managerials situated on the side of justice. Ain’t so — but nobody can force you to see what you don’t want to see. Not so far, anyway. Keep “doing the work” of misdirection if that helps you continue seeing yourself as a good person, and not as a decadent overclasser seeking moral entertainments as relief from your anomie!
—-
Here is my theory, and it blatantly rips off all of Burnam’s coolest moves.
Managerialism has ended. It fell when the World Trade Center buildings fell. It continued falling when the economy collapsed in 2007-2009. What has been replacing it is a new order that has little and decreasing need for a managerial class.
The managerial class has been in spiritual decay for decades. The postmodernism that electrified universities throughout the 80s and 90s only set the stage for intellectual collapse in the new millennium. As far as I can tell, anyone whose university education happened in the new millennium has experienced only one viable political ideology their entire lives and is seized with existential dread and willful incomprehension when faced with any truth not carefully processed and formatted for their effortless moral consumption. Such people are unequipped to diagnose their own political condition. Instead, they interpret the symptoms of class decline in the most naive way possible, projecting their class despair on any surface suitable for projection. The world is ending in myriad ways. In this unprecedentedly safe time, everything is a physical threat — violence!
What is happening is the emergence of a new social order with no more need for white collar workers than for blue collar workers. And a new social class of technology elites — with class interests at odds with the managerial class and the working class — developed within the managerial class, has separated from it, and is now poised to displace the managerial class.
The technological overclass has less and less need to compromise or to feign goodwill toward either the managerial class or the working class. In some ways, this could look like a return to capitalism, but one with diminishing need for human exploitation. If you have AI, robotics and new, low-labor fabrication technologies what good is a large population? They strain the planet, and are a potential source of unrest. Once again, a few hyper-wealthy individuals can own and directly control all production, without human intermediaries.
Liberal arts education has shifted focus (to put it mildly) from pluralism to an impotent, decadent and sentimental monism. The only students who get rigorous training are in technological fields, because this is all that is useful to the rising overclass.
It appears to managerial class members that they are helping vulnerable identities — nearly all of whom, incidentally are members of the managerial class, but whose essential identity is erased so they can become proxies for actually oppressed underclassers. Likewise, with class erased, underclassers who, to ideologically-formatted eyeballs resemble hyper-rich information technology elites, can be attacked and abused as effigies, without any sacrifice of safety or comfort. And these same people, for a variety of reasons, are childless, and help the managerial class approach its optimal size: zero.
—-
If you are a managerial class member and want to really be on the right side of history (though perhaps not as you imagine it) there are two main ways to approach this goal, depending on your tastes and inclinations.
If you are roughly average in intelligence and courage, continue embracing the progressivist ideology. Keep seeing everything in terms of the standard canon of identities. Direct your hatred at the underclass who are prejudiced against these identities. This legitimizes your hatred and gives harmless vent to your class anxieties, and it also gives the underclass a legitimate target for its anger. This is convenient for the new overclass, who would prefer the obsolete classes to fight among themselves instead of uniting against them. Whatever directs their hostilities away from the technology overclass is good. And if it helps reduce the world population to sustainable levels, that is double-plus good.
And do continue celebrating marginalization, powerlessness and victimization. The more we managerials practice admiring these virtues, the more we can retain some self-respect as a class when dress rehearsal ends, and our everyday reality is one of actual marginalization, powerlessness and victimization. In the future the ability to see what is most degraded, unattractive, useless and weak as what is most admirable will be an essential survival skill. We should be proactive about this. We should find absolutely the most non-admirable people and insist on celebrating them as the very pinnacle of humankind.
If you are smarter than average or have a weakness for daring or transgressive ideas, you can replatform yourself on transhumanism, and be an early adopter of the technology elite’s own ideology.
I hope I’m wrong about all this. I probably am. This, however, is how things seem to me at this strange moment in history.
Turing testy
The anxieties swirling around ChatGPT, Dal-E and other advancements in AI have me asking myself almost daily: “Is this person I’m conversing with human or AI?”
It has become almost a habit to search for signs of human intellect. And this has brought me to a disturbing observation: Few humans these days can pass the Turing Test.
Lovesickness
When I was in fourth grade I had my first crush. “Crush” is a fitting term for it. It was too much for a ten-year-old to handle. I became entirely preoccupied with what this other person saw, felt and thought — in particular when she looked back at me.
I had absolutely no idea at this point in my life what might be going on over there in her mind. She was a mystery to me, but somehow her presence in the world turned the entire world magical. The world as I knew it was shocked out of its orbit around myself. I was overcome with a pleasant nausea, my body was wracked and overheated, and I was lovesick.
And the worst possible outcome transpired: She did not like what she saw. She rendered that kind of terrible, inexorable judgment older girls (at least the merciful ones) learn to soften. She was nauseated by me, too — but in a very different way, and it crushed me.
While I never did figure out how to dispel this mystery, or conquer or possess it, or control or suppress it, I did learn how to win more favorable judgments (partly by developing my own judgment). And I learned how to inhabit this magical sphere, how to function and flourish within it, and how to order my life according to its strange laws of mutuality.
And while this way of living did expand the region of clear and mundane familiarity, it also lengthened the shimmering outer boundary where mystery recommences, each time reaffirming the inexhaustibility of mystery.
*
The above is intended as a response to a question I asked myself in the margin of Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. He wrote:
Hegel’s strategy here is quite reminiscent of the later Wittgenstein’s dissolution of problems by showing that our terms only make sense in mundane contexts, whereas philosophy confuses itself by taking them out of the language-games where they do work. It is then that we tend to misconstrue notions in bizarre, that is, philosophical ways: “When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.” Within normal conversation or during standard inquiry, we can make perfect sense of an idea corresponding to reality as it really is or the world apart from our conceptions, but once we stop these mundane endeavors and become bewitched by the sublime vision of an unknowable world existing in absolute isolation from all human contact, it has gotten away from us.
And I ask: “Why are we attracted — or repelled — by bewitchment?”
I think the answer is contained in the story of my crush.
*
Show me your response to lovesickness, and I’ll show you your attitude toward religious life…
Do you want immunity to lovesickness? Have you intentionally immunized yourself to it? Or have you accidentally become immune?
Do you want to treat lovesickness, and recover from it as quickly as possible?
Do you want to practice social distancing, or even self-quarantine?
Do you want to deaden its symptoms with drugs and distractions? Or do you want to intensify its symptoms?
Do you want to experience it with full awareness and attention?
Do you want to prolong it forever? Or do you want to catch it, and when its symptoms abate, catch it again, and again, and again?
Do you want to try to inflict it yourself on others? Perhaps without suffering it yourself?
Do you want to possess and control your lovesickness — or possess and control its source? Do you refuse to become lovesick unless you can possess and control it?
Have you refused lovesickness? Do you dismiss lovesickness as an exaggeration of mundane affection? Would you prefer to be lovesick toward an imaginary image?
Would you prefer to be lovesick for yourself? Would you prefer to be lovesick for lovesickness?
Do you scoff lovesickness into nonexistence, or debase it into impossibility?
These are only a few of myriad possibilities.
*
My favorite opening line to any book is: “Supposing that truth is a woman — what then?”
*
Martin Buber was the person who activated my Jewish soul:
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.
Hence the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.
Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
Primary words are spoken from the being.
If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.
If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.
The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.
*
From Daniel Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah:
Luria wrote hardly anything. When asked by one of his disciples why he did not compose a book, Luria is reported to have said: “It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received? How can I set it down in a book?” We know of Luria’s teachings from his disciples’ writings, especially those of Hayyim Vital.
Luria pondered the question of beginnings. How did the process of emanation start? If Ein Sof pervaded all space, how was there room for anything other than God to come into being? Elaborating on earlier formulations, Luria taught that the first divine act was not emanation, but withdrawal. Ein Sof withdrew its presence “from itself to itself,” withdrawing in all directions away from one point at the center of its infinity, as it were, thereby creating a vacuum. This vacuum served as the site of creation. According to some versions of Luria’s teaching, the purpose of the withdrawal was cathartic: to make room for the elimination of harsh judgment from Ein Sof.
Into the vacuum Ein Sof emanated a ray of light, channeled through vessels. At first, everything went smoothly; but as the emanation proceeded, some of the vessels could not withstand the power of the light, and they shattered. Most of the light returned to its infinite source, but the rest fell as sparks, along with the shards of the vessels. Eventually, these sparks became trapped in material existence. The human task is to liberate, or raise, these sparks, to restore them to divinity. This process of tiqqun (repair or mending) is accomplished through living a life of holiness. All human actions either promote or impede tiqqun, thus hastening or delaying the arrival of the Messiah. In a sense, the Messiah is fashioned by our ethical and spiritual activity. Luria’s teaching resonates with one of Franz Kafka’s paradoxical sayings: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival.”
. . .
In the beginning Ein Sof emanated ten sefirot, which are of its essence, united with it. It and they are entirely one. There is no change or division in the emanator that would justify saying it is divided into parts in these various sefirot. Division and change do not apply to it, only to the external sefirot.
To help you conceive this, imagine water flowing through vessels of different colors: white, red, green, and so forth. As the water spreads through those vessels, it appears to change into the colors of the vessels, although the water is devoid of all color. The change in color does not affect the water itself, just our perception of the water. So it is with the sefirot. They are vessels, known, for example, as Hesed, Gevurah, and Tif’eret, each colored according to its function, white, red, and green, respectively, while the light of the emanator — their essence — is the water, having no color at all. This essence does not change; it only appears to change as it flows through the vessels.
Better yet, imagine a ray of sunlight shining through a stained-glass window of ten different colors. The sunlight possesses no color at all but appears to change hue as it passes through the different colors of glass. Colored light radiates through the window. The light has not essentially changed, though so it seems to the viewer. Just so with the sefirot. The light that clothes itself in the vessels of the sefirot is the essence, like the ray of sunlight. That essence does not change color at all, neither judgment nor compassion, neither right nor left. Yet by emanating through the sefirot — the variegated stained glass — judgment or compassion prevails.
Liberalism, esoteric and exoteric
Pluralism is for the few, not the many. Pluralism is the esoteric heart of Liberalism.
The exoteric face of Liberalism is the Law of Tolerance.
If you pursue tolerance, eventually pluralism may develop.
Starting with pluralism, though, will produce only intolerance and illiberalism.
Pluralism is a way of being first, and only secondarily a belief.
*
Faith ensouls doctrine.
Doctrines can, and often are, misunderstood and misanimated.
An author can be brought to life through understanding.
An author — or all authors– can be declared dead by those who wish to animate texts with thoughts of their own. But then the author would be better described as undead.
Being of worlds
Love, love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Fearless on my breath
— Massive Attack, “Teardrop”
And being is a gerund, a verbal noun formed from the verb be.
A being is one who does existence.
I think I prefer the use of the word “enworldment” to the pluralist use of “world” for two reasons:
- We do, whether we like it or not (and perhaps especially when we do not like it), have an ineradicable sense that there is a world beyond our limited experience of the world and our experience-derived understanding of the world. * (see note below.) The word “enworldment” acknowledges this world beyond what we make of it, which to each of us seems, for all the world, to be The World. Enworldment implies pluralism within the context of metaphysical realism.
- Enworldments are accomplishments, not preexisting things. Beings autonomically produce enworldments through the activity of being.
Note * A friend brilliantly named this sense “exophany” (exo “outside” + -phany “showing”).
No, this ineradicable sense of exophany cannot be logically proven. But it also cannot be logically proven that what cannot be logical proven is therefore not real.
So we are faced with a highly consequential choice: Do we lay reality on a logical bed of procrustes and make them coextensive, or do we accept that logic is only one actor in a larger experiential production? I choose the latter, because I believe both love and morality demand it. Perhaps you will claim you do not have this ineradicable sense or that you have eradicated it, and if so, congratulations: I believe you have a maimed intellect.
The Internomenology of Being
The word phenomenon too strongly suggests a speculative approach to knowledge.
Internomenon might be better.
We know reality not by sensing it and recording what we sense in our minds. We participate in reality and interact with fellow beings within reality, and these interactions are what we know. We come to know more about both our own (transcendental) noumenal self and (transcendent) noumenal others through these interactions.
Whatever of the thing-in-itself (ipseic or alteric) that does not participate is unknown. What is known is what participates in particular ways in particular interactions.
For your convenience, here is Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim, because it should be coming to mind: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
… Once again, I feel like I’m lurking about in the suburbs of Whitehead. …
Beautiful and most brave
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.”
Braver published this book in 2007. It’s a useful book, or at least useful for what I am trying to do with my book (which is to propose a philosophy of design which assumes transcendent realism but affords us finite but significant latitude to design our own transcendental conceptive schema through which we may interact with the inner-face of transcendence and participate within reality in life-enhancing ways.)
It approaches the Continental Realism versus Anti-Realism debate using methods drawn from analytic philosophy to produce clear, sharp distinctions on a number of key fronts — and to demonstrate how analytic and continental styles of philosophy can be used in concert for better depth and thoughtcraft.
A few years later, Braver published a followup paper, “A Brief History of Continental Realism”, where he introduced a new term “Transgressive Realism” which he described as
a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of.
This is exactly what I believe, which why I’ve described my metaphysics as a metaphysics of surprise. Only surprise reminds us that something transcends our minds. As Bruno Latour put it, “Whatever resists trials is real.” Our participation in reality constantly produces resistance, and helps us recognize the difference between our understanding and what engages our understanding while exceeding it.
I attach religious significance to actively wanting transcendence, reality, resistance and seeking it even while we seek to understand. We do understand, but there is always more to understand — inexhaustibly more — and if we are alert, sensitive and generous, we will notice how much and how often we need to understand differently and better, in order to accommodate our fellow-persons and those aspects of reality they care about. This is not worship of human “otherness”, but human otherness where transcendence reveals itself and challenges us most conspicuously.
Unfortunately, power has a way of tempting us to substitute our own understanding for reality. We want to control our environment to use technology to keep things things reliable and predictable in order to tame surprise and constrain and confine it to the realm of play. A little surprise delights us. Radical surprise disrupts us, immerses us in chaos, crushes us with perplexity.
Even the threat of impending radical surprise fills us with apprehension and puts us in fight-or-flight mode. It makes us nasty.
And here is where power gets its bad reputation. If a fellow person threatens us with radical surprise, and we have the means, we will use our power to make that threat go away. We will require that person to be polite and avoid controversial or potentially hurtful topics. We will prohibit certain bad opinions from being spoken in public. Then we will prohibit these opinions from being said in semi-public, then from being said in private. Then even indirect or accidental expressions become taboo. Eventually even the suspicion that these opinions are privately held — or even unconsciously present — is addressed as a threat. We might feel entitled or even obligated to help people stop having these beliefs and adopting our own instead. We may start requiring behaviors that are performative affirmation of our beliefs. We might require explicit declarations of agreement, as conditions of employment or membership in civil society. In some places and times, these conforming behaviors and declarations have been conditions of the right to continue living in the community, or living at all.
A person with control of enough wealth, institutions and political force will almost inevitably, unconsciously begin to slide in this direction, demanding more and more surprise-damping conformity from fellow-persons to erase the disturbing difference between transcendent reality and our own thoughts about it.
Solipsism is the ultimate luxury; when weaker people are compelled to serve the solipsism of the stronger, this is abuse of power.
To be good, we must want transcendence, seek transcendence, accommodate transcendence even when we have the power to dictate reality to those lacking the power to resist and to be respected as real.
*
Pay close attention to who is unworthy of your consideration — because here is where your root biases — your sacred biases — do their work.
Pay attention to those biases you are biased toward and those you are biased against, because these are where your root biases reveal themselves to others while concealing themselves from you. These also are biases — your sacred biases, the ones who do the most self-righteous evil.
Critical thinking makes its own thinking the object of critique — it is reflexive. Critical thinking avails itself of the critiques of others to detect what it would otherwise miss. We are tempted to choose only the critiques from others that we are biased toward receiving — the ones who reinforce our sacred biases — but these are self-gratifying and easy, which is why this kind of “critique” is so popular — and, for a enterprising exploiter of fads, so lucrative. People don’t go to tent revivals because they are averse to being called sinners. They go because the diagnosis and remedy is a small price to pay for moral omniscience.
Listen to those who are angry and fucking hate your guts because you are so comfortable, complacent, omniscient, smugly self-satisfied, so aligned with “the right side of history”, so good — when in fact you are just a typical oppressor, too powerful to be confronted with that fact.
Consider for a moment, the possibility that, despite all their obvious faults, whether they are not to some degree justified in hating you. Test your irony and see if you can hold both conceptions in your mind simultaneously and hear the chord they form. Switch from straw-manning their faults to steel-manning their assessment of your faults. See if you can hear all four sides of this conflict.
Do all this and then I might respect you as a critical thinker and a lover of transcendence — of wisdom — of inconceivable conceptions waiting to be born.
*
Nietzsche said:
There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher’s “conviction” steps onto the stage — or to use the language of an ancient Mystery:
adventavit asinus
pulcher et fortissimus.
The ass entered
beautiful and most brave.
My conviction, beautiful and most brave: Thou shalt welcome the stranger… transcendence.
This conviction, this priority, this “prior” — this sacred bias — is unreasonable and stupid, and I am unable to not believe it is absolute good.
Maybe you can help me believe otherwise.
A cure for nihilism
I just had this thought as if it were my own:
Poetry is language attending to what transcends language.
If Jan Zwicky hasn’t expressed this thought it would surprise me. If she expressed it in exactly these words it would not surprise me. I cannot remember.
But I do know that I would not have had this thought had I not read her. Yet, I did just have this thought myself.
I rehad her thought.
*
This is how it is with the kind of philosophies I love:
They give us new givens, if we are hospitable and take them in.
They outfit us with new transcendental conceptions (together-takings) that make us aware of givens that would otherwise evade our awareness. They allow us to understand, anticipate, perceive, recognize and think in radically new ways.
These new conceptions allow new being to irrupt into our sense of everything, ex nihilo, expanding, deepening and enriching the realm of possibility. They miraculously make the word “everything” larger and more accommodating.*
If this can happen once, it can always happen again.
Nothing — nothingness — will ever be the same again, because we can never be sure that some inconceivable somethingness isn’t lurking behind the nothingness, waiting to burst through and flood our lives with glory.
How could we ever take nothingness at face value, ever again?
How could we be nihilists, ever again?
We become exnihilists.
*
What does it mean to transcend language?
It means to suspend that impulse to recognize everything and assign it a word.
It means to notice those moments when we respond? without the guidance of speech, and to refrain from labeling those moments “absentminded”, but instead to become curious about who is doing all this doing, being all this being, am-ing all this am-ness.
Maybe we are truly absent in these moments — but maybe it is only speech that is absent. How do we discern? Do we really think sitting around talking to ourselves or to each other is going to clarify the issue? To speech, speechlessness is nothingness, but more is going on in us than speech can capture in its textual web.
Words can call us to what is beyond words. And that is exactly what they ought to do.
Language-breakers: Meditation mats, usability labs, acid tabs, shock…
Note: * Expanding, deepening and enriching the realm of possibility, making the word “everything” larger and more accommodating — this is the effect of magnanimity. The measure of a soul is how much is meant by the pragmatic sprawl of its belief in “everything”. But just beyond that sprawl is an inexhaustible more-than-everything, the wellspring of holiness, the awareness of which is wisdom.
Pluralism and open faith
Some faiths are open-ended. Such a faith is aware that it animates only one way of being — and produces only one way of understanding being (and of responding to being). This way of understanding receives truth, as given, in its one particular way (and responds to being in its one particular way) — but with awareness that many other ways are possible. And it might also be aware, or even anticipate, that multiple possible ways can be actualized in a single lifetime.
But some faiths are closed. These faiths believe they possess knowledge of what animates reality itself, and that what varies from their own way of understanding, to the degree that is conflicts with or confuses is wrong.
A way of understanding and responding — what I am calling faith — is not the same thing as belief, or knowledge, opinion or doctrine. Belief, knowledge, opinion and doctrine are only the content of faith, where faith is what contains the content and, by its containing, shapes the content and renders it intelligible and known.
(Technical note to myself: Faith transcendentally conceives truth. The form imparted by faith on any understood truth is concept. The specific material conceptually shaped by faith into an instance of a concept is content. But content only gives us some of being, not all of it. Every concept, in its selection and exclusion, makes tradeoffs of illumination and shadow. Every faith, in its habitual patterns of selection and exclusion, makes tradeoffs of illumination and shadow. We know only our own faith’s enworldment, not the world in its chaos of possibility. Ignore this if you wish. Leave it in the shadows as irrelevant, or not-yet-relevant.)
Many people who have known only by one faith conflate container and content, and believe when they change opinions they’ve changed their mind as radically as a mind may be changed. These are the clever philistines.
Others change from one closed faith to another, and experience the second closed faith as waking up to the truth after a long delusion. These are the awakened omniscients.
Strangely, all open faiths, despite their diversity, share something in common — perhaps the most important thing — that one most needful thing rejected by closed faiths — a belief in transcendence, in mystery, in possibility of change of the most surprising kind… of change toward one another as we outspiralingly embrace more and more inexhaustible being.
I call the doctrine that expresses this open faith and its orientation toward the hopeful and unseen pluralism.
I understand very few are capable of this faith.
This faith is the essence of living religion.
*
“You do not believe in God,” [Alyosha] added, with a note of profound sadness in his voice. But suddenly remarking that his brother was looking at him with mockery, “How do you mean then to bring your poem to a close?” he unexpectedly enquired, casting his eyes downward, “or does it break off here?”
“My intention is to end it with the following scene: Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn. His silence weighs upon him. He has seen that his captive has been attentively listening to him all the time, with His eyes fixed penetratingly and softly on the face of his jailer, and evidently bent upon not replying to him. The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence. Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten- year-old lips. That is all the answer. The Grand Inquisitor shudders. There is a convulsive twitch at the corner of his mouth. He goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, ‘Go,’ he says, ‘go, and return no more… do not come again… never, never!’ and — lets Him out into the dark night. The prisoner vanishes.”
“And the old man?”
“The kiss burns his heart, but the old man remains firm in his own ideas and unbelief.”
You are not empathic
You are not empathic.
I’m sorry, it is true. This is mainly because you have become confused about what empathy is.
What you experience when you believe you are being empathic is the exact inverse of empathy.
In empathy, we approach an actual person with the intention of acquiring a new or modified understanding of how they interpret and respond to the world, because the understanding we currently have is inadequate for making sense of their emotions, beliefs and behaviors. We approach the problem of the other not making sense with the working assumption that the fault lies with our own failure to understand, not that the other is nonsensical — that is, confused, insane or deceptive. Once we gain an adequate understanding, we assume, we will be able to make sense of their feelings and perhaps even respond to what they experience with similar emotions.
What you do is reversed on each point. You are far less concerned with actual persons, but rather with abstractions of persons.
You conceive a person with whom you intend to empathize as an instance of a category of person — a type — to whom typical things happen. You recognize a structure: “This category of person has, once again, been subjected to that category of mistreatment by that category of person.”
In other words, a pre-existent dramatic or mythical structure has been matched with a story being told. The storyline itself is an embellished variant of a familiar myth. The actors in the story are match with a mythical figures who serve as the dramatic personae. These personae will serve as the intentional objects of the intense feelings the spectator will have.
It is important to note that there is absolutely no change in understanding here, as there is in empathy. All necessary understanding in this emotive event arrives pre-fabricated and will not be challenged, but rather reinforced by its re-instantiation, which transforms it into another example of what always happens.
It will also be charged with emotions. The relating of the story is invariably emotional. And not subtly but full-on operatic. There is sorrow, despair, outrage, righteous fury, cries for vengeance — all the stuff of the Greek theater.
The spectator observes the intense emotions expressed in the telling of the story, and mimetically reproduces them in herself. (I use the feminine pronoun here because this mimetic capacity is regarded today as highly virtuous and it has become customary, when speaking of virtues, to use the feminine pronoun.) She instinctively imitates the feelings of the storyteller and co-feels these same strong emotions in herself.
Many people who, like you (perhaps misinformed by sentimental sociopath Brené Brown) call this imitative emoting “empathy”. This very natural, very animal sentimental imitative receptivity is sympathy. It is important to have, but it is not particularly rare and it is only good when tempered with reason and willingness to understand in new ways — that is, as a supplement to empathy.
So, the last step occurs when the sympathetic spectator attaches the overwhelming emotions she has reproduced in her own imagination to the mythical structure and the actors. She is then able to believe that she has had emotions about people, and she believes that she is empathetic. What she has really experienced is something like what the audience at a romcom pays to experience. Newly whipped up familiar emotions about familiar stereotypes experiencing familiar situations with familiar themes. Zero intellectual effort yielding lots of gratifying feels.
Where real empathy is needed, however, this same “empath” is intellectually opaque and emotionally somewhere between indifferent and hostile.
If someone approaches her with a different viewpoint or with feelings she cannot match to a preexisting mythical structure, she cannot compute and cannot muster much concern. Their feelings or opinions “do not make sense” which means they must not be valid and that the person is irrational or hostile or deluded and not worth understanding. If they press the matter, and continuing trying to get her to understand, and she is unable to distract herself or evade or otherwise make the unfamiliarity go away, she get angry, cold, mean, alienating, and eventually vengeful.
The children of “empathizers” understand this about their mothers, and figure out how to become little instantiations of mythical protagonists. Ordinary feelings about ordinary individuals are not important enough to warrant a mother’s attention or sustained affection — but if the child is experiencing some kind of social or political persecution, now that gets her feelings all revved up! Now the child becomes a cause she can really feel.
This is sufficient to account for so many young children manage to get caught up in social turmoil and controversy and adopt new attention-getting identities: children need parental attention and will get it any way they can.
In reality, though, every child is unique and often deeply odd, and requires actual empathy and understanding. Children force parents to change and mature and develop in order to love them fully, in their entirety. But fundamentalists, whether of Christianist or Progressivist inclination, cannot get outside their own heads and experience anything that transcends their own solipsistic imaginations. Their kids get unbelievably fucked up, but the fundamentalism explains it all away or “normalizes” it with yet more myth.
So now that you know you are not empathic, you might find yourself in need of a more accurate term for what you are. I suggest “sentimental mythologue”.
It is a great label, and you might be proud to bear it and identify with it, since being a sentimental mythologue is celebrated nearly everywhere today.
But please don’t be satisfied with this label.
Please do not remain in this deficient state — especially if you are a parent or a spouse who aspires to be real marriage.
I urge you to develop genuine empathy.
Why? Because human beings need love. They need to give it and receive it. Without it they fall into despair, anomie, self-destruction. What passes today for “empathy” precludes love, blocks love and makes love impossible — even between a mother and her child.