Category Archives: Metaphysics
Quadrephania
Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.
Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.
Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.
Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.
Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?
Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.
The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.
The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.
The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.
And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.
Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.
Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.
Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.
Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.
Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.
In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.
By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.
But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.
And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.
This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.
Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.
Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.
The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.
I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”
I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.
“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”
Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?
Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?
I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.
Social metaphysics
Well, I took the slack bait and responded to one of those inane “watercooler topics”. I’m posting it only because the term social metaphysics emerged in my response, I think it’s a good coinage.
“Social metaphysics” has a nice ambiguity to it, too. It implies a socially shared metaphysics as well as a metaphysics of the social.
I take it both ways at once, of course, because somewhere in the neighborhood of Beriah, givens get radically polycentered — givens and takers, alike — each instaurating the other in givennesss.
Single-prompt interview research
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a “single-question magic interview“. Placing this question between two genuine interlocutors really does something astonishing, important, rare and rarer by the day.
It made me want to letterpress print this question.
I love words that act directly on a souls.
Whenever I find such words, I want to sink them deep into the surface of paper.
This is my letterpress impulse.
I am now interested in instaurating more single-question interviews. I want to collect and print them.
I will, of course, do this work in faithful, observant service to design praxis, which is sacred and therefore not to be used, but the everse of using. Faithful, observant service to praxis means giving ourselves to our praxis and allow ourselves to be used as its agent, or (as Latour put it) the actant of praxis.
I have a big fear mitigated by some hopeful hypotheses.
My fear is that an increasing number of people have unwittingly been taken by ideological faiths — what some have called “political religions”. Religion, though is not only a misnomer, but a category mistake of the highest pragmatic consequence. Ideologies are fundamentalisms.
Fundamentalism is not religion taken too far, but religion aborted and never reborn in a barren soul.
A fundamentalist faith is (I believe this also came from Latour?) a distinctive attitude toward beliefs. It could be called a belief about beliefs — beliefs being objective facts taken as true.
A genuine religion tries to transcend factual beliefs. It does so by way of a different attitude toward truth, a different mode of of believing, a different configuration of soul, which has believes on a trajectory beyond conceivability, toward “something” ungraspable by the objectively comprehending mind. (See “Religious notes” below for more.)
To a religious soul, fundamentalism is ideo-idolatry, a confused reduction of an essentially inconceivable, incomprehensible reality to a comprehended concept. The fundamentalist worships something that is inside their own heads, and part of themselves. We do this all the time, even in mundane life, when we love an idea of a thing and forget that the idea indicates a reality beyond that idea, whose value is precisely what the idea cannot capture. We confuse mental categories of groups for real persons and love or hate the mental image. We confuse stories for the complex polycentered unfoldings of real events. It’s just how we are, especially when we forget to try to be otherwise.
So — An interview with a fundamentalist, whether that funamentalist adheres to a right-fundamentalism of mis-taken religion or a left-fundamentalism of scientististic psycho-social-political beliefs is unlikely to reveal anything beyond more and more belief system content, which never touches the eclipsed host of these believed-in beliefs.
But it is precisely and exclusively this eclipsed being — this unique intuitive living in the heart of each soul — I want to coax out in these single-question interviews.
Here is where I permit myself the mitigation of hopeful hypotheses.
First, I hypothesize that any apparent soullessness is only apparent, and that what actually happens is only eclipse. A person’s weird, intuitive uniqueness never stops existing, however much it is occluded by opaque belied-in factual content. A belief-system is its own place, which makes heavens of hells and hells of heavens, but these places are not the souls who become imprisoned within them by identifying with what holds them captive. Someone is in there to be sprung.
Second, I hypothesize that the path to an occluded soul (the exit from the cell) is craft. Craft is where a person engages a reality unmediated by language, skin to skin. Where are they blurring the boundaries between their soul, their body, an instrument, and an emerging work in music or visual arts or other flavor of alchemy? Where have they become someone new with someone? Where are they losing themselves in physical exercise? Where do words fail them, precisely where their bodies and souls succeed? I need single questions that puncture belief-systems and get at these experiences.
Third, to get there, I might need to abandon the limitations of conversation. I might need to adopt some of the most radical practices of design research, which preclude the asking of questions. For in generative research we are not interested in answers to our own questions. We are after the implicit questions constituting the subjectivity of our research participants. What questions are relevant to them? To get there we do not ask direct questions, we request lessons. We ask them to teach us about their lives. This is why our research briefs are not defined by questions to answer, but areas of inquiry to learn about.
So the obvious single-question interview about craft might be neither a question, nor an interview. It might simply be:
Please show me your best craft.
In research, things never go as expected. It might be a finished artifact, or it might be a demonstration of doing the craft. Either way, I will have to go to the participant’s place.
The research will have a dual-nature. I am doing the research in order to produce a learning-teaching event, and it will be iterative prototyping testing of the research protocol itself.
The final deliverable of the research will be one or more short, letterpress printable prompts.
These will be used to make some kind of beautiful sacred printed objects, maybe a booklet, a set of cards, a small poster or reference sheet or some combination of these.
A good friend of mine suggested another question:
What is the worst thing that ever happened to you, and how did you benefit from it?
If any researcher or interviewer or front-line service provider or talented conversationalist happens up this, and has a soul-coaxing prompt or question that has worked for them, I am collecting them.
Anyone who contributes a prompt will get a copy of whatever gets printed.
Religious notes:
1.
Generally, fundamentalism believes that a belief system and sound life practice is constructed upon a foundation of concrete fact.
Religion senses a divine ground beneath all objectivity, supporting it, though less solid than water, or even aether. But without this grounding, all fact disintegrates into isolated grains of truth, unable to support even humble truth constructions, much less towering edifices of fact meant to penetrate the ultimate.
2.
Religion believes toward … Toward what is essentially inconceivable, and is not what, but someone who is better but not perfectly characterized as Why or Who. An interrogative combining Why, Who, How, What, Where, When would approximate it better than any one of them. But perhaps refusal to name this interrogative mystery … or even to invent a category for … is a better response. Perhaps we just address … with a simple situating of Nefesh-Ruach in I-here-now: “Here I am.” To say “Hineini” is for Neshamah-Chayah to inhale the pneuma of Nefesh-Ruach into itself, like an atmosphere receives back a lungful of exhaled breath.
3.
All this, of course, is said in the language of my own chosen faith, or, rather, the faith who chose me. Speaking of which, much has been made of the expression “chosen people” but this expression is rarely heard oriented by the best question. It is natural for any envy-inclined mind to hear in this a response to “Which people were chosen versus which other people who were not chosen? A better question would be “Which people made a choice of faith, and which people were made by being chosen by a faith?”
Chosenness does not signify a status: chosen versus unchosen. Chosenness signifies only who chose whom.
Update (August 4, 2026): The goal is development of a craft, “sacred interview”.
Maps and travelogues
When explorers discovered the New World and began mapping it and sending back to Europe sketches of the people, animals, plants and landscapes they saw there, the images were strange and divergent. If one had never seen in-person the realities depicted in these images it would take significant imagination to constitute a common source. Imagine the exponential difficulty had the New World not been merely a remote variation on Europe, but in fact a different stratum of being for which explicit, descriptive, objective language were inadequate. The varying accounts might have been taken as pure fantasy. Or, worse, imagine if the nature of this reality had been what Charles Stein calls “configurative”, instaurated (revealed-created) between the explorer and explored, subject and object, different for each witness, the furthest thing from arbitrary, yet eluding common sense. What then?
Standing on a solid slab of technoscientistic rationalism beneath a heaven of technocratic rule, tastefully decorated with clouds of roll-your-own spirituality, spritzed with drug-induced recollections of life-force unity, which was what the Buddha was trying to teach, but only some of us recognize as true, etc., etc. …. liberated from the unreason of the past, except for hoards of retro-fascists who never tire of reversing this liberation… living the postmodernized professional-managerial class lifestyle, mediated by screens, teleporting our own virtual selves into this virtual reality or that… where our corporate professional persona, the ideological personal-political “whole self” we are urged to bring to work, our personal brand constructed selves we set like a mannequin in LinkedIn shop windows, and our innermost selves we take on cultural appreciation field trips and little naughty adventures into normalized transgression — the default is post-Derridean disintegration. There is nothing solid or persistent enough to be deconstructed except maybe Foucauldian orthodoxy of power-relations that assumes whatever is solid serves the rich and malevolent, and whatever seeks to dismantle and reconstruct things to serve different power interests serves the powerless and benevolent, but that orthodoxy transcends mere politics, to the realm of universal truth and common decency. In this enworldment, if we do not actively resist living simulated lives, we drift into an inescapable text-trap, a sealed simulation with nothing outside it. We can call this condition mass solipsism.
Under these conditions, when studying Kabbalah and its history, it is all too easy to succumb to a semiconscious attitude that takes mystical schools of thought as thought and only thought, memes traversing social networks, forgetting that these were inspired attempts to articulate realities that transcend and defy thought and text. We lapse into charting traditional strands and tracing influences from mystic to mystic, and lose sight of the divine referent, the whole point of it all.
Nobody asks where trees were discovered, and how news of their existence spread along trade routes, and influenced how various civilizations understood their landscapes. Trees are real, so they are experienced by everyone everywhere.
But today “touching grass” has become a spiritual exercise. People need to be told to go outside to reexperience trees. If few choose to outside, perhaps trees will become as informational as experiences of pressing into the divine ground. Knowing is far more participatory than we realize, and the more important a mode of knowing is, the more we must put into meeting it. We must unclamp our heads from the screen; we must unchain our bodies from the theater seat; we must stand up, walk around, see things from many standpoints, angles and perspectives. And if we dare to go radically peripatetic, we might press into the horizons and feel out the limits. We might even find an exit from this cramped universe we mistake for everything.
It is true that truth is not just there to be discovered, but it does not follow from this that truth is just constructed, and, in fact, that is less true. A truer truth is that truth is instaurated — revealed-created — collaboratively with the materials themselves. This deep collaboration between spirit and material, subject and object, artifex and artifact has the simplest name: craft.
Bruno Latour dedicated his life to crafting a truth of truthcraft, beautifully and persuasively redescribing science to disclose its truthcraft.
And ultimately, Latour went much further: Truth is crafted from a reality it knows.
And I will say this once again, because it is true: No discipline has developed more comprehensive truthcraft methods than design.
Natural science made enormous progress by methodologically bracketing Why and narrowing its question set to What and How. Design adds Why back.
By design, I mean something very precise that resurveys the practical landscape and redraws lines separating this from that. The “that” against which design is defined is engineering.
Whatever systematizes objective components governed by objective rules (like natural laws or social compulsion) is engineering. In engineering, materials are physical, logical and essentially choiceless. Here objective knowing in terms What and How is entirely sufficient to predict and control the system.
Design extends systems to participants who have subjective experiences and make choices. In design some materials are physical, logical and choiceless (and here design overlaps with engineering), but these are no longer sufficient to predict and control the larger social systems design develops.
For design, understanding the various subjectivities involved in the social system is necessary before the system can be influenced (never controlled) and movement toward improvement becomes more likely than deterioration. These subjectivities include not only the Why factors that shape behaviors, they also shape those interactions with reality that instaurationally shape objective truth itself, differently for each subject, yet within the same reality being designed.
Domain-subdomain throwndown
To an objectivist (an adherent to an epistemology confined to objective comprehension), all truth is objective knowledge of objective reality.
Objective knowledge — as opposed to what? Subjective experiences.
If a subjective experience motivates behavior, it triggers an event in objective reality, and now can be known objectively as truth. Until then, subjectivity is objectively real only as neural processes productive of mental epiphenomena.
Objectivism sees objects of sight, while excludes its own seeing as real.
Objectivism is often materialist, but not essentially.
Objectivism concerns form; materialism concerns substance.
Matter is unformed but formable; understood formationally matter it is material.
A metaphysics of matter differs from a material metaphysics.
Someday, when materialists figure out how to explain the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious matter, without committing the performative contradiction of assuming and relying upon both their own consciousness and the consciousness of those to whom they explain away consciousness, I’ll take them seriously as philosophers.
Until then, I’ll regard them as scientistic technicians unconsciously overstepping the bounds their mastery into metaphysical questions they do not yet even know how to ask, much less answer.
The methodological reductionism so virtuous and necessary to science is, when applied to metaphysics is not only unhelpful but vicious. To confuse the ontology and practice of science with the ontology and practice of metaphysics is to conflate objective braininess with wisdom (the intuition of reality beyond the cognitive grasp of objectivity).
We can, and maybe should, place panpsychism outside of the domain of science, but we should never allow the domain of science to limit or even dominate or even try to found/underpin/regulate the super-domain of understanding to which science belongs as part.
The same error that places knowledge under the rule of science, and locates subjectivity within objective reality also sees design as a subset of engineering. Design is the superset, and all engineering work should be defined, guided and supervised by design.
“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:
“What has a name is real.”
“What lacks a name is unreal.”
What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.
What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.
In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.
In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.
The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.
To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”
Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.
Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.
Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.
This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:
Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?
Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?
In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.
Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.
A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.
The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.
Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.
Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.
When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.
Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.
But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.
Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.
An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.
Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.
When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.
The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”
Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.
Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.
But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.
When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.
Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!
Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.
These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.
If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.
Hanging with Sellars
Willfred Sellars said:
The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.
My live question: Understand how? Hang together how?
Understanding construed as hanging together as systems… constructions, theories, explanations?
Understanding conceived as hanging together wholes… gestalts, paradigms, ontologies?
Understanding comprehended as comprehensive totality within which everything hangs together… faiths, visions, wordviews?
Understanding suprehended as enworldments, each an overlapping totality of hung-together everythings, against a ground of enworldment… metaphysical epiphany?
Understanding revealed as infinite and exteriorless all-influsion of infinite One, from which the possibility of enworldment emanates… … …?
The general movement is away from objective knowing at a distance, toward deepening and expanding withinness, starting from our own withinness and continuing beyond to the withinness in whom we participate and subsist.
I know these correspond to the multiple worlds of Kabbalah and more generally of neoplatonism, and it only on this basis that I experience something that can be a basis for belief.
I am not sure precisely how the terrain I’ve walked or surveyed relates to the many maps I’ve studied, and travelogues I’ve read, but where I am is where these cartographers and adventurers have been.
Nothing could possibly be more interesting, and nothing better dispels nihilism.
This transfigured nothing is the substance of exnihilism, the ex nihilo from which all creation, revelation, instauration, configurative being and radical surprise irrupts.
Ingratitude and alienation
When someone gives you something that you value, either willingly or unwillingly, and you try to take possession of it “no strings attached” without gratitude toward the giver, something very bad happens to your soul. You suffer guilt.
This is especially true if you have no theory of relationship to help you conceptualize what gratitude is — or for that matter, any concept expressing one’s own organic belonging to living orders that transcend one’s own individual selfhood.
A philosophy of isolated self cannot make sense of gratitude, of jealousy, of loyalty, of belonging, of guilt or even of love beyond the inwardly felt emotional content. Such a philosophy takes these valid intuitions of spiritual realities as psychological hallucinations, or as biological responses to stimuli. It severs a whole category of direct intuition from the reality intuited, and this severing leaves the individual cut off from its own relational context. That is, it takes the perception of an apparent phenomenon as pure pheno- (appearance) with no corresponding superperceptual reality (noumenon).
A philosophy of isolated self is not only an expression of a spiritual state of social alienation, but alienation of all being who transcends the egoic self. All being of this kind is assigned names and explanations that strip them of the same kind of being that an egoic self has and reduces them to physical concepts.
And even this physicalization is distortive, because physical concepts do not necessarily involve any actual relationships with matter.
Physics, and science in general, is a particular class of theories about material relationships, substantiated by closely observed material interactions and rigorous tracing of causal implications of what is observed, expressed as theory. But a great many folks who never stepped foot in a laboratory or much concerned themselves with how laboratories generate theoretical knowledge, accept scientistic doctrine the way others have accepted Christian or Buddhist doctrine without ever undergoing the kinds of firsthand experiences that make immediate sense of these religious concepts, and in fact necessitate them. Scientism is an ungrounded dogma with exactly the same form as dogmatic religion, just populated with a different style of content. In other words, the medium is identical, and its spiritual effect (message) is the same.
The spiritual effect is compulsive playing of construction toy games with abstract concepts derived from physics (or theology) without ever contacting, or missing contact or even wondering about the concrete realities from which these abstractions were abstracted!
Notice how this dogmatic physicalization move resembles the self-isolating one: A revelation of a given reality is taken as the only reality, severed from the reality given. The experience of givenness of reality is accepted as real, but the given reality is denied reality. An intuition of relationship with being beyond oneself is taken as an experience within the self (an emotion one has). A theory of matter derived from disciplined and intensive interactions with matter is taken as knowledge of matter. And of course, infamously, a belief in a theology (a serious attempt to make sense of one’s actual religious life in relationship with divine being) is treated as religion itself, as if a religion is a belief system!
All these moves ignore the fact that all knowledge is abstracted from concrete reality, and concrete reality is given by intuition. Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.
And if you habitually suppress intuited givens, especially intensely intuited givens, in order to preserve a construction of ungrounded concepts, you will suffer alienation. Less and less of reality will feel real to you. As social alienation increases, people will feel like phantoms or identity avatars. As world-alienation increases, the world will seem like a simulation or shadow play. And you, yourself, will feel like a ghost, dissipating and reappearing, today as one me and tomorrow another. A thunder-perfect nobody, alienated from self, precisely because that self is alienated from whatever is not of itself.
The strange thing about alienation is how all its various forms converge at the same abyss-point, the antipode of the esoteric summit: “Mind as its own place.” Milton knew.
But when we intuitively ground ourselves in a shared reality, intuited and valued diversely, but loved in common, we now have ground for participation in something realer than real in whom we subsist. We now have the participatory medium we need, connecting us to each other, connecting us to a world that feels real, connecting us to reality beyond our own sphere of experience and knowledge which may at any moment irrupt into our midst, apparently from nowhere, changing everything.
Guilt is real, gratitude is real, love is real because we belong to something greater than us. And that belonging is the source of all meaning. If we know this we will feel grateful for our guilt. If we do not, we will feel anxious hostility toward even love.
Protected: Enworlding One
Protected: Abnormal mysticism
Protected: Rejohanine rejoinder
Scholem on originality and tradition
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.
Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.
Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)
To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.
This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.
Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.
And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.
ASCII sigil
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+0(
- “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
- “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
- “(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Protected: Note to self (and probably only myself)
Protected: As aleph, so tav
Ontological membranes
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.
And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.
Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?
It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).
Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.
An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.
Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.
Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.
But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.
Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.
But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.
These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.
This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.
Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.
Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.
Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.
…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Common senses
Below is one — perhaps idiosyncratic — common sense account of the Olamot, presented from the first-person:
Common sense of Assiyah: each of our senses gives us the world in some sensory mode — a world with reality understood to transcend each of our senses and all our senses, but gains reliability through sensory testimony. What we see and touch is assumed to be real. What we see, but cannot touch is assumed to be a hallucination.
Common sense of Yetzirah: each of us is given the world in a specific way, but our own way shares much in common with others of our community, and this commonality — this consensus understanding — is our most reliable access to the reality of the world. What all of us understand together is assumed to be real. What only one of us understands is idiosyncratic, less real, possibly delusional. What other communities take as common sense, but which are clearly false or nonsensical, might be delusional groupthink.
Common sense of Beriah: from moment to moment, age to age, the common sense of solitary persons and the common sense of communities changes, and testifies to different experiences and understandings. Reality and truth clearly can be given quite differently to different people in different places in different times. What is common across them, and how can they differ? The commonalities and differences are always given to the threefold present, according to what can and cannot be received in this particular I-here-now. All this is what existentialism (and its myriad siblings) pursues, and in response it receives ciphers, interminable questions, aporias, shocks, terrors, ecstasies. Light, dark, rippling oblivion.
Common sense of Atzilut: our various attempts to account for the givenness of the real points to a reality beyond questions and answers, beyond defined objects and defining subjects, beyond sense, within a commonality so all-inclusively common, so inescapably, so infinitely common, it is beyond comprehension.
On the matter of Nietzsche
The first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil — the most electrifying in all of philosophy — proposes a thematic question:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then?
I have incessant asked and re-asked this line for over twenty obsessive years, and today I ask it like this: Supposing truth, of all things, is a woman?
When Nietzsche asked this himself, in 1885, what was the matter with him? Or better, where was the matter for him?
Some hints from the preceding book: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
And another:
Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.
“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”
Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.
And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.
For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?
And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”
When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”
Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.
If only Salome had accepted Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. The painful lessons she could have taught him!
It took a decade, but my own wife taught me this: She cannot be reduced to who I imagine her to be. She is perpetually surprising. We will never stop defying my understanding, and if I confuse her for my understanding, the defiance might not be polite.
From this I know that matter is not who physics theorizes her to be.
Supposing reality is a woman — what then?
Supposing truth is marriage —