Category Archives: Philosophy

We make ourselves out of each other

Philosophy

From C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy:

Occasionally I have the pleasure of performing a wedding ceremony. As a process-relational thinker, I have something I want to say about human relationships in general, and marriage in particular. As John B. Cobb Jr. wisely observed, a soul is not a thing. It is not an isolated stone hidden somewhere inside us untouched by our life’s experience, enduring unchanged by the changes of our lives. A soul is a dynamic process, a bundle of experiences, thoughts, emotions, dreams, and memories. In each moment of our life, we take in all of our past experience and all of our new experiences, and we create our selves out of them, deciding who we will be in that moment.

Two people who join in marriage will be creating themselves out of each other and out of their relationship. Each word, each glance, each touch, each kiss, each shared moment, each thought about each other — everything they do will become part of the material out of which they will create themselves. They will gradually discover that they have literally become parts of each other, parts of each others’ souls. They should have a special care, then, how they treat each other, have a care what material they each give to the other for the creation of their souls.

Obviously, a relational vision of the human soul confirms and helps to clarify our special obligations to children. A child’s soul is not a supernatural Cartesian substance “which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist.” I’m sure Descartes never meant to suggest this, but if he were right about mental substances, it would seem to follow that it would not matter what experiences a child had. Whippings, cigarette burns, dark closets, verbal humiliation like “you’re garbage and you always will be garbage” would just be so many accidental qualities that would come and go without changing that unchanging substance. But we know better. Process-relational thought offers us a vision of reality that helps us to understand what we all deeply know to be true. Sadly, as well as happily, we know that children must create themselves out of their relationships. They create themselves out of the genes and the nutrition and love, neglect, or cruelty they receive. They must create their souls out of the relationships they find themselves in. While there is some degree of self-creative freedom that often allows children to amaze us with their resilience, every person who has ever talked to me about the impact of abuse on them speaks of the deep scars they carry and will always carry. Children create their souls out of their relationships with us. Have a care: It matters what we give them to work with.

Exactly.

The pain of non-response

Ethics

When I attempt to communicate with people and get no response, I find it intensely painful.

Maybe I’ve just gotten sensitive about it and notice it more, but until a few years ago I do not recall speaking to people and being ignored, as if I hadn’t spoken. Now it happens frequently. By my understanding of manners this is appallingly rude, not only according to rules of etiquette but by universal human standards.

I have also noticed an increase in leaving electronic communications unacknowledged and unanswered. I don’t mean ignoring group emails or forwards or links. I mean ignoring personal messages.

I have been told many times by multiple people that this should not be taken personally and that in today’s world this is not an offensive behavior. Cultural norms change and hand-wringing only makes you bitter and keeps you stuck in the past. While I understand this argument, I find it unpersuasive and even depressing. Common behaviors that begin to feel familiar, then acceptable, then normal, then expected do not automatically become good. The belief that what has become common also becomes good encourages us to abdicate our moral judgment. And really, aren’t we selective in our passivity? There is judgment smuggled in when we accept former rudenesses as benign or as progress. We don’t accept all change this way.

I feel an urgent need to explain this pain, not only because pain by its nature seems to demand investigation into its causes, but, it appears to me that I find non-response more painful than most other people do, and I probably need to be able to explain why this is the case to others as well as myself. And maybe my explanation will inspire others to change their behaviors and their expectations of how others behave toward them.

This is my attempt at an explanation:

I think the pain of on-response is rooted in its deep moral ambiguity: it can mean many things, across a broad range of significance.

It can be purely accidental and insignificant. The attempt to communicate was not perceived. Or it can be a mostly innocent postponement or forgetting to respond, due to other more pressing things are going on. It can be an incapacity to respond, for reasons having nothing to do with the communication.

But crossing into the personal side of the spectrum of meanings, it can mean that the communication just isn’t seen as important enough to warrant a response. Or it can be an inability or unwillingness to respond for personal reasons, for instance feelings about the anticipated exchange. Or the silence might signal anger.

Or, worse, the non-response could be a sign of contempt. The contempt might be minor, for instance, a disregard for subjects or themes deemed unimportant. Or the contempt might be more serious: the speaker deserves no response. Or the contempt might be profoundly personal: the speaker is not worth the effort of a response.

The more the non-response is a pattern, the more likely the meaning of the silence falls somewhere on the contempt end of the spectrum. This is why non-response is offensive.

One of the key functions of manners is to keep alienating questions of these kinds from arising. Manners have us 1) signal our respect, and 2) offer explanations for behaviors that could be misinterpreted as disrespectful.

I do not believe the behavioral changes in response to the social media and rampant addiction to mobile devices are creating new norms of etiquette. I believe they are destroying manners and weakening human relationships. I believe general decay of manners (and in general of honoring social obligation) contributes to what some are calling a loneliness epidemic.

Respect is a fundamental human need, rooted in the affirmation that our existence is acknowledged and valued by the people around us. Social norms that allow us to disrespect others (even when that disrespect is not intended or felt as an emotion by the disrespectful) is creating a world that denies these fundamental human needs.

Gatecrasher maxim

Philosophy

When I have a  metanoetic transformation that throws me into a new world of insight, I’ve learned to tell myself: “I am late to this party.”

A person who undergoes metanoetic transformation is truly “born again” in the sense that it is necessary to learn how to speak and act all over again, to flourish in this freshly newly-revealed world. We can still speak about the more primitive facts of our lives, but the things that matter are imprisoned in privacy. It takes humble and painstaking work to re-mature  after conversion. Most of all, this means re-overcoming the egoism of infancy. Inexperienced converts think they’ve become godlike seers of the re-creation of all that is, when in fact, they’re just babies who don’t understand how populous the world already is.

Growing up again after being born again, re-socializing ourselves, learning new language for new experiences and learning to communicate and build on our new communities allows us to repeat the process. Eventually, we get better at maturing a little quicker. That starts with assuming that surely someone got here earlier and starting a search for the others who already know instead of assuming the apparent ignorance we see around is real.

There is always a party if you want to find it. And wanting to find that party is morality itself.

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(Yes, “gate” is a Janus reference.)

Rude tools

Design, Ethics, Extended Self, Philosophy

In my last post I promised that my next post would be “a theoretical tantrum on the ethics around that miserable love triangle between developer, tool and user.” and that I thought the issue of “‘ownership’ of software is an unrecognized moral crisis of our times.”

This is that post.

My belief in the importance of resolving the issue of tool ownership hinges on a theory which I experience as true: Extended Cognition. According to wikipedia “Extended cognition is the view that mental processes and mind extend beyond the body to include aspects of the environment in which an organism is embedded and the organism’s interaction with that environment. Cognition goes beyond the manipulation of symbols to include the emergence of order and structure evolving from active engagement with the world.” The example offered to me by my friend Zach, who introduced this concept to me, was of doing addition with your fingers. Viewed through the lens of Extended Cognition the movement of the hand is part of the thinking that produces the result.

Where I experience this as most true is when I use tools that I’ve learned to use skillfully. That is, I’ve mastered them so fully that they more or less disappear as I use them. If we know how to use a pen, we no more need to think about using that pen while we are using it than we need to think about our hand. It becomes part of us, and it allows us to focus our attention on the thing we are doing, and to become absorbed in our activity.

This is true also of software tools — or at least well-designed ones. If a tool is well-designed, I am able to just concentrate on the content of my activity, without the need to split my attention thinking about use of the tool. Often, I can’t even explain how I use a tool. My hands know what to do, and my verbal mind isn’t in the loop. What I know can only be demonstrated.

How many times have you told someone you can’t really explain how to do something on their computer of phone, but if you can just get your hands on the device you can show them? Sometimes it’s not enough to see the screen. Only actual doing of the interaction releases the know-how.

This kind of knowing that seems to exist just in the body is known as tacit knowledge. I like to call the part of UI design that harnesses this tacit knowledge “the tacit layer.” Back when designers still liked to talk about “intuitive design” this awareness was much more prevalent. But I think this way of thinking about design is in precipitous decline. Now, intuitive means little more than figure-it-outability.

Tools used largely in a tacit mode to develop ideas become an extensions of the user’s own being. To change a tool so that it stops functioning this way changes a person’s being. It literally prevents a person from thinking — it robs them of a piece of their own mind.

When we look at software in that light, doesn’t it seem like a norm that a company owns software, and that users pay a licensing fee for the right to use it offers far too little protection to the user? Shouldn’t users have more control over what is done to them?

I’m not suggesting a change in IP law or anything like that. I do think the software industry needs some different licensing arrangements, though. I’d like to see something like a user-developer covenant: “If you, the user, invite this tool into your life, adopt it and invest the effort to master it, you can trust us, the developer, to safeguard your investment by minimizing design changes that break the tacit layer, create distractions and force unwanted relearning. We understand that your concern is with what you are doing, not with the tool we offer you.”

 

 

Process Theology

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pragmatism

I’ve been poking around in several books on Process Philosophy/Theology to see if my own homegrown theology isn’t in fact some version of Process Theology. So far I’m finding some closely matching concepts. (Two big ones: Panentheism and “the lure”.) That is not surprising: it turns out Whitehead was influenced by Pragmatism (which not long ago I considered my religion). Process Theology appears to me to be the religious implication of Pragmatism.

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For awhile I’ve speculated that Fundamentalism is actually a religion of its own: a distinctive way to interpret scripture and to practice religion. Fundamentalisms are more like one another than they are to other denominations within the same religion. I’ve come to see Mysticism and Humanism as similarly connected. (Note Oct. 3: and the book I’m reading reminded me, also Scholasticism.) There is considerable similarity across Mysticisms and Humanisms (that is, attempts to fit religion inside the Enlightenment framework).  I’ve been calling them “lateral traditions”. I’m sure this is not a new concept, and when I find the language others are using to talk about this idea I’ll adopt it.

I believe Process Theology represents another lateral tradition.

Intuitive forces

Philosophy

I think I might not believe in intuitions as pre-thoughts. I think intuitions are creative impulses — the impulse to make a song, an image, a story or poem, a gesture or dance, an object, an organization — or a thought. Why must a pre-thought be placed between an intuition and its expression? I’m inclined to believe the same psychic forces befind intuitions can shape multiple media and can also shape a person’s responses to many kinds of experience. 

Convergent forces, not ideal forms, are what shape life. Plato has never rung true to me. 

Esoteric summary

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

The heart of morality is the call to transcendence: we are meant to exist as ourselves toward reality that is not us (alterity). These are the proper terms of transcendence: self transcending toward alterity within a shared ground of infinite reality. This is very different from that common conception of transcendence that opposes a mundane natural world and a divine supernatural one. The fact that I cannot deny the existence of this call to transcend is the primary basis for my belief in God. Such a call has no authority in an essentially meaningless universe.

Alterity (reality that is not us) is infinite, meaning that it is not only quantitatively limitless, but qualitatively limitless as well. This means it can only be thought-toward in an open-ended way, not comprehended. Thinking-toward qualitative infinity encourages existing-toward reality in a way that invites the kind of radical surprise intrinsic to qualitative infinity, a prerequisite of transcendence, and is therefore an ontological foundation of moral life. An aid for imagining the directions of this existing-toward is along the trajectories of time, physicality and mind. These can be seen as the basic “objects” of transcendence, but they are everted objects which enclose us, involve us, and exceed us. (Another word for an everted object is a subject, and this is another tributary to my belief in God.)

The heart of transcendence is metanoia: a tacit conceptual/moral/practical shift in being that changes why we exist, how we exist and what we perceive in the world. These three kinds of being can be imagined as the self who exists toward infinity, the subject of metanoia.

Metanoia is a process that can be encouraged and discouraged, which sometimes even ought to be resisted. To navigate the metanoetic cycle, it is important to be able to read the waters of experience and to recognize the significance of moods, feelings and other psychological states that indicate one’s situation and help orient action and moral interpretation.

(Above was a sketchy summary of the diagrams in Geometric Parables. The moral ideal is diagramed as a spiral, qualitative infinity is diagrammed as an asterisk, the subject of metanoia is diagrammed as a trefoil, and the metanoetic cycle is diagrammed as a wheel. I did another half of a sketch yesterday, where I tried to explain each of the parables from the perspective of the others. I am going to finish that and publish it on this blog ASAP.)

Design augury

Philosophy

The assumptions about human life at the heart of our design practices which shape our products and our daily experience of the world are exactly the same assumptions that shape our political life. Design, however, moves faster, which means we can sense where our politics are headed by observing where design has arrived. 

When I become angry about giant corporations using their own cloud computing ecosystems to outmaneuver other rival cloud computing ecosystems and dominate the market and ignoring the impact their strategic jockying has on users who have to live and work in their platform battlefield, it is because I feel and smell the politics inside this phenomenon. 

The same is true when I become enraged at dealing with the consequences of startuppity hubris — with the consequences of individual microomniscient geniuses obsessing over their masterpieces, thinking about the contant improvement and perfection of a product they think of as their own personal property, and forgetting the users who have to deal with the constant tinkering, rethinking, pivoting, etc. not just with this one product but pretty much all products. 

…And the weird sameness of so many product innovations, all in lockstep inside a narrow product paradigm, treating minute tweaks as revolutionary breakthroughs. Witness the dozens of variations of Hi-Tec C pens spwarned by Pen Type A. 

…And also when I suspect that most product designs or updates are motivated less by how it will be to use them than how it will be to read about them (or watch videos about them) on tech blogs, unboxing videos, kickstarter profiles, etc. 

…And when I see mass embrace of Helvetica and Swiss Grid design systems. A longing for regularity, order, conformity to relentless logic inherent in that approach to design. 

…And then there’s the Industrial Age relapse known as Lean Startup. 

  Etc. 

These trends feel very much as though they belong to this political moment, and also to what I fear is gathering force behind the present wave of history. 

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Of course, another name for “assumptions about human life at the heart of our activities” is philosophy. Getting at those ethical, ontological, epistemological faiths that direct our attention and guide our actions — most of all when their effects are unconscious and indistinguishable from truth and of reality itself — and seeing what possibilities emerge when they are detected and questioned is philosophy’s central task. 

I am surrounded by folks who know that philosophy is a pointless intellectual exercise in opinionated speculation, an inferior and primitive approximation of science. The philosophy behind this attitude which produces this belief as well as the myriad other political and practical beliefs remains entirely unexamined because according to itself, this activity would be pointless. It is better to just develop one’s beliefs strictly through scientific method and practical hands-on doing — never mind that all this activity is guided by philosophy and what is noticed as significance is filtered by philosophy. 

I’ve said this for years, and I’ll say it again: what ails this nation is bad philosophy. Neglect of philosophy has made us too stupid to be good Liberals. This is why most of us are illiberal right or left, or just checked out. 

Renewal is rarer than revelation

Philosophy

When a new philosophical perspective alternative reveals itself, it takes philosophical clarity to recognize that what has been revealed is not the ultimate truth but just another philosophy.

And even with this clarity, it take significant philosophical discipline to resist the impulse to accept the new perspective as one’s own, simply because one has seen where one was formerly blind. 

And finally, it takes humility to realize that new philosophical perspectives are nearly never as new as they seem to one who has just conceived it. Almost always, the deepest impact a new philosophical perspective can have is exposing one’s own misunderstandings of misconceived old truths — truths incomprehensible apart from the perspective. But because each time a new philosophy is revealed, it is revealed in a new situation and expressed in a unique language, pride and laziness works against working to discover the redundancy of one’s own apparent genius.

By one of the most perverse ironies of the human condition, when philosophical clarity, discipline and humility fail, the failures are experienced by individuals and their adherents as success of the highest order — as divine revelation, as divine command, as the dawn a new age — and the feeling certainty that attends such errors as evidence of truth. 

Philosophy, properly practiced, is an exercise in perpetual humiliation. It is both an inoculation against prophetic hubris, and a recollection of Liberalism which will otherwise be forgotten.

Sadly, because so few American intellectuals take the practice of philosophizing seriously, treating study of philosophy as a systematic exposure to a history of opinions — (opinions mostly supplanted by more rigorous social scientific fact) — too many people have dismissed Liberalism, thinking themselves superior to something that is, in fact, too demanding for their minds and character.

Pamphleteerism

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Over the last year I’ve been equipping myself to make pamphlets. I’ve purchased several reams of beautiful French Paper in cover and heavy text weights, waxed linen bookbinder thread, needles, and awls and a bone folder. I’ve figured out how to use Adobe InDesign with my printer (which prints 2-sided) to create booklets in signature format ready for binding. I’ve practiced and refined my booklet sewing technique constructing and revising Shabbat prayer booklets.

I think I am going to force myself to work differently in the coming months. I think I’m going to steal from the product development industry (my greatest, most beloved, most intensely detested frenemy, who has nourished me with so many unavoidable crises, who has dragged me through so much dark despair into so many enlightenments). What I intend to steal comes directly from the single most painful trend of the last decade. I intend to force myself to work in “sprints”.

Working in pamphlet sprints, I will write with the intention of always creating a printed pamphlet by the end of the session. I am also going to get rid of this notion of getting everything I’ve learned into a single book. I’m going to get it all out in microcosmic bursts of various genre.

Here are the pamphlets I have planned so far:

  • Geometric Parables. This is a book of diagrams I’ve been drawing and redrawing, interpreting and reinterpreting over the last 15 years. These images guide my best thoughts. When I think, often I am just growing the consequences of particular problems onto these frameworks, as if they were trellises. This will be an obscure little book, consisting of diagrams and meditations in compact verse. Its purpose is not explanation, and it is unlikely to make sense by itself. Its purpose is prayer: recollecting what memory cannot grasp. I will be flirting with idolatry making this pamphlet the way I want it made.
  • The Ten-Thousand Everythings. This could end up being a book that explains Geometric Parables. I’ve accumulated a large number of aphoristic scraps that fit together into a cohesive philosophical perspective. I want to attempt to demonstrate my way of thinking by exploring some key domains, especially ethics, ontology and religion. This will be my idea dump. I’m going to try to force myself to be more relaxed and prosaic writing and rewriting it.
  • Syllabus Listicalis. This idea came to life yesterday, when I just started listing out the most consequential points where I disagree with conventional wisdom. Few people understand the extent to which my thinking has diverged from the norms of everyday thinking, especially at the most crucial life-shaping points. This has left me in a place where at best I agree with others on details, but not for the reasons people tend to assume, which cannot be explained within contemporary customs of polite conversation. I doubt I’ll try to explain anything in Syllabus Listicalis. It will be a bare list of instructive disagreements, maybe a negative image of The Ten-Thousand Everythings.
  • Interface: This will be a more or less explicit book about the myriad lessons I’ve learned oscillating between human-centered design and philosophical reflection, and how these insights have constellated around what I think is an important new way of thinking about reality. I believe many designers have intuited the importance of this new perspective as they have developed and applied its methods to an expanding sphere of problems. But so far, I have seen no attempt to articulate the perspective itself and  account for its importance.

In addition, I may start typesetting my better blog posts. Maybe I’ll make a series called Anomalogues. But first, I’m going to make some editions of the pamphlets I’ve listed above.

Syllabus Listicalis

Judaism, Philosophy

Today, I feel a need to make an arbitrary list of consequential reconceptions. These are some of the core ideas I want to put in one of the several pamphlets I have planned. I’ve named two of them: Geometric Parables and The Ten-Thousand Everythings. Maybe this is the start of a third pamphlet, Syllabus Listicalis.

  • Blindness is like rippling mercury that nullifies sight with glare and camouflage. The equation of blindness with darkness is profoundly misleading. Anyone who expects blindness to be highlighted with shadows is blind to blindness and consequently to sight. The disperception of blindness sees precisely where it doesn’t.
  • A soul is an everything among myriad everythings. It is natural to imagine a person’s soul as a body-shaped ghost, but this is an intellectually and morally corrupting confusion. Souls are better imagined as radiating into the world from a person’s physical being. The soul’s radiance continues to travel after it leaves its source and it illuminates those aspects of the world the soul finds important. Everywhere I look I see the souls of people I love: this is the root of my compulsion to give gifts. I could continue on to the subject of immortality, but let’s not.
  • Objectivity is a type of subjectivity. The idea that subjectivity is a distorted reflection of some all-encompassing objective world has catastrophic consequences. The best way to understand a person’s subjectivity is to examine its objectivity. When we speak of human “subjects” and school “subjects”, in both cases we ought to mean the word “subject” in the same sense.
  • Transcendence is entirely about the relationship between I and Other. This idea that transcendence refers to a supernatural reality behind or beyond the mundane world, is an elaborate failure to recognize otherness beyond one’s own I. Many, if not most — (and possibly all!) — notions of magic are the splatterings of souls on the walls of solipsism.
  • Tacit knowledge is not articulated, it articulates. Everything explicit, everything formed, emerges from implicit being. That which is least sayable is not passive silence, but an active capacity to say. Here speech is a metaphor for all making, all poiesis.
  • Love and dread together signal transcendence. Only dread reveals the reality of the beloved. These are not “choices”, they must be taken together, always.
  • Love is not only a matter of heart, but also of soul and of might — not separately, but always all at once. Love is done with the entirety of our being. To love God is to love the entirety of reality with the entirety of one’s being.
  • Pluralism means that even when we avoid being wrong, we are never as right as we hope.
  • Religion does not have to be conceived as it often is: the activity of an individual communing with God. Religion can, and in fact must be, broadened to comprise the continuous struggle of finite beings to relate vitally to infinite being without suppressing its infinitude. By this definition, sciences are religious activity and fundamentalisms are anti-religion.

Mark Lilla on the trajectory of ideologies

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: “Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.”

Mark Lilla on political thought today

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind (2nd edition): “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life. This, it seems to me, is the most significant development since The Reckless Mind was published [on September 9, 2001], and the first thing we need to understand about the present.”

I cannot wait to read Lilla’s latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, due August 15, 2017.

Schemas and coinages

Philosophy

One advantage of being a schematic thinker is the technique exposes gaps in our vocabularies, conceptual spaces deprived of language that create intellectual blindspots (schemoscotomas?) for those whose thought is primarily verbal.

In encountering these wordless conceptual spaces my approach has been to find close matches or to resort to descriptive language to indicate what I mean. Today I’m thinking a better approach would be to simply invent words to fill in these spaces. This is likely to change the tone and substance of my work.

Some time ago my friend Jokin told me a beautiful Basque saying: “What has a name is real.” I believe that we need to invest some badly needed ideas with the reality of language, and I think it is the task of philosophy to do so.

More to come.

 

Whys

Philosophy

Is it a coincidence that “why” in the plural sounds like “wise”? Yes. Actually it is a coincidence. So I will force the connection myself. Wisdom is closely related to the capacity to reason from the logic of multiple moral purposes, the awareness that more purpose-logics exist that we can imagine, and the virtue to recognize when we are encountering an (as yet) unimaginable other-why.

Thou shalt transcend

Philosophy

The moral imperative that I feel most intensely is to acknowledge, respond to and relate to realities who are not myself, and to value most of all those real others who want to return my acknowledgment, to respond back and to form a relationship with me — or at least to some degree. 

My difficulty is in the ethics of “to some degree”: how does one relate to an other who prefers to reduce some or all of one’s own reality to that of their own self? That is, they prefer their belief of you to the reality of you? That is, they do not share your transcendence ethic? Or are hostile to your transcendence ethic? Clearly, we cannot treat those who approach us as mere idea the same way as those who approach us as transcendent realities of our own, but that does not mean we should respond to them as they respond to us.

This is a digression, though. The main point I wanted to document is this: I believe the moral requirement to acknowledge, respond to and relate oneself to the reality of transcendence, however it approaches us (which is generally more burdensome than magical), is absolute. I hang my belief in God on this simple but all-pervasive faith: I cannot not believe we are commanded to transcend. 

This faith is compatible with many forms of atheism, actually, though I prefer to interpret God into my understanding. It is incompatible with all denominations of Fundamentalism, which I do not accept as religion, and in fact reject as anti-religion, being as it is the attempt to reduce transcendence to mere idea, factual “faith” and “belief”, leaving the “believer” hostile to what stands outside their faith, that is, whatever reality transcends what they can grip with their mind’s little fingers. 

Meditation on V’ahavta

Judaism, Philosophy

While I traveled the last two weeks I finished memorizing the V’ahavta.

V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

You shall love Adonai your God
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your might.

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For the purposes of this meditation, morality will be defined as immediate valuing: discerning (or mis-discerning) what is good or bad, or both at once, or neither. It is not the same as ethical codification, or deliberation over what is right, or even the resolve to submit to what is good. It is value as we have it, as “experienced”.

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With our being — with our moral heart, with our knowing soul and with our active might — we live within our world, a finite portion of God.

With all our being — all our heart, all our soul and all our might — we love beyond our world toward God, a finite speck of whom is each of us.

The beyondness, toward which our finite being exists in relation with God’s infinitude, extends from immediate presence of self, time and cosmos into inconceivable nothingness of Spirit, Eternity and Apeiron, which are dimensions of One: Echad.

(These dimensions might not be the only or even best way to conceive extensions toward infinity from immediate presence, but they are the ones most natural to me, personally, in this place, time and state of existence.)

With all our being entails more than simple feeling or simple knowing or simple doing, or even each of the three in turn. With all our being means simultaneously valuing knowingly and actively, knowing actively and valuingly, and acting feelingly and knowingly.

And loving with all our being means preferring a beloved beyondness more than preserving the particular being with which we presently love, our own self. It means allowing love to change who our self is, in response to loving a beloved.

This change of love, in every case, draws us toward the nothingness of infinitude despite our anxiety, into it despite our dread, across it despite our despair, and to the other side where love is consummated and prepared for the next traversal.

Anyone who cannot face being changed for love by love, who understands God to be found where bliss points and away from dread, will confuse God with the being of one’s own existence, not the One toward which love draws more than dread repels.

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The misinterpretation of experience toward God is the corruption of religion in this time, and maybe all times.

What is religion? Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually (soul), practically (might) and morally (heart).

It is not a merely physical reality that is, nor a merely spiritual reality who lives, nor a mere story unfolding, but all of these, and others we might one day come to experience and others no finite being can experience. God comes to us as constancy, as fate, as shock, as longing — as the destiny of going-toward-God-despite — as insistence wrestling with existence.

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I’m shocked I can say a public prayer and mean it, albeit in my own way, but in a public made up of individuals who are all expected to say things in one’s own way. In Judaism (at least Reform Judaism), saying words in unison does not mean saying them unanimously. It is a perfect resolution of my need to be who I am in my way, but to do so without being isolated.

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.
Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va-ed.
V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

This is my understanding from the last decade, finally translated into my native Hebrew.

What is religion?

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

What is religion? My definition is very broad: Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually, practically and morally.

Rosenzweig and the philosopher-hybrid

Judaism, Philosophy

I get the same feeling reading Rosenzweig as I do reading Levinas: I begin to feel a little like a paraphrasing popularizer, or vulgarizer.

In a little over a day from now I hope I’ll just feel like a fellow Jewish philosopher attempting, yet again, to say the same impossible-to-say truth both these Jewish philosophers are attempting to say.

*

One thing I love about Rosenzweig is that he seems to understand and respond to the same thing that matters so much to me in Nietzsche’s thought.

He says this about Nietzsche: “Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again — not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher. What he philosophized has by now become almost a matter of indifference. …  But none of those who now feel the urge to philosophize can any longer by-pass the man himself, who transformed himself in the transformation of his mental images…”

There have been countless philosophers wrote their philosophies in verse or poetic language, or who have philosophized while trying to live saintly lives. Many philosophers have philosophized about poets and poetry, or saints and saintliness. There have even been some philosophers who have philosophized poetically about poetry or lived a saintly life philosophizing about saintliness. But strangely, none of these things conveys what a philosopher-poet or philosopher-saint does. With this in mind, I’ve been developing a another philosopher-hybrid ideal: philosopher-designer. This is not a well-designed presentation of philosophy, a philosophy about design, or a well-designed presentation of philosophy about design… but something else that feels enormously important (if not for the world, at least for me) and profoundly Jewish (if not for all Jews, at least for me).