Category Archives: Love

Hyperactive listening

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Love, Polycentered design

Susan and I have a new method for fighting.

We start with her expressing what is pissing her off — pure stream-of-consciousness thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, images, etc.

When she is done, I steelman her grievances, speaking as much as I can from her perspective — as if she were addressing me. I attempt to method act her point of view, adding sarcasm, emotional digs, humorous abuse and expressive flourishes to indicate insight into her feelings as well as her thoughts.

Then Susan joins in and piles on, with additional points I neglected to mention, which I integrate into the overall argument.

Essentially, we collaborate on kicking my ass as thoroughly and brutally as possible, until she feels everything has been said as thoroughly, clearly and forcefully as possible. She tells me that this process helps her feel thoroughly understood.

Only after she ratifies my understanding do I try to answer her points. Obviously, it’s pretty easy to steelman my own perspective, since it’s the perspective that persuaded me.

Then we try out possible resolutions of our differences. For each candidate possibility we do the same steelmanning, method acting and collaboration until we find a shared perspective and common ground to use as a new point of departure.

This is essentially polycentered design applied to domestic conflict.

I feel fortunate to belong to a two-person organization with this kind of collaborative culture.

Intercursive knowing

Judaism, Kabbalah, Love

From Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

…the Zohar’s sexual symbolism reflects the influence of two different tendencies. Insofar as it shows a positive attitude towards the function of sexual life, within the limits ordained by divine law, it may be said to represent a genuinely Jewish outlook. Chastity is indeed one of the highest moral values of Judaism: Joseph, who by his chastity has “upheld the covenant” is regarded by the Midrash and the Kabbalah as the prototype of the righteous man, the true Zaddik. But at no time was sexual asceticism accorded the dignity of a religious value, and the mystics make no exception. Too deeply was the first command of the Torah, Be fruitful and multiply, impressed upon their minds. The contrast to other forms of mysticism is striking enough to be worth mentioning: non-Jewish mysticism, which glorified and propagated asceticism, ended sometimes by transplanting eroticism into the relation of man to God. Kabbalism, on the other hand, was tempted to discover the mystery of sex within God himself. For the rest it rejected asceticism and continued to regard marriage not as a concession to the frailty of the flesh but as one of the most sacred mysteries.

Every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah. In a tract on the “union of a man with his wife” which was later ascribed to Nahmanides, Joseph Gikatila gave a similar interpretation of the mystical significance of marriage. The Kabbalists deduced from Genesis 4:1: “And Adam knew Eve his wife” that “knowledge” [Da’at] always means the realization of a union, be it that of wisdom (or reason) [Chokhmah] and intelligence [Binah], or that of the King [Keter] and the Shekhinah [Malkhut]. Thus knowledge [Da’at] itself received a sublime erotic quality in this new Gnostical system, and this point is often stressed in Kabbalistic writings.

This passage expresses at once how I know marriage, philosophy, design and everything in life I care about. This is why I am Jewish.

No complete systematic whole (synthetically constructed or analytically construed) is sufficient to sustain enworldment.

A whole must also form a gestalt whole (conceived as a whole and articulated as parts belonging to that whole).

And we ourselves must belong within this whole as participants who, through our participation, instaurate it.

But to do so requires inward and outward change, co-figuration of first-person and third-person, nearly always by way of second-person. We can systematize the little we can conceive whole without any disruption to our own subjectivity.

In craft artifact and artifex change together.

The change to oneself in first-person is experienced as the click of gestalt shift.

Gestalt-shift (whether perceptual, or conceptual, or both) is a manifestation of change within one’s pre-thought order among intuitions — to the structured receptivity to whom reality is given in direct perception long before truth is given. The name of this inter-ordered intuitive being — being who precedes and conditions all experience — is faith. Faith is not a property of belief. Belief is the property of faith, the deepest self who does all believing, perceiving, conceiving and — much later — construal and construction.

New words for new properly subjective understanding. A receptivity to some form of being — a capacity to take a given. We will call this an enception. A new enceptive order that manifest new conceptive wholes and articulations within wholes is a gestell, an enframing. (Heidegger was right that technik enframes, but he was wrong that only technik enframes. I will say that technik dysenframes.)

A perceptual gestalt shift, a conceptual hermeneutic shift, an equipped perceptual-conceptual-practical scientific paradigm shift, a comprehensive religious conversion in which one is reborn into a new world — these are all gestell shifts, changes of faith, transfifurations of soul that give us reality in new ways. They are all re-enworldments.

But listen: we are tuned for objective knowledge. We forever confuse subjective changes which manifest objective change with changes to the objects themselves. We have language for the objective changes we notice in our perceptual and conceptual field, but we lack language for the subject who changed and for the nature of change a subject undergoes. When we attempt to talk about subjects, we evert them into psychic objects so we can grasp them scientifically as psychological phenomena or as behaviors resulting from something nonexistently unknowable.

This is all just the latest iteration of the same primordial category mistake of subject and object, the edenic eversion that has plagued us as a species from before the beginning of history. We think we can grab Eden by the apples and own it as property, and we cannot.

We don’t know how to avoid knowing that knowledge is objective comprehension and mastery. We think we only know for as long as we can give an objective account. We cannot help but know that whenever somebody else’s account of things is incomprehensible and makes no to us that they are full of nonsense.

So the “masters of reality” white-knuckle whatever given reality is graspable to them right now — which to them is “objective reality” itself — and stack these little givens sky high. Their constructions reach the roof of heaven in the grandest narrative edifices, which remain such, even when the grand narrative is a tale of rejection of grand narratives. The new structures collapse as fast as they are constructed and soon the tall tale of overcoming tall tales is replaced with a new tall tale of oppression by the old constructions. The Tower forever topples into The Tower. The blocks are too small for the height. Only a single block the size of the tower itself can bear such weight.

I am less and less able to doubt the truth in the dialectical Sefirot. I experience it as excessively true.

The uncanny craft of parenting

Autobiography, Design, Love, Philosophy

For the last several years, Susan and I have been collaborating on a philosophy of parenting. It is an application of a more general philosophy, and that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment. (For background see the autobiographical endnote.)

This parenting philosophy (like the general philosophy and all its various applications) is a relationship-centered philosophy.

The job of a parent is the intentional development of a parent-child relationship from one of inequality and dependence to one of equality and independence. Within this relational matrix (the essence of matrix) — within this social womb — an adult personality takes form, in stages, from relative passivity to active partnership in configuring the relationship. Adulthood is achieved when from this process, a new adult emerges who is capable of equality relations with the parent and with others, and of performing the job of parent.

Parenting is a strange craft.

In every craft a crafter collaborates with a material until a work is formed and fully actualized, often, in the process transforming the crafter. But in parenting, what is actualized is a fellow-crafter. Parent craft begets parent craft.

What makes the craft of parenting so challenging, fascinating and unnerving is that the process of crafting iteratively changes its own conditions and inner logic, often radically. It is like a game whose object is to transform the game itself; and with with each move, the game and the rules by which the game is played are reinvented.

Susan gave this philosophy an elegantly self-descriptive name: Raise-to-Relate.

Autobiographical endnote:

“…that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment.”

This enworlding faith began forming the minute Susan and I met and began fighting about religion.

I was a standard-issue spiritual-but-not-religious liberal materialist with a rebellious curiosity about religious understandings. I grew up in UU milieu. UUs prided themselves on religious tolerance, but that tolerance seemed both incurious and impotent. Even at ten years old, it was obvious to me that these UUs lacked all means of effective intolerance. Wherever they had the power to pull it off, they were more than eager to suppress opposition. The primary locus of this suppressive power, of course, was with youth. Even the faintest trace of intolerance would not be tolerated. And as I got older, beginning with a conclusion that religion is something to tolerate, and never seriously questioning or challenging that premise, struck me as a mark of shallowness, immaturity and boringness.

Susan was a lapsed Catholic on a mission to recover her faith and reenchant her disenchanted world. Growing up, she was a strange child, and was persecuted by scandalized nuns for the heretical mystical rituals she invented and taught on the playground. College shattered many of her naive beliefs about the world, and her religion shattered with it. She wandered into light libertinism for a few years, but quickly became disgusted and demoralized by it, and had begun systematically reforming her religious life to get back in order. Disenchantment is relative, though, and, by my standards, Susan was still so saturated with enchantment that her being hit me like a heroic dose of acid. Her weirdness and her discipline were magically alien.

Within our first half-dozen clashes she turned my own intellectual conscience against my facile utilitarian morality with a simple devastating appeal: “You can certainly argue utilitarianism, but does it account for the intensity of your disgust toward immorality? Do you really care that much about the smooth functioning of the social order? Really?” I was used to butting heads with philosophical opponents, but Susan hit from the heart. She won that round decisively and permanently.

We have been locked in machloket l’shem shamayim ever since.

Whatever I learn is set in our marriage crucible, and whatever I say or make pours from its lip. My philosophy comes from something deeper than philosophy. It can be expressed generally, but it can also be focused into defined domains of activity like design or parenting, and perhaps this is where it becomes most comprehensible.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Smiling insistence

Design, Love

When I was younger I was “philosophical” in that casual way people are when they enjoy reflecting on life, but still don’t see much benefit in reading other folk’s difficult technical reflections. Maybe we want to keep our own original vision virginally pure. We think to ourselves: “You might need to get your ideas from books and teachers, but I have my own ideas and I don’t need to learn what to think from other people.” Or we read, but just to find others who also know what we know.

It was only a desperate existential need to defend my way of working — the conditions I need to design — that eventually drove me to do philosophy.

In my world, working as a designer, if I cannot make clear sense fast, I get chained to tasks that drown me in anxiety, boredom and despair.

If I hadn’t needed help wherever I could find it, I would have gone to my grave mistaking my very unoriginal notions of originality for pristine, untouched intuition. Naw… we learn from authority to exalt this complacently rebellious arrogant nonsense.

I am still desperate. But I have more inner resources for explaining what is happening to me, when people force me to work in ways that make design impossible.

I still get anxious and I still get bored, but I never despair.

I refuse to despair, because I know better.

But know and insist… and smile? That’s the next goal.

Susan teaches this: Warm demander.

Messenger

Autobiography, Letterpress, Love

In the autumn of 1989, my weirdo friend Rob approached me and, without comment, handed me a slip of paper, upon which he had typed out a quotation:

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.”

The words were from a letter written by Rainer Maria Rilke, the year his love affair with Lou Andreas-Salomé “ended”. In truth it did not end, but had consummated and rebirthed itself — and Rilke, too — as something novel and beyond the range of talk.

While this quotation is credited to Rilke because the words flowed from his pen, the capacity to conceive it came from Salomé. This message was one of their many children.

I still don’t know why Rob decided to type this message, nor why he chose me as its recipient. I’ve asked Rob, and he doesn’t remember doing it. He did a lot of mysteriously transmissive things like that back then. He was a medium, passing things along. He was a mailman.

But that message from the past was exactly the one I needed at that moment. I was suffocating my future wife, and I was set to lose her. This message gave me an entirely new future — a future for which I am grateful — filled with children.

Of course, this is now a magical letterpress project.

The first step is to reproduce the slip of paper Rob handed me. It will be hand-set in lead type and hand-printed. The second step is to sneak up on Rob and place a slip of paper in his hand. The third step is to get away without ruining it with explanation.

Rob deserves to receive the message he delivered.

She was already root

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Love, Symbols and diagrams

Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.

Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.

I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.

Sacrificial offerings to the ideoidol

Autobiography, Love, Religion

Many of us cling to ideas that make us feel sane, but which, in actuality produce insanity.

The worst kind of idol is mental. Very few of us worship golden idols, but all but very few of us worship ideoidols.

I know parents who were faced with a choice between their ideoidol and their own child. In the wordless depths of their soul, they are placed as a crossroads:

Do I sacrifice this idea I believe in so fervently for the sake of my child, or do I sacrifice my child to this idea?

All but very few sacrifice the child to the idea.

Goebbels shot his own children before allowing them to live in a denazified world.

I know a child who was unable to accept her parents’ fundamentalist faith. When insistence failed they used shame. When shame failed, they had her exorcised. When exorcism failed, they threw her out of their home.

I know another child whose mother joined a cult that taught a great secret. The secret was so simple it was hidden in plain sight: she lived in a world of her own creation, and the purpose of this world was love. Whenever her child said something disturbing or confusing, this was a lesson that could teach her whatever wisdom she chose to learn. The child became a great teacher, who taught her deep truths that somehow she’d already known all along. After that, he was no longer distressing at all.

Today, many parents refuse to acknowledge own children’s obvious psychological distress and instead believe their own ideology when it soothes them with lies: the despair and confusion the faith itself inflicts is just sensitivity toward a worthless and dying world. The ideoidol masticates and slurps and smiles an oily, bloody smile. “Your child’s deep despair is the only sane response to an unjust and doomed world.” As the child dissolves into a formless blob of dark feelings and appetites in gastric juices, the ideoidol strokes the mother’s head, coos and flatters her self-awareness, her selflessness, her deep concern, her willingness to do the work.

Love and lust, weak and strong

Love

Love is essentially a transcendent relationship. Love is subjectivity subsisting within an enveloping, higher-order subjectivity, which exceeds and involves you and others, who, like you, are exceeded and involved. Love always brings a third being to life, within whom lovers are together organized. Organized together — not merged.

Love’s purely immanent and objective counterfeit is lust. Lust, however, does not bring a third to life. Lust subsumes another within oneself. A lot of talk of merging and union refers to lust relationships. Fear of merging and loss of self is fear of becoming a lust object of another. It is a valid fear; not everyone is wiling to love. There are good reasons to avoid love.

We notice lust mainly when we are overwhelmed by it. So we associate lust with rare intensity. We might view lust as essentially intense. But weak and feeble lust is ubiquitous. Whenever we want to possess something objective — anything we take or mistake to be possessable — an object, a person, an experience, a feeling, a status, a bit of knowledge — and however faintly we want it — that is lust. We subsume something and make it exclusively our own — a part of us. Every home is filled with objects of lust.

We also treat love as essentially intense — as liking taken to an extreme. “I love you” is synonymous with “I double-plus-like you.” But love in weak form is common, and highly valuable. It happens whenever we form relationships with any being who transcends us. We give ourselves over to participation to being we are not. And if that being changes or disappears, we cannot be the same without it. We feel an inward loss — maybe small, maybe total. We are also open to transformative joys, large or minuscule. The more our life is saturated with loves of people, animals, places, rituals, traditions, and so on, the more valuable life is to us, and the more vulnerable we become. Love requires courage.

To say “I love you” is to say “I’d be someone different, and worse, without you.”

The sacrament of inner marriage

Love

Saint-Exupery says something self-tranformingly, world-tranformingly true:

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

This is the difference between lust and love. Lust wants to possess another as object. Love wants to be possessed by a We, an emergent superpersonal being summoned by participation in love, which renders those in love participants in someone transcending either.

Where such a superpersonal being comes to live around and between two life partners, there is marriage. Marriage is a spiritual fact, independent of society. A marriage is or isn’t.

Many people have faiths that preclude the possibility of marriage. For those of unmarriageable faith, any wedding is a premature celebration of a union that has not yet happened and may never happen.

Unfaithfulness is a kind of unsanctioned marriage. Some people’s first real marriage occurs outside of and in violation of wedlock.

Nietzsche understood the psychological topology of love, that love is a kind of super-person:

“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le veritable amour c’est l’ame, qui enveloppe le corps.’ ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.'”

Much attempted self-love is actually self-lust. And when people condemn self-love, it is actually self-lust that is condemned.

In self-lust we want to possess ourselves as a beloved object.

To achieve self-love we must follow Saint-Exupery’s advice, but with the intuitive factions — what depth psychologists call complexes — and have these aspects of ourselves “look outward together in the same direction.”

This experiencing of the world together within ourselves, this attempt at sensus communis with our estranged and conflicting aspects of ourselves, this is the path to self-respect, inner mutuality — of self-integration.

Each of us is a community of intuitive sup-personal beings, to whom I is transcendent. Only inner-marriage produces a coherent person.

All marriages of all kinds and scales require constant cultivation, repair, growth.

Another beautiful Nietzsche quote:

One must learn to love. — This happens to us in music: first one must learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a life in itself; then one needs effort and good will to stand it despite its strangeness; patience with its appearance and expression, and kindheartedness about its oddity. Finally comes a moment when we are used to it; when we expect it; when we sense that we’d miss it if it were missing; and now it continues relentlessly to compel and enchant us until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers, who no longer want anything better from the world than it and it again. But this happens to us not only in music: it is in just this way that we have learned to love everything we now love. We are always rewarded in the end for our good will, our patience, our fair-mindedness and gentleness with what is strange, as it gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even he who loves himself will have learned it this way — there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned.

Psychologies that encourage self-reflective observation — taking oneself as something to observe and know about — draw us into self-consuming reflection on the reflector. We gorge on self and starve to death.

A visual warning:

Jewishly

Judaism, Love

For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light from the side does nor reveal the light the same way that looking directly up into the beam does. My complaint is that maybe there are better things to do with light sources than examine their beams or stare directly into them. Perhaps I am just weird, but my preferred use for light sources is to illuminate spaces and the objects in those spaces.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically.

Today’s version of the complaint is no different, except today I want to suggest (or re-suggest) that this complaint I’ve been making is a Jewish one. And by “Jewish”, as always, I mean in accordance with Buber’s fundamental insight of I-Thou, which is the whence of my faith — the from-where — or to translate it into hippie, “where I’m coming from”.

Here is what Buber says in I-Thou, which I read as an expression of my complaint.

When you are sent forth, God remains-presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

It might be helpful here to re-quote Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I believe, with my entire stubborn Jewish faith that the famous Jew that so many people want to face, contemplate, love and worship, never wanted to be loved face-to-face in that romantic  way that lovers love, as they stare into each other’s eyes.

With Buber, I believe that this exceptional Jew very Jewishly wanted us to stand next to him in the light of creation, our backs warmed by his Father’s radiance, and look out upon a divinely-illuminated world with him.

Please do not hate me for saying these things, which I fully believe and consider of highest importance. I love Jesus, Christians and Christianity, but my love is a thoroughgoing Jewish love.

Hineini and amen.

If you care, I care

Autobiography, Ethics, Love

Friend, if you care about something, I care about it, too.

I care about it for the sake of its importance to you. I may care solely for that reason and no other.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you have reached, and we might never agree on what is true and right on this matter.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to explain why and justify it.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

I cannot promise to believe what you want me to believe. I cannot promise to feel what you want me to feel. But I can promise you this: I will care as much as I am able about what you care about.

And where one or the other of us refuses to care, there we find the limits of our friendship.

Beautiful instruments

Autobiography, Design Instrumentalism, Love, Philosophy

I love beautiful instruments.

These are useful tools — like pens, bicycles, guitars, blades, bags, digital devices, user interfaces — designed so well that they disappear in use, becoming extensions of our own being. They are, in Heidegger’s words, ready-to-hand.

But when we shift our awareness to present-at-hand, and contemplate them as objects, we find them aesthetically resonant. They reinforce our sense of value and meaning.

I love beautiful instrumental language. The words are transparent in use, spontaneously conveying meaning without obtrusion, distraction, obfuscation or distortion. When we participate in reality, doing and speaking, the words are part of reality and participate in its realness.

But when we attend to the words themselves, hearing them, seeing them on a page, experiencing them objectively, they are beautiful. The form of the language reinforces our sense of value and meaning.

The words extend our subjectivity and become part of us, but they are also objects that help us feel who we are, and what we care about.

Words, like selves, have subjectivity and objectivity, concavity and convexity, are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand depending on how we let them be for us.

When I sit in my library, among my books, I feel profoundly at home.

I love when people visit and talk with me in this beloved space, lined with books filled with the words of people I love, people I have done my best to incarnate and make immortal through my own share of moral life.

Philosophy is useful poetry.

Pragmatic Opportunity Cost

Love, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I explained the Pragmatic Maxim to Susan this morning. I explained how Pragmatism provides an alternative to correspondence epistemologies. The meaning of any assertion or belief is the sum total of practical consequences of its being the case — the Golden Therefore — or as William James so crassly and Americanly put it, the pragmatic “cash value” of that truth. She thought for a second and asked whether for each assertion there was also a set of practical consequences left unconsidered.

She called it the Pragmatic Opportunity Cost.

Dang.

Anamnetic learning

Love, Philosophy

What the world needs more of is teachers of what everyone already intuitively knows.

From the perspective of a learner — the most important perspective to both learner and teacher — learning what you already intuitively know is the most inspiring kind of learning. — “I always knew this but could never say it, before!” —

We feel relieved, dignified, liberated, restored, empowered when we learn this way. We feel grateful without feeling humiliated or indebted, because nobody gave us anything that was not already ours.

Everyone loves this kind of learning.

Plato called it anamnesis: unforgetting.

From the perspective of our social existence, anamnetic learning liberates private intuitions from solitary confinement within the skulls of individual persons, and brings it out into the light of shared understanding.

It socializes private knowing and allows it to participate in public knowledge.

I mean social and public in a positive sense. For many of us, the words “social” and “public” taste sour in our mouths. They imply imposition of unwanted burdens, constraints, exposure, artificiality, impersonality, de-personalization — alienation. But it has not always been this way. The ancients experienced public life very differently, and maybe in a different way that is partially recoverable.

The difference is preserved in the lonely etymology of the word “private”. Privare meant “to bereave, deprive, rob, strip”. Private means deprived of public existence.

Looking at the word “social” offers us clues into how Roman citizens may have experienced society. Socialis — “of companionship, of allies; united, living with others; of marriage, conjugal,” from socius “companion, ally.”

Is it possible that anamnetic teaching could help restore a non-alienating society, where living and working together in public affirms what we know and love most immediately?

Could we ever abide in a self-affirming, other-affirming, world-affirming common truth — a truth rooted in the soil of our souls, but growing upward as public knowledge, branching out as specialized practical expertise, efflorescing as culture, fructifying as teaching?

This is the stuff of utopian dreams, but I think it is a truth-bearing fantasy.

I imagine my younger daughter would laugh at me for being such an extreme Aquarius. But I am actually feeling it right now, and even as I see the wrecking ball of the day ahead swinging right for my  skull…

Learning to teach is helping me shed the burden of intellectual avarice. What seems deeply true to me is not mine. It’s not me. Truest truth should be everyone’s. The value of truth is actualized in the sharing of it with others.

One of the world’s most cloying day camp songs:

Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Give it away
Love isn’t love
Until you give it away
You end up
Having
More

I’m making myself throw up, now. Have a good day.

True — but it could be truer

Autobiography, Love, Religion

I just had one of those creative conversations, where I was moved to say things I didn’t know I knew.

I found myself saying, “Intersectionality is true in a deep sense. Our existence is radically intersectional. But it is not an intersection of social categories. It is an intersection of love relationships  — participation in transcendent being in which we experience our personal being.”

I also related this with an old thought: “In my meandering journey through atheism, I learned to disbelieve in many different notions of God. Though I’ve found an understanding of God I cannot even doubt, my past atheisms all survive in me. I still disbelieve in every one of my rejected notions of God.

“Years ago, when my daughters came to me and proclaimed their atheism, I asked them what it was they disbelieved in. They would explain, and I’d say ‘Wonderful! Definitely refuse to believe in that!'” To have a healthy faith, it is important to disbelieve everything you find unpersuasive

I also realized last week, talking with another friend that the notion of institutional racism is rooted in a legitimate intuition that there are institutional personalities. Our participation in these collective forms of being — these egregores — do, in fact, change how we perceive, think and respond to the world, and not always for the better.

But to change the collective personality of an organization requires profound structural changes — changes in how participants in the organization interact and exchange service with one another. Attempting to change the mindsets of all the people within the organization, and worse, doing so through coercive means, will only create new forms of institutional oppression.

The organization must be redesigned to make people naturally want what is better for everyone. The most effective way to change an organization’s personhood is service design.

A conversation with yet a third friend gave me a third insight. Identity crises are an essential part of young adulthood. In youth, we outgrow the roles we are given by our parents and seek new ones. And this role is almost always a category of some kind or another that we share with others we see as our people.

My friend reminded me how, in our profoundly musical generation we adopted music genres and specific bands as our identities. When we met someone else who loved our music we knew something about their ideals and behavioral norms. We were very protective of these identities, scorning poseurs who tried to appropriate our style. If we’d found a way to defend the boundaries of our identities with coercive force, perhaps we would have done it. But adults barely noticed what we were doing and even if they had, they would never have indulged our feelings of ownership over the borrowed foundations of our selfhood.

Young people today favor different categories, and unfortunately many of these identities have been politicized and are enforced by nominal adults in positions of authority.

But it is important to remember, those who are still in this stage are doing their best to establish their selfhood. We cannot condemn them for that. But as adults we have a responsibility to help them mature past this stage.

Prying open the hand of thought

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Love

I’ve begun to notice where other people’s own original “pet theories” harm their overall understandings and ability to communicate their ideas. The noticing is spontaneous and intuitive, too. It is not an intention or an analysis. I just see it as given.

This matters to me because I have become aware that I am guilty of the same thing. The idea that I was going to write a book to mark my intellectual property, and my intense anxiety of getting scooped has corrupted my thinking. Now my philosophy is scarred with neologisms and mangled with argumentative entrenchments.

For this reason, I am doing some strange things to loosen my own grip on “my” ideas.

I feel that if I can stop caring, or at least suspend caring about the source of the ideas I use and care about — if I can “open the hand of thought” and let my precious, old, complicated ideas fall out — maybe some simpler ideas might land on my palm.

I am focusing on learning to teach — prioritizing what is most readily learnable over what is mine — as a mindset to gently pry my fingers open.

And what I am going to learn to teach is service design. I want to get service design dead simple, so it can do its transformative magic on our everyday dealings with others.

When done in the right spirit, service design invests us with a new practical faith — one that guides our participation in the transcendent, mysterious, glorious drudgery of life. This drudgery — ours and others — deserves our love and respect. Service design operationalizes that love and that respect within an organization.

It is important!

Hope

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Love

I spent most of this week at Greenville Memorial Hospital. My dad had a Type A aortic dissection, and had to undergo emergency open heart surgery. So far, he has beaten some terrifyingly slim odds, largely thanks to his heart surgeon, Dr. Bhatia, who worked on him literally all Sunday night through Monday morning, and the incredible nurses and support staff at the CVICU.

*

These days it is easy to lapse into pessimism regarding our species.

But it is important to remember that the people who give us this dark impression is a small and specialized segment of the population, who spend their days reading about and writing about one small corner of human experience.

Meanwhile, another, much larger group of people show up to work each day to give care and comfort to a perpetually rotating set of hurting, terrified people. They serve with skill, professionalism, compassion and humor. We don’t often hear their perspectives on things because they are incredibly busy. Their communications are mostly practical and specific and directed to one person or a few.

When I focus on people like this, and recognize them as representative of humanity I feel much, much better about everything.

Love-driven service

Love

If you stop taking acts of service motivated by love for granted and instead see them as the most significant, valuable things any person can do, everything starts looking very different.

I am not talking about the stuff we notice and celebrate — the usual heroic acts of self-sacrifice, or overcoming insurmountable challenges to achieve the impossible, or anything requiring moments summoning will or bravery to do some great deed that has a defined beginning, middle and end.

I am talking about unceasing, interminable day-in-day-out, night-in-night-out persevering labor of care. I am talking about commitment to the endless, strenuous, stressful, frustrating, unglamorous, often mind-numbingly repetitive work that sustains our lives, both now and across generations.

It is the easiest thing on earth to take these love-driven acts of service for granted as a given, part of the invisible background of life. If we don’t work to notice, we are likely to remain oblivious to it.

Because love-driven acts of service draw on the deepest internal resources, they require no external motivation. On the contrary, they keep going despite every discouragement and danger. For this reason, people moved by these inner-resources are easy to exploit, and we do often exploit them shamelessly.

What we notice most, it seems, are those actions that we cannot depend on, which require payment of external resources. If payment is not made, the actions do not happen.

But those external reward driven actions are not the most valuable acts. They are only the most conspicuous acts. Precisely because we must reward these externally-motivated actions , we notice, respect and esteem them. But the love driven acts keep happening whether or not we notice them or whether or not we adequately reward them.

People who do this kind of love-driven work are everywhere, holding things together. We can find many of them on the front lines of service. Nurses, teachers, social workers, cashiers, waiters, and, of course, mothers. They are frequently overworked, under-compensated and unnoticed, but they don’t stop.

It is terrifying to recognize how much we owe them for what they have done for us and how dependent we are on their service and their love.

Can we bear feeling as much gratitude as we owe?

Maybe our blindness isn’t as innocent as we would prefer.

What if the real job all the rest of us have — those of us situated far behind the front lines of service — is not to order our front-liners around, and not to exploit our front-liners and their unconditional willingness to serve, but rather to give them the support they need, even when — especially when — they don’t demand it, so they can better do this sacred work that makes our lives worth living without burning out or falling into despair.

Our strength depends on their strength.