Category Archives: Letterpress

Pascal’s Wager 2.0

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:

  • If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
  • If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.

Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.

Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.

Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.

But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.

Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.

But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?

In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?

So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.

  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
  • If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:

Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.

This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.

Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:

To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.

I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it…

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.

Manifesto as genre

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Polycentrism

I find the manifesto an attractive genre.

Most persuasive writing takes disagreement or indecision as its point of departure. Not the manifesto. A manifesto assumes agreement or at least sympathy and persuades toward full embrace and action.

A good manifesto activates an egregore.

One other winning characteristic of the manifesto is its brevity, which makes it eminently letterpressable and chapbookable. I have at least two manifestos I could write:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto — Reality is morally meaningful and you know it. And reality is pregnant with surprise.
  • Polycentrist Manifesto — The world we inhabit is one of myriad experiential and agential subjective centers. We should not be naively ego-centric, nor naively other-centric. We should polycenter ourselves. Empathy, the Golden Rule, law and principles are indispensable to polycentered life.

“Tend the Root” v.2

Design, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

I made minor changes to my favorite “boring advice” to despairing friends. I’m going to letterpress print it with my revised knitbone symbol in a 3×7″ card format.

I’m also planning to print it as a bookmark.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Autobiography, Design, Everso, Letterpress

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

  • The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
  • Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
  • Shabbat prayers chapbook
  • Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
  • “For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
  • The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Letterpress sefirot

Autobiography, Design, Judaism, Letterpress

An old friend of mine introduced me to a master letterpress printer who lives in the Atlanta metro area. The printer connected me with one of the nation’s best die makers. I immediately ordered a plate for my first project, which will be a letterpress sefirot.

I am doing this project because nobody else has. I have been unable to find a beautiful letterpress printed sefirot, so in order to have one I will have to print it myself. This is something that should exist. I’m excited to have a supply to give away to friends.

The final printed artifact will look like this:

First sixteen copies of Geomentric Meditations

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Letterpress, Philosophy

Yesterday, despite UPS’s best efforts I managed to get both boxes of the printed spreads of Geometric Meditations. I unpacked and organized the components, and assembled the first sixteen copies. I gave the first three copies to Susan, Zoë and Helen. I put the fourth in my library, in the religion section with the Kabbalah books. This is a book I’ve wanted in my library for a long time.

The process of making these books is labor intensive. Here’s the process:

  1. Collate the signature from six separate stacks of spreads.
  2. Fold each sheet.
  3. Use template to punch three holes (for sewing) through the signature fold.
  4. Measure 14″ of red waxed linen thread and thread it through the bookbinding needle.
  5. Starting from the top hole in the spine sew the signature, using a figure-eight pattern.
  6. Tie off the top and trim the threads evenly.
  7. With a craft knife (#11 Olfa) trim top and bottom edges in .75″.
  8. Trim outer edge in .75″.

I’m working on methods to streamline production, but it is still time-consuming.

If you receive a copy of this book, please take care of it. In each book is fifteen years of intense thinking, hands-on use and iterative design, five years of obsessive writing, rewriting and editing, one year of final editing and design tweaking, two months of production work and about half an hour of handcraft.

I made everything as beautiful as I could, and I am uneasily pleased with how it turned out.

Publication of Geometric Meditations

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy, Spiral, Star, Trefoil, Wheel

I am sending Geometric Meditations to the printer this weekend. I have continued to tweak the layout in vanishingly minuscule ways. Just about every word, every punctuation mark and every line break has been inspected, varied, experimented with, obsessed over.

I am posting what I think will be the final version which will be printed. If anyone happens to look at it and finds a mistake or flaw, please alert me. I know it cannot be perfect, but I’m pushing it as far in that direction as I can.

Once Susan gives it the last pass on Saturday and approves it, I am bundling it up and sending it off. I’m told the printing takes about fifteen days. After that, I will be hand-sewing each copy, and giving them to the people who participated in the development of the concepts and the design of the book.

Continue reading Publication of Geometric Meditations →

Book

Autobiography, Design, Geometric Meditations, Letterpress, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

I’ve contacted some letterpress printers about making my pamphlet, which used to be titled The 10,000 Everythings, but has been sobered up into Geometric Meditations, which is a more precise description of how I use the content of the book.

One printer has responded so far, and suggested some changes that seems to have improved it. I looked at the book again this morning, and I am still happy with it, so it must really be ready. There is only one word in the book that I’m not sure about.

I am producing it as a chapbook, sewn together with red thread, signifying both Ariadne’s thread as well as the Kabbalistic custom of typing a red thread around one’s left wrist to protect from the evil eye. Both are intensely relevant to this project. I have to remember how much I use these diagrams to generate understandings and to keep myself oriented. It is the red thread that connects all my thoughts. So the utility and value of the ideas is beyond doubt. It is true that the form does look and sound somewhat pompous, but it is the best (prettiest and most durable) form for these concepts, so I have to ignore my anxiety about scorn and ridicule from folks who know too little or two much (a.k.a. “evil eye”). At least one angle of understanding yields value, and hermeneutical decency requires that it be read from that angle.

I am incredibly nervous about putting this book out there. I am guessing I’ll just box all the copies up and hide them with my Tend the Root posters.