Category Archives: Religion
Protected: Design revolution
Scalar being
Once we accept the existence of collective beings, and we understand that these beings can suffer the same psychological problems any individual person can have, or isolated complexes within an individual persons can have — the world looks radically different.
Nietzsche clearly saw being as scalar in this way, observing:
Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
And
Morality as the self-division of man. — A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover’s faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.
Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “impossible and yet real”? Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when a pigheaded man says, “I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man’s way?”
The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not “selfless.” In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.
Even in his notorious attacks on people (Wagner, being the most famous), Nietzsche was attacking representative agents of collective beings:
I never attack people, — I treat people as if they were high-intensity magnifying glasses that can illuminate a general, though insidious and barely noticeable, predicament. This is how I attacked David Strauss or, more precisely, the success of an old and decrepit book in German ‘culture’, — I caught this culture in the act… And this is also how I attacked Wagner or, more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our ‘culture’ that mistakes subtlety for richness and maturity for greatness.
And of course, for those with ears to hear it, Nietzsche’s famous concept of Übermensch obviously referred to a collective being, not some solitary hyper-ambitious dark-triadic wannabe Caesar or Jesus figure.
So when I read Progressivist analysts and commentators scratching their heads over the latest Wall Street Journal poll, showing that Democrats are at a 35-year popularity low, trying to understand how it it is possible that any sane, moral, semi-informed person could possibly hate the left —
…seeing that no group of people in the history of humanity has ever been this benevolent, this sensitive to the plight of the vulnerable and marginal, this concerned about this planet and its living inhabitants, this self-aware and attentive to its own biases, blindnesses, privileges, power imbalances, this obsessed with justice and ethical conduct, this independent- and critically-minded, and this courageously determined to make the most radical changes to the world…
— I marvel at how they miss the possibility that they are caught up in a collective narcissism.
But nobody can tell any narcissist — individual or collective — anything they don’t already believe. The groupthink of the left summarily dismisses the views of anyone who challenges its own self-conception and self-image — its vision of its own exceptional moral, intellectual and technical character — and in fact lashes out in a classically narcissistic way at anyone who refuses to see it as it wishes to be seen.
So Progressivists as a group, and as individuals insofar as they think, speak and act as Progressivists, are hated the way all narcissists are hated — while they themselves collectively experience nothing but persecution from vicious, stupid, inferior people who misunderstand them and fail to appreciate their unbelievable, mind-boggling awesomeness.
Note: Progressivism isn’t the only insane collectivity out there, of course. Everyone these days — and in every time, for that matter — is caught up in some collective being or another. It seems the most prominent collective beings active today are contemptible in differing ways. I’ve been caught up in several of them, myself. Nobody is immune. But that is the point: Nobody is immune! Progressivism thinks it is exceptional and immunized, thanks to its special awareness and its mitigating techniques. This conceit makes Progressivism a zillion times more self-oblivious and meta-uncritical than it should be, given its pretensions and aspirations.
A great many people who lack the audacity to indulge their narcissistic impulses in their own individual self will instead gratify them by identifying themselves with a collective narcissism, and “selflessly” giving over to it. You see it often with parents who hyper-protect and privilege their own children over the reasonable needs of other people, we see it in historically oppressed groups who claim special status with special benefits to compensate for past wrongs. We see it in religious fanatics who imagine themselves as having special relationships with “God” with inside knowledge and a special duty and destiny.
Observing the Golden Rule, interpreted ever-more radically, at ever-deepening meta-levels, is the hardest thing a person can attempt. Most of us fuck up and mistake the self or the collective with whom we identify with God.
Why? Because.
Technicity’s Why is always asked as: “What is it for?”
And this technic Why is reflexively answered with a Because of a specific form: “…in order to…” — in a long and unending chain of in-order-tos.
Technic Why means: “What is its use?”
This deformity of meaning is the valid impulse behind our indignation at calling the person for whom a design is intended the User.
Fundamentalist “religion” is the technic reduction of intrinsically good life-toward-the-Absolute to a system of Why-Because rules one must observe in order to earn magical rewards and in order to avoid magical punishments. It is technicity pristinely alienated from Earth, Man and Heaven, with all technicity’s negative trade-offs and none of its advantages.
Absolutism-Pluralism dialectic
We know — and cannot avoid knowing — that there is one Absolute beyond plurality. When we assert the relativity and plurality of truth, it is precisely toward the existential truth of that one Absolute that we reach.
But this reaching toward the Absolute exceeds all grasping. We apprehend an essentially incomprehensible truth. This apprehended, uncomprehended truth — the existential acknowledgment of an Absolute transcending relativity and plurality — contains, envelops, permeates and involves our being, entirely and without remainder.
We cannot grasp this truth We situate ourselves within it and participate in, in awareness of our relationship to it.
We can no more comprehend the Absolute and have it as an object of thought than we can see sight or hear hearing. You can stare into a mirror for years or decades searching for your I, but all you will ever see is your Me. You can scour the universe and history in search of the Absolute, but your very search is an ontological absurdity.
The Truth of the one Absolute cannot be known objectively or contained in language.
There is capital-T Truth, but that Truth is not an objective truth.
So pluralists and relativists are right, and dogmatic absolutists are wrong, if relativists mean: All objective truth is relative and plural.
But absolutists are right, and radical relativists and pluralists are wrong, if absolutists deny that all truth is relative and plural. Only objective truth is relative and plural — and not all truth is objective.
Here is where absolutists and pluralists can sublate their antitheses and philosophically transcend to something truer: That to which objective, relative, pluralistic truth must relate — always, inescapably and without exception — is the Absolute.
Any idea or argument that attempts to deny this relation is wrong in every possible sense of the word.
Body and soul
In the lowest realms we experience subjectivity as within objects. Souls (or minds or psyches or awareness) seem to inhabit bodies, and express themselves through them.
But at exalted moments, boundaries of within and without can blur, shift or vanish, and we can feel ensouled within and animated by something larger. For instance, musical or theatrical performances or dramatic public events involve us in collective experiences that blur inward and outward. Well-told stories — whether written or filmed — immerse us in alternative worlds, and we find ourselves caring intensely about the fates of imaginary people in imaginary situations in realities radically different from the reality we inhabit. When we travel we feel the spirit of a different place, feel permeated by that spirit, and experience our selves differently. At home, sometimes we can feel the currents of zeitgeist changing our tastes and sensibilities. We notice new palettes, forms, colors, attitudes we never perceived before, or what was drab or repellent becomes fascinating. When we see old pictures of ourselves or hear a song that brings back the past, we experience a contrast in spiritual climate between then and now. And of course, love, for those still capable of feeling and giving over to it, puts everything in a new orbit around a shifted center, and everything changes, all at once, and becomes otherworldly, enchanted and enchanting.
Of course, if we prefer to preserve our ontological topology, we can do so with theories and language that hold everything in place. We can say we resonate (“vibe”) with an energy or vibration around us, or that something inside us is stirred or inspired by something outside of us distinct from us. We can reduce it all to biological dynamics, and so on.
This realm is discretionary, and nobody can force you to think any way you choose to reject — as long as you are actively noticing, selecting, accepting and rejecting.
People who consume truth passively — people who inform themselves without taking active responsibility for their own understandings, who trust by default and make no conscious choices — end up with souls shaped by others. The in-formation with which they in-form themselves, inwardly-forms them, and primes them to notice and accept only data formatted to reinforce their self in its current form. In Soviet Russia, information consume you!
This collective and individual self-formation is normal. It is only problematic if the collective understanding is manipulated to a degree that alienates it from concrete, intuitable reality and from awareness of their situatedness within a reality that transcends not only their comprehension, but all comprehension. Then reality itself appears to be a construction. We are free to invent it as we wish, without constraints, or with purely arbitrary constraints.
There are realms, however, even higher than soul. These are not discretionary. They are not only unchosen, they are of a nature that we are no more able to control than we able to control our own sight as we see, or our own hearing as we hear. Here there is intention and will here without any intending or willing object.
At this point, a dramatic eversal was is and will always be — of within and without, of subject and object, or action and reception, of container and contained, of reflected and reflector. Every relationship reverses, all at once.
Pascal’s Wager 2.0
I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:
- If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
- If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
- If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
- If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?
But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.
Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.
Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.
Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.
But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.
Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.
But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?
In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?
So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
- If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?
I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:
Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.
This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.
Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:
To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?
I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.
I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:
We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …
A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it…
Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.
“Doing the Work” of liberation
Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.
Here is the passage:
Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.
Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed firsthand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.
. . .
During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).
In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.
One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.
It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.
Here is the sequence of thoughts:
- “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
- In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
- Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
No, reality is not constructed.
Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.
But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.
And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.
Walk good.
Pluralism
I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.
I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.
But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.
We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.
But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?
Belimah
Chaos is relative to an order-comprehending mind.
To comprehend, a mind must have a capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) a given order within increasingly comprehensive comprehensions of order. All these interrelated, inter-comprehending comprehensions are themselves ordered within a grounding and orienting relation to absolute reality. Metaphysics is what we call any grounding, orienting relation to absolute reality — again, within which all comprehensions occur.
Where the capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) order-within-order is lacking — where an enception is lacking — only chaos can be apprehended. We cannot comprehend what the chaos is, only apprehend that the chaos is.
(((Incidentally yesterday I leaned a new Hebrew word, used in the Sefir Yetzirah: “belimah“. According to Daniel Matt’s footnotes:
The word belimah, also obscure, can be read as two words: beli mah, “without what.” It appears once in the Bible in the book of Job (26:7): “He stretches the north over chaos and suspends the earth over belimah,” meaning apparently “emptiness” or “nothingness,” the cosmic void. The sefirot are without whatness, they cannot be grasped. A few paragraphs later, we find belimah followed immediately by the imperative belom, “bridle, restrain”: “Ten sefirot belimah. Belom, Bridle your mind from imagining, your mouth from speaking.” The phrase sefirot belimah conveys a sense of concealment and mystery.
I will translate belimah as whatless or whatlessness. It is any reality that defies objective understanding. And if to you understanding necessarily entails objectivity, and if to you objective and real or objective and true are synonymous, I’ll say it plainly: You are missing an entire class of enceptions. This condition is analogous to spiritual blindness and deafness, lacking “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” certain crucial religious truths. Your religious common sense is missing a dimension, but you are as unable to miss it as a birth-blind person is unable to miss sight. But I will also say it plainly: if you find a way to allow these religious sights and sounds to become visible and audible to you, it will be the most glorious shock of your life. You will feel like a new person in a new, infinitely meaningful world. And I know you cannot believe me, but that does not make it any less true. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.” You will see.)))
The intuition that real order is present, but intellectually inaccessible, generates apprehension. This apprehension intensifies with the intuited importance of the intellectually inaccessible intuited reality. A crucial whatless thatness inspires excruciating apprehension, a minute spark of the dread of the infinite, which to us is Ayin, nothingness. This nothingness is the outer surface of myriad surfaces concealing Ein Sof. The Kabbalists call these concealing surfaces garments. Ein Sof is clothed in Ayin, and if it were otherwise, our finitude would exfinite into the infinity to which it belongs and we would be whatever the eversion of annihilated is. I suppose “exnihilated” is as good a word for it as any.
How can we account for enception? Enceptions are determined by possibilities within a comprehensive conception.
Enceptions crystallize from the multistable possibilities of soul.
Some possibilities of soul harmonize essential orders essential to human existence and relate them to what surpasses all understanding, but at the cost of practical competence. Other possibilities of soul grasp the objects of scientific understanding at the cost of understanding social or biological epiphenomena like love or morality. Other possibilities permit deep attunement to people and groups, but at the cost of clarity and self-confidence.
When we understand one way, within one metaphysic and one comprehensive comprehension, it enables some enceptions and disables others. It produces a distinctive vision with its own regions of intuitive sensitivity and oblivion, and its own way of filling in oblivion with its own imaginative productions.
Some metaphysics give us unshakable certainty about a great many unimportant matters, leaving us free to fill in the vast void of truth with our own constructed ideas. We can freely invent whatever reality we wish to inhabit. The only cost is that we are haunted by the whatless thatness of the absolute, and almost everything induces excruciating apprehension. We are disoriented, ungrounded and gripped in anxiety, neurosis and depression. Love is impossible, because other people intensify our angst — to the degree they are personal and non-identical and refuse to cooperate with our language games. But at least we are masters of our own domain, free to construct according to our whim. “Neither God, nor master.”
Truth circulates only when the ladder of Yetzirah stands firm on the rock of Assiyah and penetrates the heavens to Beriyah.
Everso II
Having broken free of the bolts that gripped my skull and held me in place, I turned away from the glaring screen and began to grope in the nothingness around me — that off-screen nowhere where nothing happens. As the blindness gradually abated, I could see silhouettes and shadows cast against the ambient glow of the screen. I felt the edges of objects around me, wrapping my fingers around their contours and comprehending what they were and how they were situated relative to one another within this space. But as I explored further, beyond where light could reach, I found dark edgeless surfaces that could only be touched but not defined. I sought the limits of this space, and finally apprehended that it was an inner surface, which comprehended me in every dimension, confining me and all I could comprehend within its own interior.
Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations
In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.
First, a dimension is named.
Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.
And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.
I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:
The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.
The polarities are Beriyah, the realm of intelligibility.
The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.
And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.
Humanize the machine
I had to buy a Frithjof Schuon book, just to have this quote in my library: “If we cannot humanize the machine, we mechanize the man.” This is the heart of design.
Root and crown
Yetzirah must be rooted in Assiyah and crowned by Beriyah.
Talking at my designer friend
An edited version of a comment to a friend at work who is reading Campagna’s Magic and Technic:
My concern with the state of service design is this: The whole power of design is that it goes to the rough ground of apeiron — to true material, as opposed to scientistic thought-about material — as a way to circumvent the wordworld of social construction that many people inhabit and mistake for reality.
At a certain velocity and altitude of generality, we lose contact with the apeironic ground and detach into the realm of pure form (subtle plane / yetzirah).
It seems to me that this is happening to the field of service design, just as it happened to UX when it underwent radical acceleration, standardization and metrification under the Lean Startup regime. As we work at ever increasing velocity, to think and communicate more explicitly in the compulsively quantifying, abstracting, operationalizing language of management, as the time we have for reflection shatters into tinier and disarrayed shards, we become alienated from designerly ways and the kind of contact design makes with unprocessed reality.
Under technicity / technik / technic this always happens. A Marxist, of course, will blame it on capitalism (and that is partly valid) — but it is important to remember that Marxism is at least as technicity-dominated as capitalism, and equivalent alienations happen under their order as well. In fact, Marxism is even more alienated, as its aggressive-compulsive breaking with the past severs it from vestigial non-technic attitudes that remain in capitalism and provide minor relief.
Capitalism and marxism are puppets on the right and left hand of the same technicity puppeteer, who stages a bloody, century-long Punch and Judy tragicomedy.
Misfinition
I have a reading group that meets on Sundays. We initially formed to read Buber’s I and Thou together, then we attempted Rosenzweig. Now we are reading Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah, a compilation of beautiful passages from Kabbalists, one after another — including this one by Rav Kook:
The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine — all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God” — these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition — these, too, would engender heresy.
Yesterday, when we were discussing the mismatch between human thought and God’s infinitude — repeated in many passages, expressed here by Kook with “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry” — I coined a word for this most fundamental of category mistakes: misfinition: the attempt to define and thus render finite what is essentially infinite.
But this is not the only place we make this category mistake. Whenever we try to make any subject — who is, by virtue of subjecthood vis-a-vis ourselves, both transcendent and non-finite — into a finite object of knowledge, we commit a minor heresy.
And we cannot stop doing this when our mind compulsively tries to grasp and comprehend and have whatever it touches. Wherever we find ourselves engulfed, integrated, involved, environed — we cannot resist the temptation to once again grab the garden by the fruit and consume it, so we can have it as our own property. We do this even to our own subjectivity, and when we do, we are narcissists.
It is in its undefinability that every subject is created in the image of God.
Moral misappropriation
Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.
It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.
And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.
Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.
This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.
If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.
We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.
Techne + logos
Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!
techne- — craft.
-logy — speak, tell.
Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.
Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.
In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.
And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.
This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.
Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.
Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“
Representational eclipse
Heraclitus:
One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.
The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.
Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.
When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.
This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”
Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.
There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.
Word torture
There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.
This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.
I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.
Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.
But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.
Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.
How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:
His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.
My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”
Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.
Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.
“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”
“Shivah? Kaddish?”
“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!
“Moishe, is that you?’
“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”
“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.
“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.
“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.
“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?
I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”
What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.
It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.
Demurely.
This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.
She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.
The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.
Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.
And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.
They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.
He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.
I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.
The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.