Category Archives: Judaism

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

*

If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

*

A face is a gate.

*

It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Edenic seeds

Fables, myths & parables, Ideas, Judaism

A biologist held out two seeds, one in each hand.

“This seed in my left hand is a future tree. If you plant this seed in a sunny spot on fertile soil and keep it watered it will consume nutrients, water and sunlight and grow into a tree.

“This seed in my right hand is a generative principle. If you place this seed in a sunny spot, on fertile soil and keep the soil watered, through the seed nutrients, water and sunlight will congregate and organize themselves into a huge tree.”

“That I can accept,” said the biologist’s colleague; “but your claim that these seeds come from the two trees of Eden strikes me as unprovable, and, frankly, unscientific.”

To forget a dream

Ideas, Judaism

Two ways to forget a dream: 1) leave it alone and let it evaporate naturally; 2) misremember it with narrative coherence.

*

Equally inhuman: total artificiality and pure naturalness.

*

At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempts to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

– Bob Dylan

*

snakeorders

*

Dreams, children’s stories, Greek myths (pre-Bullfinch, pre-Hamilton, pre-Disney), raw observations of well-executed research — this is empirical truth. The minute understanding enters the picture — any concept, theory, narrative, even relevance or quantification — (any kind of coherence apart from the fact that these were all experienced by a single consciousness) — the empirical truth is diluted with interpretation.

Empirical purity is lost. Good riddance, too.

Understanding digests raw empirical fact and absorbs it into the body of meaning.

*

You want pure empirical truth? Why? Search your biography for reasons. What for you makes the empirical chaos superior to that which hovers over that-which-is, which articulates distinctions and narrates a continuous story? Are you sure you are as empirical as you think?

Here’s my opinion: most of us reject grand narratives (or concepts), not because we are against narratives (or concepts) per se, but because the narrative (which is an expression of our conceptual system) in which we are enmeshed requires us to repel truths which feel suspiciously relevant and meaningful, and systematically excludes them from the general body of meaning, our culture. It is a principled self-denial, a postmodern geek’s asceticism.

Freedom from the dominant narrative and conceptual framework is the means to a better narrative and conceptual framework, one where we have a place. We need a place where we have the words we need say and hear, a place where we can do our work and where we can rest.

*

Imprisonment, liberation, building, dwelling… then realizing our dwelling has degraded to imprisonment… that’s the cycle of culture.

We humans keep reinventing what a human is. We’re at least as cultural as we are biological. The line between the cultural and the biological is a fine one. The line is a narrated one.

*

In addition to our physical “homeless problem” I believe we have a spiritual homeless problem. How many of us have found situations where we are permitted to do our own kind of service for others, and are valued for it?

Think about the people you love. How often  is there agreement between one’s own sense of value and the collective’s sense of one’s value? Isn’t it more common that the collective has no use for what one wants to give, or is even hostile to accepting it?

One is enslaved or marginalized.

Imagine a world where people actively value what you need to offer, what you feel born to offer.

*

Has it ever occurred to you that culture changes because it produces new kinds of people, the people it needs next, and it is up to those new people to effect change, to make a place in the world for themselves?

*

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” *

* Note added Easter Sunday April 16, 2017 / Pesach VI, 20th of Nisan, 5777:

On “Son of Man”: A child of humanity never has a place to lay her head because she is born to make a new place for new heads to lie! Sacred galut. A child of humanity — a new humanity produced by humanity, by culture — by a particular culture, that essentially progressive and eternally productive Jewish culture — is born and reborn. Judaism produces yet one more new kind of Jew, one particularly beautiful link in a long chain of generating generations. How can anyone not want to become part of such a tradition — a project of  human self-reinvention?

 

Eden retold

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism

Adam-in-Eden reached out and grasped knowledge as something that is grasped. At that moment he became simply: Adam.

He was Adam who lived in a place called Eden. He could live somewhere else, too. He could be Adam in another garden or in a desert or in a jungle or in a city. “Listen, I could live on the motherfucking moon,” said Adam.

He was as a god, mastering this new world full of objects with his new explaining, predicting, controlling knowledge.

*

Adam forgot who he wasn’t, and so he forgot who he was.

He wasn’t exactly wrong about anything he thought, but he was never right enough.

*

“Dude, I have knowledge of God. Don’t fuck with me. Me n’ God’ll smite thee. Just saying.”

Magic was the first technology. It wasn’t too good, but the rush was addictive.

Christian cred

Etymology, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Symbols and diagrams, Synesis, Taoism

Think about these statements:

“Bear with me.”
“Please hear me out.”
“It will all make sense in the end.”

Why are these requests necessary? When are they made?

To what feeling in the listener is the speaker responding?

What kind of appeal is being made? Do we owe it to another to give him a full hearing?

When is the appeal denied? Is it a matter of credibility?

What is the experience of denial?

*

To read the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament is to experience the most pluralistic religious vision ever recorded, from the most accutely and radically pluralistic people who ever lived. In what other scripture is the same story is recounted three different times from the point of view of three different people? It would have been easier and more obvious to collapse them into one univocal account, but instead the three experiences, three meaningful visions were presented together in a three-in-one synopsis – syn– (together) –opsis (seeing). [* See note 1 below]

I like to think of pluralism as a kind of parallax vision, that allows us to see hyper-dimensionally. With one eye you see a flat picture. With two eyes working in concert we see depth. Our so-called “inner eye” draws out the dimension of meaning. With a pluralistic synopsis we see meaning together – we share meaning and have community. We gain understanding, which the Greeks called synesis.

*

By the time Jesus began teaching his distinctively Jewish universal vision of life, the Jewish tradition had survived and overcome numerous cultural crises. They had dominated and been subjugated, had won their home and lost it. They knew belonging and alienation, and they knew both sides of power.

Most importantly they knew that knowledge of experience means to know an experience from the inside. Experiencing is inseparable from that which is experienced, and this means, to use a common visual analogy, that  experience is inseparable from its vision, as how the world looks from that experience. (One of my favorite Jewish thinkers, Edmund Husserl called this “intentionality”: seeing and seen are inseparable, as are hearing and sound, feeling and sensation, etc. [* See note 2 below].)

The Jews knew better than anyone that power is something that can be seen, but even more, it is a way of seeing – of life and the world as a whole. Power has its own kind of vision. When an emperor sees himself, or his court, or a rival power, or he looks upon a conquered enemy or slave, that emperor sees something radically different than the slave regarding the same situation. Power is something different, powerlessness is different. A palace, a body, a tree, a poem… everything is the same in a sense, but things are deeply different. The same goes for a stranger, expat, wanderer, outcast or outcaste.

Out of necessity, the Jews had to develop a way of preserving themselves as a tradition within these conditions. That meant living on a line between provoking attacks from the outside and simply dissolving from cultural self-indifference or self-disgust. They had to internalize their strength. They had to find dignity in their vulnerability to escape the indignity of weakness.

There was no way such a response to such a universal problem was going to stay contained within a small ethnic tradition forever. Whether it was Jesus or Paul, somehow the radical insights of Judaism went universal.

*

A series of words derived from the Latin word credere, “believe, trust”:

  • Credit
  • Credential
  • Credence
  • Creed
  • Credo

A series of words derived from the Old English word agan, “believe, trust.” :

  • Own
  • Owe
  • Ought (originally past tense of “owe”)

A series of words derived from Latin auditor, from audire, “to hear”:

  • Audit
  • Audition
  • Auditorium
  • Auditory
  • Audio

*

An example of divergent accounts from two of the Synoptic Gospels (which some scholars believe were adapted from yet another lost Gospel, “Q”, possibly a compendium of sayings similar to the (in)famous Gospel of Thomas).

These two passages are taken from Jesus’s famous Lord’s Prayer, his instructions on how to pray.

Matthew 6:12: “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Luke 11:4: “And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”

In Matthew 6:12, the Greek word used was opheilema. [* See note 3 below.]

In Luke 11:4, the Greek word was hamartia, which means literally “missing the mark”.

*

Out of time. Darn. I’ll finish this post if there’s any interest. [* See note 4 below.]

—-

* NOTE 1:  To call the New Testament inconsistent as some atheists do is to miss the point. To argue over which meaning is the right meaning as the fundamentalists do is to betray the point. To behave as though a plurality of possible meaning implies that all meanings are equivalent and that it is meaningless to discuss them… to go skeptical on that basis, and to ask cynically, rhetorically “what is truth?”… to wash one’s hands of the responsibility to engage dialogically in pursuit of understanding… that’s complicity in the conflict.

* NOTE 2:  Intentionality in Husserl’s sense is a core religious insight, expressed in a variety of forms, from the Jewish Star of David, to the Chinese yin-within-yang and yang-within-yin, to the Greek Janusian herms (with Hermes’s head fused to the head of a goddess, often Aphrodite), to the Hermetic hermaphroditic Androgyne, male on the right, female on the left, sun on the right, moon on the left. Listen for the inside-outside symbolic structure and you’ll find it everywhere. This capacity to hear and understand the form-language of symbol is what I believe is meant by “having ears that hear.”

* NOTE 3: Opheilema seemed like it might have a connection with the name “Ophelia” from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I looked it up on Wikipedia to see if there was an etymological connection. According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Ophelia’ itself was either uncommon or nonexistent; the only known prior text to use the name (as “Ofalia”) is Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia.” It seems fairly obvious the name is a combination of opheilema and philia, love – “love debt” – love unrequited.)

* NOTE 4: Etymology of “interest”: ORIGIN late Middle English (originally as interess): from Anglo-Norman French interesse, from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important,’ from inter– ‘between’ + esse ‘be.’ The -t was added partly by association with Old French interest ‘damage, loss,’ apparently from Latin interest ‘it is important.’ Also influenced by medieval Latin interesse ‘compensation for a debtor’s defaulting.’

Buber’s “Elements of the Interhuman”

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

I scanned Buber’s essay “Elements of the Interhuman” and put it in my wiki. It is hard to convey the feeling of satisfaction I’m enjoying right now at the fact that this essay exists. It is essentially a summary of my own ethic. When I say that I “feel Jewish”, this essay is an example of what I mean by Jewishness.

I say this essay summarizes my ethic, but that doesn’t mean it summarizes what my ethic was prior to reading the essay (which I read for the first time early this year). I’m not sure exactly how much I was persuaded by this particular essay the first time I read it, but I can say that the process of reading most of Buber’s writings this year did change me ethically. It wasn’t a persuasion away from my earlier ethic, but it was a persuasion beyond it. Also, it was my first experience of sharing this species of ethic-ethos with another soul – and considering that the species of ethic-ethos is an ethic of sharing ethic-ethos, that was a major life event. Sharing this ethic-ethos was an actualization of something that had before existed as mere faith. The fact that Buber existed to me only as an author makes little difference. (If you understand why I would say this, you’ll understand my hostility to all pomo “death of the author” talk. If an author is dead to you, you are dead to humanity. A person who rejoices at the announcement of the author’s death fears and hates authentic love. Love is fearsome especially if you know what it is, but this is what courage is for: love is the root of courage’s undeniable value. All people admire courage, whether they want to or not, even if they cannot love. Courage points to love, even if it seems to point into nothing.)

The standout idea of this essay the first time I read it was the distinction Buber made between the interhuman and the social. It made such an impression on me that it’s possible I noticed no other idea in the essay. A brilliant insight can blot out all surrounding ideas with its glare. In the last several days I’ve re-read several of the sections multiple times. Even on adjacent days the same passage can read entirely differently. Key personal insight: I am sensitive and effective in the interhuman sphere, but half- or three-quarters-blind and paralyzed in the social sphere. I need the social.

Marys and Marthas

Biography, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism

As far as I can tell the only time people finally let down their guard and brave the visceral anxiety of genuine intersubjectivity is when they’re thrown into the pressure of collaborative project work. It is a peculiarly intimate situation, and it is the sole intrinsic value I experience in work.

I’m shameless in my exploitation of collaboration: it is really the only genuine transcendental subjective contact I have anymore outside of my home. It is the only time I feel the presence of other subjects and know in a perfectly immediate, non-theoretical, non-reflective way that I am not alone here.

*

Try to really talk with someone and watch out: they’re indignant. They think they’re anxious because they ought to be doing something else. If they were observant they’d note the sequence: the anxiety precedes the explanation. “Why am I so… tense? Oh, here’s why…” That’s how angst works. Angst is what you feel reading the words of an impenetrable poem, but angst projects itself onto the world’s surfaces as explanations.

Angst is what you feel when a spiritual “close-talker” gets in your psychic space.

*

We’re all a lot crazier than we think – just some of us are lucky to be participants in a collective insanity, so we get a nice cozy psychic habitat, a shared reality. Mine’s better, and I’d know, because I’ve lived both places. Where I live you can’t see the smoke from another man’s chimney, which seems awesome at first.

*

I used to have several friends to whom I “brought things home”. I did not feel as if I really knew something, until I’d told them about it. Only after I’d shared it with them was it mine. Since then, I’ve gone too damn far. Now I have to bring things home to myself. The closest thing I have to bringing something home is the comfort of reading a thought I’ve had in a book.

Martin Buber had my thoughts; so did Husserl. I could name others. It seems I think Jewishly.

*

There is no possibility of culture where angst-tolerance is lacking. Spiritually, we’re total chickenshits. That’s why our art is stagnant. Our art no longer announces any new way to be. At most it shows some new way to appear new, while courteously leaving us untouched, unchanged.

*

How much is “too much to ask”? Not much at all, I promise. Even with your best and closest friends, I bet the limit is a lot closer than you think or hope. Do not test this, unless you really want to know. I wanted to know. I am not sorry to have acquired this knowledge. I will digest this stone, and I will declare the fucking thing delicious. Right now, though, my stomach hurts.

*

Isn’t it true that we fear dull aches less than sharp pains?

Borges – “The Aleph”

Judaism, Philosophy

I found Borges’s “The Aleph” online and put it in my wiki. It is a portait of intersubjective betrayal.

*

The theme of intersubjective betrayal is terribly important. Intersubjective betrayal is the kind of betrayal we moderns reserve as our sacred right. It is also, incidentally, the most deeply damaging kind of betrayal. According to us, our subjectivity is our private property, and being our own property we can dispose of it as we wish: we are allowed to invent; that is, we are permitted to lie arbitrarily. Unfortunately, this attitude precludes genuine love, and also authentic culture. To be honest about one’s subjective existence means to share subjectivity with another. Sharing of subjectivity is the ground of love. To be intersubjectively dishonest/”inventive” is to chop out the roots of love and to salt its soil. If you believe things have somehow gone deeply wrong in our culture, consider the possibility that the origin of the problem is the privatization of the subject.

*

I see “The Aleph” as a complement to the better-known “The Secret Miracle”, which… wow – as I write this I’m realizing there’s a lot more depth to “The Secret Miracle” than I’d noticed. It is no accident that Jaromir Hladik was Jewish. At this moment the story appears to me less as a meditation on time in general, than on the Jewish understanding of time and intersubjectivity.

*

Judaism is the intersubjective religion. To speak mythically: Christianity is the slow dawning of the strange fact that the gentiles are the lost tribe.

Do you speak mythos? (Or, to put it mythically: do you have “ears that hear”?)

*

I’d much rather be insane than bored.

What I would really love: a very beautiful shared insanity, which faithfully includes everything and excludes nothing, which interrelates and orders the entirety of subjective and objective existence. Unfortunately there are very few genuine philosophers in the world, so everyone believes our current not-so-beautiful, deeply fragmented, semi-shared insanity is reality itself.

Some ethical fragments

Judaism

Gratitude: Gratitude is acknowledging that your own apparently individual successes and good fortune are actually collective, and only illusorily individual. Gratitude is giving others their fair share in your self: shared oneness. Ingratitude is spiritual theft.

Apology:  Apology is the repairing of damage done to the oneness of a collective self by one or both of its participants. Apology is essentially atonement: the participant reaffirming oneness with a partner after denial (in word, action, or even thought) of a shared oneness.

Offense: Offense is the palpable feeling of destruction of actual or possible oneness. We are offended by ethical breaches because oneness is accomplished within an ethos – an ethos being a way of seeing and living, and an ethic being the sustaining praxis of its ethos.

Metanoia: A Greek word which means radically changing one’s mind, seeing differently. This is generally translated as “repentance”. When a person violates an ethic severely enough, the person is no longer able to exist within the violated ethos, and in fact changes modes of existence and becomes a stranger.

Unrepentant regret: The expression of regret for destroying oneness with another without the intention of atonement – that is, unrepentant regret – is the opposite of apology: it consummates an estrangement.  These  has the form: “I’m sorry, but…” It also frequently has the form: “Forgive me, God…”

The retraction of gratitude, which is the same as denial of oneness, is one of the deepest offenses one can commit.

*

The Jews are humanity’s geniuses of oneness. Antisemitism is a poetic expression of radical individualism.