Two quotes from my last post deserve to be separately framed:
Sarcasm is what we do when another neglects their ironic duty, and we must do it for them.
And
The Pluricentric Maxim — Always remember: “I am not the only center of the universe.”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation
Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.
As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.
A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.
Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule. A patch, if you will.
Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.
It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.
And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…
Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.
They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.
When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.
You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.
They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.
Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.
They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.
According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.
Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.
Unlike us.
Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.
Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.
Respect acknowledges that when we look at another and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.
Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.
Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.
Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.
So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.
Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.
Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.
Rorty
In light of my last post, I might have to read Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism straight through this year. Or maybe I will reread Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
Conscience warfare
I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.
That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.
On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”
This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.
But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.
My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.
Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.
And all this is only for private thought.
I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.
My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.
My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.
Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.
For many “the personal is political”.
But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.
The personal should not be political.
And the political should not be personal.
Conflating them destroys both.
And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.
I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.
I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.
I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.
“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”
Each time I see a young people’s eyes light up at the mention of the word “ethics” — and, oh, how they do light up! — I remember this Nietzsche passage:
So, how many people know how to observe? And of these few, how many to observe themselves? ‘Everyone is farthest from himself — every person who is expert at scrutinizing the inner life of others knows this to his own chagrin; and the saying, ‘Know thyself’, addressed to human beings by a god, is near to malicious. That self-observation is in such a bad state, however, is most clearly confirmed by the way in which nearly everyone speaks of the nature of a moral act — that quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! People seem to be wanting to say to you, “But my dear fellow, that is precisely my subject! You are directing your question to the person who is competent to answer it: there is, as it happens, nothing I am wiser about.”
This is also true of aesthetics and of religious/spiritual/philosophical insight.
Cultivating moral judgment, aesthetic taste or profundity of insight is certainly personally rewarding, but it is a stupid and noxious mistake to expect recognition or acknowledgement for it. Because in each and every one of these subjective fields our appreciation for anyone else’s accomplishments is entirely constrained by what we have accomplished ourselves.
Unless we work at perceiving it, we each are always the apogee of everything that really matters.
Wouldn’t it be a comical paradox if it turned out that the closest a human can come to apotheosis is finally overcoming natural misapotheosis?
Twofold convention
The anti-intellectualism of conventional mystics, and the anti-mysticism of conventional intellectuals: these are a single convention. And we all know with more than our minds that we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven or earth.
Protected: Lou Salomé
Psychedelic meaning
I don’t know what conventional mystics experience in ecstatic visionary states, but I assume these experiences are related to psychedelic experiences.
In my limited experience, psychedelic experiences were intensely meaningful in ways that are nearly impossible to talk about. Although I did experience vivid visions in that state, I was never terribly fascinated by the visions themselves nor in the question concerning the ontological status of the mysterious noumena. At the time, my strong unexamined inclination was to take them as imaginary, and not to attribute any kind of real existence to them.
I prefer to phenomenologically bracket visions, and approach them phenomenologically. I am most concerned with the significance of the ineffable meaning. I am interested in the genus of this meaning, the question of why this meaning is ineffable, and how we may relate ourselves to it.
Maybe my other conceptual commitments preserve themselves through this attitude and this field of relevance. But my gut tells me that this focus will bear fruit. This doesn’t exactly put me at cross-purposes with traditional mysticism, but it does put me at what could be described as a parallel purpose.
Sophia
From Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives, “Weeping as Mystical Practice”:
I shall begin my description of the techniques by focusing on a practice — unnoticed before — that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia. I refer to the recommendation of the use of weeping as a means for attaining revelations — mostly of a visual character-and/or a disclosure of secrets. …
It is obvious that, for Luria and Berukhim, weeping is an aid to overcoming intellectual difficulties and receiving secrets. It is plausible to interpret the final sentence as referring to a revelatory experience, in which the supernal gates are opened. This text is recommended for a practical purpose; it appears that R. Abraham Berukhim indeed had the opportunity to apply this recommendation, as it is reported that Luria had revealed to him that he would die unless he prayed before the Wailing Wall and saw the Shekhinah. It is then reported:
“When that pious man heard the words of Isaac Luria, he isolated himself for three days and nights in a fast, and [clothed himself] in a sack, and nightly wept. Afterward he went before the Wailing Wall and prayed there and wept a mighty weeping. Suddenly, he raised his eyes and saw on the Wailing Wall the image of a woman, from behind, in clothes which it is better not to describe, that we have mercy on the divine glory. When he had seen her, he immediately fell on his face and cried and wept and said: ‘Zion, Zion, woe to me that I have seen you in such a plight.’ And he was bitterly complaining and weeping and beating his face and plucking his beard and the hair of his head, until he fainted and lay down and fell asleep on his face. Then he saw in a dream the image of a woman who came and put her hands on his face and wiped the tears of his eyes…. and when Isaac Luria saw him, he said: ‘I see that you have deserved to see the face of the Shekhinah.'”
It is clear that the two visions of the woman — that is, of the Shekhinah — are the result of R. Abraham’s bitter weeping: the former a waking vision of the back of the Shekhinah, the latter a vision of her face, which occurs only in a dream. The first one provokes anxiety; the second, comfort.
In my own philosophical experience, perplexity and angst — sacred dread — always precedes revelatory insight, instaratio ex nihilo.
This recalls Nietzsche’s mysterious and beautiful preface to Beyond Good and Evil:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.
Beriah is the home of the enveloping alter-subject beloved by philosophers, forever beyond possession or mastery. She is Sophia, the Shekhinah. In Assiyah, she appears through the sefirah Binah. When we approach her dogmatically, she turns her back on us and we despair. When we approach her as she wishes to be approached, she reveals her face, shading the blinding light flooding in behind her.
Kabbalistic everso
I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).
Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.
For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.
Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.
Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.
Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.
To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.
Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.
Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.
Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.
Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.
What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.
Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.
The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.
Eternal effigicide victims
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Protected: Excruciation
Myths all the way back
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
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
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.