Category Archives: Philosophy

Eternal effigicide victims

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Jew-haters, antisemites, anti-Zionists have diverging reasons for hating what they conceptualize variously in religious, racial, historical, political, ideological terms.

The ontology shifts about according to the faith and doctrine of the ones doing the hating. But the emotion — angst expressed as hate — and the target of the hate is constant: Am Yisrael, the People of Israel. It is Am Yisrael and our perpetually evolving, disrupting, regenerating, self-transcending tradition, dedicated to the ever-expanding transcendent One beyond being.

Am Yisrael is the radical other who stands in for the radical Otherness of the transcendent. When it is impossible to annihilate reality and reality’s transcendent ground, but one needs to vent infinite hatred somewhere, however impotently, the best lightning rod for discharging one’s angst is whoever loves what one hates.

And when effigicide is directed at Jews, it is rarely confined to Jews for long, for the simple reason that Jews are not the only people who offend ideoidolators.

Effigicide is the violent expression of angst toward the supraformal absolute directed at someone with living form.

Ancientspeak

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Orwell famously invented the idea of an artificial language semantically engineered to destroy the possibility of thought beyond a set ideological horizon.

For a Newspeaker, any notion with potential to interfere with total cooperation with Ingsoc would be mentally inconceivable. Such an idea would require no suppression. Not only would it be impossible to communicate to other people, it could not form as an intelligible concept in the first place — even a concept requiring rejection and condemnation.

As I have said before, realia we can intuit as relevant, but which we cannot conceive and understand within our overall understanding (our metaphysic) induces perplexity and intolerable dread. Such realia stands at the outer edges of intelligibility and threatens the shimmering migraine mirage membrane separating us from infinite annihilation.

Within this membrane of intelligibility is everything — the totality of the known and knowable universe.

Beyond the membrane of intelligibility is unspeakable evil, toward which one feels inexpressible angst, hatred and terror. Such angst is radically objectless (as Heidegger noted in Being and Time) — and this lack of object itself creates yet more angst, because the very concept of angst stands beyond the membrane of intelligibility. Such angst always finds an object, into which it can discharge itself and find temporary relief. Ingsoc wisely provided such objects and occasions for discharge (Two Minutes Hate). Emmanuel Goldstein (an all-purpose political villain) or some enemy state or another were provided as lightning rods to direct this hate along politically useful channels, producing a sort of cathartic post-coital devotion in its exhaustion.

A Newspeaker indoctrinated in Ingsoc would live inside an intentionally, systematically narrowed horizon of intelligibility, surrounded by intense, pervasive evil, which was conveniently embodied by enemies, who stood in for any reality or idea unthinkable in Newspeak. Who isn’t precisely with us, is absolutely against us. Docility within. Hostility without. Two sides of the same totalitarian existence.

Of course, the above account blends Orwell’s thought with my own.

I’m presenting it Newspeak as an antithesis of an opposite ideal, that everts every feature of Newspeak.

The angst of transcendence is interpreted not as inexpressible evil deserving infinite hatred but as ineffable goodness inviting and emanating infinite love. The language is not centrally engineered but organically developed polycentrically across a community of radically non-uniform unique individuals among whom wisdom is distributed.

Of course, whoever speaks and things and exists in this language would be a special target of totalitarian hatred. It wouldn’t be discharged in a mere Two Minutes Hate. You’d need something closer to a Two-Thousand Years Hate.

Despite the risks, though — and these do exist even in an intellectually expansive free society like ours where young people are trained to think critically and unanimously embrace the value of diversity (“diversity is conformity”) — I would very much love to learn such a language.

Instauratio ex nihilo

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

When I first learned the word “instauration” from Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, I was thunderstruck. Latour described precisely how it is to find the kinds of truth we discover-create in design research.

But now, I am thunderstruck all over again, recognizing that the creation and revelation essential to Beriah is sublime instauratio ex nihilo.

Desperate philosophizing

Biography, Design, Existentialism, Trefoil

Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.

For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”

But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”

What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.

Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.

It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.

I have a slide I show clients.

I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”

Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.

They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.

Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.

This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.

My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.

The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.

Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.

But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.

Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.

I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.

I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.

I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.

This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.

My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.

I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.

Language of reception

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I’ve returned to an old line of thought this morning, thinking about synesis, “together-being”.

In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:

“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”

I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of a given something, there is imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness that precludes even absence. When nothing is present, nothing is missed.

I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.

From Etymonline:

Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.

The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.

As I said last week,

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.

They had reasons, too

Ethics, History, Judaism, Politics

People also thought they had good reasons for hating Jewish people in 1933. And in 1821. And in 1894.

The reasons change.

The name for it can only be used once before it must be abandoned in disgrace, and a new one coined.

But the target is constant.

The justifications always look reasonable, or at least convincing from the inside, but they are obviously distorted when seen from outside that fact-bending, standard-doubling field.

The cycles start hot with resentment and hate intoxication. They mellow into thoughtless conformity. (“If every person I respect has this anti-judaism/anti-Jew/anti-Israel/anti-zionism attitude, it must be a respectable attitude to have.”)

People thought they had good reasons for hating zionists (or vaguely sympathizing with zionist-haters) in 2023-2025.

They will all want to pretend you resisted this. But, right now, in the present, I only know a few non-Jews with the humanity, moral integrity and intellectual honesty to look at this situation and say what it is. Everyone else tries to blur, qualify, equivocate, squirm into conformity with the illiberalism they are in bed with. They want to reserve their right to “criticize” so they can remain in good standing with their morally bankrupt peers.

I am observing this blurriness with the sharpest eyesight.

I am watching and learning.

I will never forget how each and every person in my life behaved in this crucial time.

Most do exactly what most people did in 1821, 1894 and 1933 did: Stand quietly on the sidelines trying to look exactly as indifferent as they truly are, harboring a lukewarm mixture of confused conflicting opinions in their loose minds.

Whatever they try to blur, they will never blur the sharp resolution of my memory and of my understanding.

Myths all the way back

Philosophy

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

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

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

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

Now that I think about it

Esoterism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

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

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

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

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

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

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

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

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

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sacred study

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

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

Study as religious practice

Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistaking is theft

Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette

Philosophy

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette.

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

Some things are just not discussed in society.

Spiritual programs

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

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

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

As always, I disagree with everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perplexity lifeguard

Biography, Design, Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the perplexity requires a concerted and coordinated effort.

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

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

Being is scalar.

Collective being is just as real as individual being.

Collective beings can be perplexed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternal recurrence of the metatragedy

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.

More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism

Kabbalah, Phenomenology

The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context.

Email #1:

I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything true that is not well known within Kabbalah.

Microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy is assumed by all Kabbalists. And one of the core struggles of Kabbalah is the incomprehensibility of its most essential and consequential insights. Scholem indicates this problem in his aphorisms, from multiple angles. Students of Kabbalah quickly learn to release the mundane expectation that they can cognitively grasp anything important beyond the objectivity of Assiyah. Beyond Assiyah only cognitively indirect methods of intellection work at all. I think even Biale knows these things, and the unreliability of his commentary comes from something else I haven’t yet pinned down.

Rereading Scholem, I do not believe he is denying the truth of Plotinus, but rather denying that emanationist accounts of the Olamot “do” what Kabbalah set out to do. A pat explanatory model — and worse, a model objectively graspable — replaces a within-outward, first-person experiential account of one’s layered and (cognitively) elusive relationship with the One. In other words, Scholem is making a procedural, not substantive objection.

So, the emanationist model may very well be true (that is where I have recently arrived), but accepting of it, without doing the spiritual and phenomenological work of arriving at it via actual participation and reflection cheats the Kabbalist of Kabbalah’s best fruits, which are not theoretical constructions, but influx of incomprehensible divine light. This gift is received precisely through doing the work of aware participation — not by reaching the conclusion and possessing the answer.
Ironically, my earlier rejection of emanationism came from having not completing this work for myself, and from not recognizing the links between my incomplete “everso” theme and Kabbalah.

Email #2:

To clarify, I think Biale’s commentary completely misconceives Aphorism 7. Biale does, in fact, seem to treat the problem as substantive doctrinal disagreement. In doing so, he flies off in the wrong direction and both obscures and accidentally demonstrates Scholem’s point. He treats Kabbalah as objective metaphysical information that can be more correct or less correct, or reach more correct or less correct conclusions. Ironically, this is precisely the “misfortune” Scholem is indicating in this aphorism. No wonder Biale calls the aphorism “obscure”. Its meaning is entirely eclipsed by Biale’s confinement to objectivist cognition!

Email #3:

Actually, maybe I can pin down Biale’s problem. 

To me, Biale seems a scholar with a lot of academic knowledge about Kabbalah, but who lacks Kabbalistic knowledge of academia’s objectivist limitations.

Objective knowledge — that is, knowledge of what is experienced and comprehended objectively — is effective only within Assiyah. But the entire point of Kabbalah is to transcend Assiyah. So if one tries to build systems of objective knowledge about Kabbalah, this knowledge might be true as far as it goes, but it is useless for progressing as a Kabbalist or for representing the most crucial insights Kabbalah offers.

Biale seems unaware of this truth — a truth of Beriah.

Who Cares that We’ve Never Been Modern?

Philosophy

Wow, nobody cares about modernity, anymore.

People cared about it too intensely for a decade or two.

“What is modernity?” “To what degree are we still modern?” “Were we ever modern?” Blah blah blah blah.

That question died so hard and so fast, I don’t think anyone has enough interest left to notice that the coroner never dropped by to pick up the corpse.

I just ordered a book from 1985 to complete my Richard J. Bernstein collection. I almost didn’t order it, because I very much want to not know Habermas’s thoughts on modernity. But this gap in my library is unacceptable.

The kids were driven to hysterics by the dry and amoral pedantry of their elders.