Category Archives: Religion

Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping

Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am suspending this question for now.

Construal belongs to the mode of system. We construe a logic of construction. We figure something out and comprehend the relationship between a set of objective givens and a systemic whole they constitute as parts, linked logically or causally. This is the objective understanding of Nefesh, in the objective world of Asiyah.

Conception belongs to the mode of gestalt. We spontaneously receive a given gestalt whole. We are given gestalts both perceptually through the senses and conceptually through the mind. Each whole spontaneously resolves into given sub-wholes. The sub-wholes do not constitute the whole; rather, each whole comprises sub-wholes articulated within it. This is the subjective understanding of Ruach, in subjective world of Yetzirah.

But we do not experience our own subjectivity. Our own subjectivity manifests as given sensory and mental objects, as reality as we know it, as “objective reality”. It is only when we notice differences in responses to or beliefs about “objective reality” that subjectivity is indirectly discernible. This is only possible, though, if we do not naively invalidate other subjectivities as mistaken or deceptive. If we take other subjectivities as valid, we learn that objective understanding is rooted in subjectivity, and that material reality constrains objective understanding but does not determine it the way naive realism assumes. This process is dialogue.

If we pursue understanding of other subjectivities, and persevere until we succeed, success manifests as acquisition of new gestalts in new forms of objectivity. We are able to spontaneously perceive and conceive new gestalt articulate wholes. This acquisition is insight.

Pursuit of insight into other subjects — fellow Ruchot — is not straightforward, however. It is intellectually, emotionally and existentially demanding, and this is why we neglect or actively resist doing it. It is easier to ignore or invalidate other subjects, and subjectivity in general.

The most difficult aspect of trans-subjective understanding is the challenge of loosening and overcoming our own subjective limits. Those limits are uncannily enforced by nothingness. Each Ruach has an implicit ultimate conception of everything, beyond which there is nothing. In pursuit of inter-subjective understanding we must become skeptical toward our own sense of everything and the apparent nothingness beyond it. Everything becomes only everything to me within my own Ruach, and nothing becomes only that of which I am as-yet oblivious.

This introduces an entirely new attitude toward reality that intuits reality as largely — and in fact, overwhelmingly — transcendent in essence. This is the world of Beriah — the world by which Yetzirah and, consequently Asiyah, are given ex nihilo from nothingness.

To find our way to fellow Ruach we must puncture the roof of oblivion, and ascend to Neshamah. From there we may descend back to Ruach who can accommodate my old understanding and that of my fellow Ruach. More important than the present expansion, though, is something else: an immediate intuition of the eternal inexhaustibility of ex nihilo epiphany. This faith is intellection, also known as gnosis, the root of both subjectivity and objectivity.

Intellection is revelatory-creative, epiphanic. In intellective faith we press into the outer limits of everything as we conceive it, through the oblivion of nothingness, and intuit that nothingness is eternally pregnant with infinite moreness. The insight into nothingness resulting from this intellection immunizes against naivety of nihilism, and I call it exnihilism.

Entirely beyond philosophy is the absolute in Atzilut. From here I will observe Wittgenstinean silence.

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

Israel Sarug

Autobiography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

Israel Sarug is my kind of kabbalist. He is philosophically rigorous, but a factual trickster. To borrow from Werner Herzog, he cares little for the “truth of accountants” and will not allow factual trivia to obstruct his pursuit of learning or teaching. To borrow a related idea from another filmmaker, Jodorowsky, Sarug appears to belong to the long iffy line of “holy charlatans”, or to tone it back to archetypal semirespectability, the trickster tradition, driven to interweave factual, figurative and intellective truths, suspended in ironic tension.

On the whole, the spread of Lurianic Kabbalism was almost entirely due to the activity of another Kabbalist, Israel Sarug, who between 1592 and 1598 carried on a lively propaganda in the interests of the new school among the Kabbalists of Italy. He posed as one of Luria’s principal disciples, although it seems certain that he had no claim to this title and that all his knowledge of Lurianic doctrine was derived from those stolen copies of Vital’s writings which had come into his hands in Safed. A man of considerable intellectual originality, he conceived himself to have penetrated more deeply than Luria’s genuine pupils into the mysteries of the new doctrine. This fact probably explains why his missionary zeal led him to claim an authority which strictly speaking he did not possess. The deception passed unnoticed, and down to our own days Sarug has been treated both by adherents and opponents of Kabbalism as an authentic interpreter of Luria. The truth is that in certain essential points he gave an entirely new turn to Luria’s thought and enriched it by speculative ideas of his own with which I cannot deal in this context. They are to be found chiefly in his book Limmude Atsiluth [which I transliterate as “Atzilut”], “Doctrines on Emanation.” The essence of Sarug’s interpretation of Luria may be described as an attempt to provide a quasi-philosophical basis for Luria’s distinctly unphilosophical doctrine by injecting a species of Platonism into it, and the singular success his interpretation achieved was due in part to those elements of his teaching which were not genuinely Lurianic.

When I dug further into him, I found a paper called “God as a Printer: On the Theological Status of Printing in the Kabbalistic Tradition of Israel Sarug” by Eliezer Baumgarten.

Here is the abstract:

Recent decades have witnessed a broad scholarly discussion of the cultural influences of the printing press invention. The core of this revolved around the new technological influence on the concept of knowledge, its methods of dispersion, and on social changes that it engendered in the 16th century, when it became an affordable widespread technology. This article presents the way in which the spread of the printing press influenced conceptual paradigms of Kabbalists in general, and Lurianic Kabbalists from Sarug’s tradition in particular. These Kabbalists exchanged the traditional conception of creation as an act of writing, within the conception of the world as a written text, for conceptions of creation as a printing act and the world as a printed text. I show how the professional term ‘letterpress printing’ entered these Kabbalists’ descriptions of divine emanation, alongside their conceptualization of printing as a divine activity, as writing had been conceptualized previously.

Of course, as a letterpress fetishist, I adore this analogy, not least for its anomality.

A fascinating McLuhanian element to this story also appeals to me. I’m succumbing to a temptation to link this with the trickster angel of media and mediators, by whom truths are not only propagated, but configured.

Sarug could be called the Justin Sledge of the Gutenberg age, though it remains to be decided whether esoteric insight or something else is the message of the medium of streaming digital content. Many voracious consumers of digital esoteric content seem to me more like bus tourists in Yetzirah than emigres in higher orders, and whether they are seated to the right or left of the bus they more often become ex-patriotic illiberals than liberated expatriates. They are more individualist than individuated, more inclined to follow ideological trends than to loyalty to people or persons, more spiritually escapist than religiously responsible, more “not of this world” than “tikkun olam”… yet still so imprisoned within this sealed-off, air-conditioned sightseeing bus.

I’d have written a shorter book

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

The internet has misattributed to Mark Twain a quotation: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” I first heard and anchored on it as “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I hadn’t the time.” To my ear, it has a nicer waltzier swing.

Ironically, none of the sources of this quote managed to say it as parsimoniously as the internet rock-tumbled version. Presumably, they hadn’t the time.

My first book took 16 years to write, and was nine pages long. My forthcoming book on Kabbalah has taken another six years, and it will be one page long.

Nobody can accuse me of failing to write a shorter book because I hadn’t the time.

Between wherefore and therefore

Chord, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Faith moves in the present, between wherefore and therefore.

“Wherefore…?”: Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief

“Therefore…?”: Pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

Each belief is engendered by an implicit wherefore before unfolding into explicit therefores.

Belief precedes speech and action, and is the fruit of faith. It is the rustling between whither and whence.

I originally formulated this idea using the model of the pragmatic maxim:

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the practical consequences that follow from it.

Thanks to C. S. Peirce for the pragmatic maxim:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Thanks to M. Tismisesky for bludgeoning Peirce’s verbosity into a two-word provocation:

And therefore…?

Thanks to H.-G. Gadamer for his “hermeneutic priority of the question”.

To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.

Scraps for the exnihilism file

Kabbalah, Philosophy

Every finite one is articulated from the infinite One by degrees of nihilitude. Nihilitude and finitude belong entirely to infinitude and are essential within infinite self-articulation. Before the beginning, there is a faint trace of indivisible difference. At the beginning, infinity and the possibility of finite being divide without exclusion. In the beginning, exclusive subjectivities separate from one another. Thereafter, everything is a sum of objects, and non-objects are nothing. Each degree layers nihilitude upon nihilitude.

Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief, and pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

The pragmatic consequence of a belief is its implicit “Therefore…?”

The hermeneutic presequence of a belief is its implicit “Wherefore…?” “and this answers what?”

Belief is prior to speech and action. Belief is the fruit of faith, a wherefore and therefore, a wither and whence of spirit, a rustling in the present.

The wherefore flows from Yetzirah; the therefore unfolds into Assiyah.

Sophists are so spiritually underdeveloped that they lack the capacity to conceive even the possibility of wisdom transcending their own. This is one of the most radical category mistakes, for wisdom is precisely active awareness of this possibility. Wisdom is wise most of all to how oblivion works and lives in ironic tension between certainty and certainty of disruptive, radical surprise ex nihilo.

Metacognitive incompetence entered the popular sphere as Dunning-Kruger.

But millennia before, Plato spoke of metasophical incompetence as double-ignorance — not knowing that one does not know. Socrates knew he did not know, and for this reason was the wisest man in Athens.

But every age has its sophists who know they know and, with the confidence and barbarous serenity of youth, dispense to all what everyone knows is wisdom: wisdom is confident, self-certain, calming, comforting, accepting. Who wouldn’t pay top dollar for such wisdom?

One fool’s dissenting wisdom:

The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…

The substance of oblivion, ignorance and the very possibility of surprise is shared with relevance, focus, discrimination and mortality. Nihilitude, and more nihilitude. Without nihilitude, we return to our source.

Gevurahless Chesed

Kabbalah, Letterpress

If Chesed is lovingkindness, Gevurah should be lovingseverity.

It is easy to see that Gevurah stripped of kindness is loveless judgment.

It is harder is to see that Chesed stripped of severity is equally loveless niceness.

Only together with Gevurah is Chesed love.

In Tiferet, this couple (and all couples) unite and inter-perfect in the beauty of balance.

Continue reading Gevurahless Chesed →

Kabbalah prints v.2

Kabbalah, Letterpress, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I need to print revised editions of both the dialectic sefirot (which seems more true and important to me by the day), and the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet, for a mix of boring and interesting reasons.

The boring reason is transliterative consistency. My earlier prints had some minor inconsistencies that are bothering me. Da’at, Tif’eret and Netsach have been changed to Daat, Tiferet and Netzach. Assiyah has been changed to Asiyah.

More interesting are some refinements in alternative translations translations of sefirot.

  • Gevurah changes from “power” to “severity”.
  • Chesed changes from “love” to “kindness”.
  • Netzach changes from “eternity” to “overcoming”.
  • Hod changes from “splendor” to “glory”.
  • Malkhut changes from “kingdom” to “sovereignty”.

These changes are all still traditional, but make a better-tempered whole.

Most exciting though are the changes in the four worlds chart.

First, I made two intensely satisfying improvements to the column labels:

  • “subject” is now “self”.
  • “understanding” is now “givenness”.

In the rows, I re-tuned some of the language:

  • In Atzilut, Chayah changes from “life-essence” to “source”, and its givenness remains “mystical”.
  • In Beriah, Neshamah changes from “divine breath” to “intellect”, and its givenness changes from “interpretive” to “intellective”.
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach remains “spirit”, and its givenness changes from “allusive” to “figurative”.
  • In Asiyah, Nefesh changes from “vital soul” to “soul” and its givenness remains “literal”.

I plan to print this new sheet and live with it for a week or two before committing to plates.

This is starting to feel very much my own intimate understanding within my tradition, and it is becoming more starkly beautiful to me with each revision.

Update August 19, 2023: I was considering “lovingkindness” for Chesed. There are good arguments for it. Viewed from approximate absoluteness, as emanated from Binah, Chesed is, in fact, complete lovingkindness, from which Gevurah develops its complementary severity. But viewed from below, which is the perspective of this sheet, Gevurah can be excluded from Chesed, which is then mere kindness — the loveless niceness of unconditional mercy and tolerance — always toward some at the expense of others.

Worlds, selves, givens

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

In the lifeworld dwells vital soul, to whom literal truth is given.

In the world of form-and-order dwells spirit, to whom figurative truth is given.

In the world of creation-revelation dwells intellect, to whom intellection is given.

In the world of emanation wells the source from whom being flows forth and returns.

The lines above are a summational response to a hymn by Nachmanides, translated in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

From the beginning of time, through eternities

I was among his hidden treasures.

From Nothing he called me forth, but at the end of time

I shall be reclaimed by the King.

My life flows from the depth of the spheres

Which give order and form to the soul;

Divine forces build it and nourish it;

Then it is preserved in the chambers of the King.

He radiated light to bring her forth,

In hidden well-springs, right and left.

The soul descended the ladder of heaven,

From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

Scholem then proceeds to discuss the three “spiritual agencies”, which in my Jacob’s Ladder “reference sheet” I labeled “subject”, but which I might simply call “self” in future editions.

The psychology of the Zohar shows a peculiar mixture of two doctrines held by certain schools of mediaeval philosophy. The first distinguished between the vegetative, the animal, and the rational soul — three stages which Aristotelian doctrine regarded as different faculties of the one soul, while the mediaeval followers of Plato were inclined to think of them as three different entities. The second, which was generally held by the Arab philosophers and popularized among the Jews by Maimonides, is based on the conception of the “acquired intellect.” According to this view, the rational faculty latent in the mind is actualized in the process of cognition, and this realization of the intellect is the sole guide to immortality. To this doctrine, the Zohar now gives a Kabbalistic turn. It retains the distinction between three spiritual agencies: Nefesh or life; Ruah or spirit; and Neshamah or soul proper, but abandons the idea that they represent three different faculties of the soul. Rather all three are already latently present in the first, Nefesh, and the higher grades correspond to the new and deeper powers which the soul of the devotee acquires through the study of the Torah and through meritorious actions.

Neshamah is the intellective self in Beriah, to whom reality is given in intellection.

This term, intellection, is a concept I learned from perennialists (followers of Schuon) and it concerns a kind of gnosis invited (never caused) by spiritual effort, which yields spiritual fruit, but which transcends spirit and vital soul. It transcends objective reason and subjective ontology.

Intellection is the true telos of philosophy. It is here that we receive gifts of immortal life from others and bequeath it to others willing to receive it. Here we move and are moved by the tossing of the golden ball.

Intellection is known solely by its fruits in figurative and literal givenness — enworldment.

A footnote in Scholem gave me another jolt of recognition this morning.

It referred the Zohar’s spiritual diagnosis of origninal sin.

He joined below and separated above, when it was necessary to separate below and to join above.

I consulted the Zohar for context:

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.”

“The fourth commandment: to realize that YHVH is ha-Elohim, God, as is said: Know today and take to heart that YHVH is ha-Elohim), God (Deuteronomy 4:39). To include the name Elohim in the name YHVH, realizing they are one, indivisible. This is the mystery written: Let there be me’orot, lights, in the expanse of heaven to shine upon earth (Genesis 1:14-15), that the two names be one, with absolutely no division — that me’orot, lights, spelled deficiently, merge in the name of heaven: one together and indivisible, black light with white light, indivisible, and all is one. This is the white cloud of day and the cloud of fire in the night, as they have said: ‘Quality of day and quality of night’s — to be arrayed by each other to shine, as is said: to shine upon earth.

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

“Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.

“This is the mystery written: Let them be me’orot, lights. The shell rises in the wake of the kernel. The kernel is or, light; the other side, mavet, death. Or [light] in letters joined together, mavet [death] in separation. When this or [light] disappears from there, the letters of separation join together. …”

This understanding of sin as reversal of proper relationships reminds me of the animating insight of a poem I wrote twenty years ago in a metanoiac outburst and continue to edit and revise:

In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
bury the ground with broken branches.

Quadrephania

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.

Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.

Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.

Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.

Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?

Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.

The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.

The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.

The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.

And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.

Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.

Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.

Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.

Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.

Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.

In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.

By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.

But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.

And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.

This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.

Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.

Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.

The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.

I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”

I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.

“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”

Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?

Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?

I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.

Intercursive knowing

Judaism, Kabbalah, Love

From Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

…the Zohar’s sexual symbolism reflects the influence of two different tendencies. Insofar as it shows a positive attitude towards the function of sexual life, within the limits ordained by divine law, it may be said to represent a genuinely Jewish outlook. Chastity is indeed one of the highest moral values of Judaism: Joseph, who by his chastity has “upheld the covenant” is regarded by the Midrash and the Kabbalah as the prototype of the righteous man, the true Zaddik. But at no time was sexual asceticism accorded the dignity of a religious value, and the mystics make no exception. Too deeply was the first command of the Torah, Be fruitful and multiply, impressed upon their minds. The contrast to other forms of mysticism is striking enough to be worth mentioning: non-Jewish mysticism, which glorified and propagated asceticism, ended sometimes by transplanting eroticism into the relation of man to God. Kabbalism, on the other hand, was tempted to discover the mystery of sex within God himself. For the rest it rejected asceticism and continued to regard marriage not as a concession to the frailty of the flesh but as one of the most sacred mysteries.

Every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah. In a tract on the “union of a man with his wife” which was later ascribed to Nahmanides, Joseph Gikatila gave a similar interpretation of the mystical significance of marriage. The Kabbalists deduced from Genesis 4:1: “And Adam knew Eve his wife” that “knowledge” [Da’at] always means the realization of a union, be it that of wisdom (or reason) [Chokhmah] and intelligence [Binah], or that of the King [Keter] and the Shekhinah [Malkhut]. Thus knowledge [Da’at] itself received a sublime erotic quality in this new Gnostical system, and this point is often stressed in Kabbalistic writings.

This passage expresses at once how I know marriage, philosophy, design and everything in life I care about. This is why I am Jewish.

No complete systematic whole (synthetically constructed or analytically construed) is sufficient to sustain enworldment.

A whole must also form a gestalt whole (conceived as a whole and articulated as parts belonging to that whole).

And we ourselves must belong within this whole as participants who, through our participation, instaurate it.

But to do so requires inward and outward change, co-figuration of first-person and third-person, nearly always by way of second-person. We can systematize the little we can conceive whole without any disruption to our own subjectivity.

In craft artifact and artifex change together.

The change to oneself in first-person is experienced as the click of gestalt shift.

Gestalt-shift (whether perceptual, or conceptual, or both) is a manifestation of change within one’s pre-thought order among intuitions — to the structured receptivity to whom reality is given in direct perception long before truth is given. The name of this inter-ordered intuitive being — being who precedes and conditions all experience — is faith. Faith is not a property of belief. Belief is the property of faith, the deepest self who does all believing, perceiving, conceiving and — much later — construal and construction.

New words for new properly subjective understanding. A receptivity to some form of being — a capacity to take a given. We will call this an enception. A new enceptive order that manifest new conceptive wholes and articulations within wholes is a gestell, an enframing. (Heidegger was right that technik enframes, but he was wrong that only technik enframes. I will say that technik dysenframes.)

A perceptual gestalt shift, a conceptual hermeneutic shift, an equipped perceptual-conceptual-practical scientific paradigm shift, a comprehensive religious conversion in which one is reborn into a new world — these are all gestell shifts, changes of faith, transfifurations of soul that give us reality in new ways. They are all re-enworldments.

But listen: we are tuned for objective knowledge. We forever confuse subjective changes which manifest objective change with changes to the objects themselves. We have language for the objective changes we notice in our perceptual and conceptual field, but we lack language for the subject who changed and for the nature of change a subject undergoes. When we attempt to talk about subjects, we evert them into psychic objects so we can grasp them scientifically as psychological phenomena or as behaviors resulting from something nonexistently unknowable.

This is all just the latest iteration of the same primordial category mistake of subject and object, the edenic eversion that has plagued us as a species from before the beginning of history. We think we can grab Eden by the apples and own it as property, and we cannot.

We don’t know how to avoid knowing that knowledge is objective comprehension and mastery. We think we only know for as long as we can give an objective account. We cannot help but know that whenever somebody else’s account of things is incomprehensible and makes no to us that they are full of nonsense.

So the “masters of reality” white-knuckle whatever given reality is graspable to them right now — which to them is “objective reality” itself — and stack these little givens sky high. Their constructions reach the roof of heaven in the grandest narrative edifices, which remain such, even when the grand narrative is a tale of rejection of grand narratives. The new structures collapse as fast as they are constructed and soon the tall tale of overcoming tall tales is replaced with a new tall tale of oppression by the old constructions. The Tower forever topples into The Tower. The blocks are too small for the height. Only a single block the size of the tower itself can bear such weight.

I am less and less able to doubt the truth in the dialectical Sefirot. I experience it as excessively true.

Therapeutic oracle

Esoterism

I have an unusual approach to oracles: I bracket all thaumaturgic practice, and focus solely on the descriptive languages embedded in the oracular system.

The question of whether chance-based methods produce meaning or randomness is an important one, but it is an important question toward which I practice fastidious incuriosity. I keep the symbols and the interpretative methods, and ignore the oracle production techniques.

Let us call what is left of an oracular system when oracle production techniques are stripped away “oracular languages”.

Two oracular languages I have studied and value for their powers of spiritual description are I Ching and Tarot.

Both describe, in different ways, spiritual situation: the situatedness of some situated being within some situating being. Or alternatively the situation of some spiritual participant who participates in a specific way in some partially-known whole.

Of the two, I Ching seems to have the most grammatical precision, and I have a clearer understanding how it works. But this might be insufficiently informed, because I have spent very little time studying Tarot spreads, which are unmistakably grammatical. I Ching might have sharper mathematical structure, where Tarot might have more linguistic complexity that makes its structure harder to grasp. As I write this I feel that I believe that this is the case.

I am saying all this because I have an idea for a therapeutic application for oracles. In principle it could work with any oracle which claims to provide a snapshot of a present situation with a futural trajectory, which, unless I am mistaken is what both Tarot and I Ching claim. Each claims to be a snapshot of a scene. In the shot, frozen in mid-action is some occurrence. Some of the image is stable and some of it is obviously in motion. Some of the image is foreground, and some of it is background.

Imagine an image of a high school football game. A player is in mid-jump reaching for the ball, and it seems possible but not certain that he will catch it. Behind him is a player on the opposing team who is mid-lunge, and clearly a fraction of a second from bringing him down with a tackle. Other players from both teams scramble in the periphery. Behind this action are cheerleaders who are frozen in hope. Behind them is a blurry crowd. The scene is lit by stadium lights and a drizzly mist is in the air. The helmets might be wet.

Nothing in this image moves, but the image is of motion, and we can anticipate how it is likely to continue. This is what oracles communicate.

An I Ching medium will say that the coins or yarrow stalks work like a camera to pick up or respond to or configure (in Charles Stein’s sense of the word) the subtle realities in play in the situation in question, and make it legible to those making the inquiry.

A very brief account of how these situations are captured in the parlance of I Ching.

The I Ching describes a situation by a hexagram of six lines, or yao.

Think of the hexagram as a statement. Each of the six yao is a unit of meaning, analogous to a word. But in the I Ching, both sentence structure and vocabulary is mathematically rigid. It is more like a mad libs fill in the blank than a real sentence, with each blank, or wei, bearing a fixed significance within the whole sentence, and the words that fill in those blanks being limited to four. The syntactic location of these four words, however, gives them different meanings.

Let’s start with the four word vocabulary, the yao.

  • Yang denotes action, positive closure, light, clarity, resistance, resolve, conscious awareness, all of which in I Ching philosophy are manifestations of the essential reality underlying these qualities, yang.
  • Yin denotes receptivity, negative openness, darkness, concealment, yielding, questions, unconsciousness and unknowing, all of which are manifestations of the essence, yin.
  • Changing-yang denotes yang which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yin.
  • Changing-yin denotes yin which has run its course, and is now transitioning to yang.

Grammatically, each of the six wei of the hexagram is occupied by one of these four yao — yin, yang, changing yin and changing yang. Obviously, there are myriad gradients in this cycle, but I Ching divides them into four categories. As with any sentence, the meaning of the whole lives in the relationships among the parts.

A hexagram is constructed of two trigrams — a lower trigram that describes the situated being, the subject of the situation, and the upper trigram, the enveloping being in which the subject participates and in which the subject is situated. The hexagram gives the structure of each and puts them in relation.

The trigrams also have a set structure. They are read from bottom to top.

  • Earth wei describes the objective character — the What or That or Is — firm or malleable, settled or unsettled, noticed or undetected, in the situation.
  • Man wei describes the participatory character of the situation — the How or Can the doing or being done to — active or passive, strong or weak, directed or diffuse, in the situation.
  • Heaven wei describes the value character of the situation — the Why or Ought or better or worse or beautiful or ugly — giving moral purpose or resistance, vividness or faintness, unification or diversity, in the situation.

So the complete hexagram describes situations by giving us (from bottom to top, so reverse from this list)

  1. Lower earth wei — the What of the situated subject
  2. Lower man wei — the How of the situated subject
  3. Lower heaven wei — the Why of the situated subject
  4. Upper earth wei — the What of the situating being-context
  5. Upper man wei — the How of the situating being-context
  6. Upper heaven wei — the Why of the situating being-context

One last note: any hexagram with any changing yao is understood to lead to another hexagram. The changing yaos are developed to their changed state. So a hexagram with a changing yang in the lower earth wei leads to a hexagram with yin in that same wei.

I’m out of time, so I need to wrap up too fast.

The therapeutic opportunity is in the lower trigram, because it is only here that we have some degree of direct control over the present situation.

The kind of influence we have in this lower trigram is rate of change. We can push or slow each yao’s development toward its next stage. But we cannot reverse it.

  • Yin can remain yin, or it can be willed toward changing-yin.
  • Changing-yin can be willed to remain changing-yin, or it can be allowed to develop into yang.
  • Yang can remain yang, or it can be willed toward changing-yang.
  • Changing-yang can be willed to remain changing-yang, or it can be allowed to develop into yin.

Each yao in the lower trigram can be willed or left to develop naturally.

We can look at future hexagrams that might develop from the current one, changing none, all or some combination of the three in the line of development, again, by selective acceleration and deceleration of yao, the constraints being 1) only the lower trigram can be changed, 2) only rate of change can be influenced and 3) development cannot be reversed.

Returning to our image. We can slightly change the football player’s rate of forward motion by extending his hands, or easing back on his forward stretch. But he’s going forward at some range of motion and there is no use in attempting to reverse it. The ball and the other players are going to respond to the player, so his control is indirect. The crowd, the stadium, the weather and the lights are entirely beyond immediate control. Perhaps cheering and booing will follow, but that is later.

The goal is to focus on influencing only what can be influenced, only within the range of possible change, and accepting as given constraints what cannot.

In a way, this is similar to how I approach Enneagram. Most choices can be analyzed in terms of choices between integration or disintegration. As a 5, I can be pretty sure I’m making a worse choice if I am moving toward 7 (more freedom and pleasure) and a better choice if I am moving toward 8 (intuitive mastery, mission and unsparing destiny). This method gives similar guidance by identifying the most possible options and giving specific strategies for accelerating or braking, and taking all less possible strategies off the table. We can’t reverse changing-yang into yang without committing the mystic’s sin of “turning around” and becoming inert columns of salt or forgetting ourselves in shadows.

There is a ton more to develop, but sadly I must end here.

Picking up again (August 11, 2026)…

Multiple variations to this approach can be taken.

All approaches start from an established hexagram. This establishment might be done by traditional oracle, using yarrow or coins. My preference would be to conduct a deep interview with the advisee to collect a description of the situation sufficient to link the description to a hexagram. Let us assume for the purposes of the method that, however we do it, we have, as our point of departure, a valid hexagram, accepted by both advisor and advisee.

In all approaches there is a “natural” future hexagram, where all changing yao are assumed to follow their course and ripen into the opposite. In the natural future hexagram all changing-yin becomes yang, and all changing-yang becomes yin. This depicts the trajectory of the situation if will does not intervene. This is what is given in a traditional I Ching reading.

But in this approach different willful interventions are considered in order to steer toward a preferred future.

Willing consists of holding back or slowing changing-yin or changing-yang and preventing it from becoming its opposite in the future hexagram. Or it involves pushing young yang or young yin into a changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively. In other words, willing a rate of change: either slowing change-in-progress or speeding stability toward change.

Let’s call any intervention willed development, and any non-intervention natural development.

  1. Things are left alone to develop naturally. (The natural future hexagram is the likeliest future.)
  2. The yao in the lower earth wei is willed.
  3. The yao in the lower man wei is willed.
  4. The yao in the lower heaven wei is willed.
  5. The yao in the lower earth and man wei are willed.
  6. The yao in the lower earth and heaven wei are willed.
  7. The yao in the lower man and heaven wei are willed.
  8. The yao in the lower earth, man and heaven wei are all willed.

Each of these eight potentially change the future reading. They may yield a different future hexagram, or they may change a stable line in a hexagram into a changed one.

Variation one: The advisor looks at all possible future hexagrams. There are eight options.

  1. All lower yao are permitted to develop naturally toward the future hexagram. (This is the predictive aspect of a traditional reading).
  2. All lower yao are held back. The flow of fate is slowed so the present hexagram applies also to the future. The effort is primarily focused on changing yao, preserving the remaining yin in the changing-yin, or yang in changing-yang, without attempting to reverse course.
  3. The yao in the earth wei is modified. If it is a changing line it is slowed. If it is young yang or young yin it is pushed to changing-yang or changing-yin, respectively.

This is where variations present themselves. I’ll cover three:

We can brute force it. We can work out the eight futures, read through them and interpret them into possible outcomes. Then we compare the outcomes, and select one. We then focus on the specific yaos requiring willful intervention, and what that entails.

We can take a preference-first (ought-first) approach. We start with the natural future. The advisor hears the advisee’s response to that future, inquires into what aspects of it are desirable or undesirable. The advisor interprets which yaos seem to require willful intervention, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

We can take opportunistic approach (can-first). We start with the natural future. The advisor then interviews the advisee on perceived levers of change. What aspects of the situation seems controllable to them, given available personal or environmental resources. The advisor interprets these levers into intervenable yaos, and selects a future hexagram reflecting these interventions, repeating the process if necessary with different interventions.

Of course, all this raises a whole new set of practical questions. How does one actually intervene in each lower trigram wei, and, per each what does willing each yao entail? For example, how does one go about pushing a young yang yao in the heaven wei into changing-yang?

This will need to be addressed later.

Social metaphysics

Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Well, I took the slack bait and responded to one of those inane “watercooler topics”. I’m posting it only because the term social metaphysics emerged in my response, I think it’s a good coinage.

“Social metaphysics” has a nice ambiguity to it, too. It implies a socially shared metaphysics as well as a metaphysics of the social.

I take it both ways at once, of course, because somewhere in the neighborhood of Beriah, givens get radically polycentered — givens and takers, alike — each instaurating the other in givennesss.

Watch setting

History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

I heard someone say something darkly true: “Anyone more religious than you is fanatical; anyone less religious than you is profane.”

This same principle can be applied to just about any attempt at balance. Wherever we set our mean is the zero point between deficit and excess.

I say “set our mean” but in most cases, the mean is set for us. However far our group drifts, there we are. We read the news to calibrate our sense of normal. For the average intelligent citizen of wherever, whether that paper is the New York Times, Berliner Tageblatt or Pravda is purely an accident of place and time.

Chokhmah obscura

Everso, Kabbalah, Polycentered design

I think of Chokhmah as the infinitesimal pinhole of a camera obscura through which the infinite light of Keter projects into an almost as infinitesimal five-dimensional plane the width, breadth, depth, duration and awareness of the whole cosmogonic unfolding. In this projection within One, each one of us lives and dies as an everted holographic vision of the whole, a subject of Malkhut.

This is a response to a (god)heady passage from Scholem:

Among the symbolical descriptions of the unfolding of God in His revelation, special attention must be given to that which is based on the concept of the mystical Nothing. To the Kabbalist the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God; apart from that he admits of no act of creation worth that name which might be conceived as fundamentally different from the first inmost act and which takes place outside the world of the Sefirot. The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation.

The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefirot emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” [Keter] of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible. Nothing can change without coming into contact with this region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing. The difficult task of describing the emergence of the other Sefiroth from the womb of the first — the Nothing — is somehow managed with the aid of copious metaphors.

In this connection it may be of interest to examine a mystical jeu de mots which comes very close to the ideas of the Zohar and was already used by Joseph Gikatila. The Hebrew word for nothing, ain has the same consonants as the word for I, ani — and as we have seen, God’s “I” is conceived as the final stage in the emanation of the Sefirot, that stage in which God’s personality, in a simultaneous gathering together of all its previous stages, reveals itself to its own creation. In other words, the passage from ain to ani is symbolical of the transformation by which the Nothing passes through the progressive manifestation of its essence in the Sefiroth, into the I — a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought. Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking.

In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the “hidden cause.” To this comparison, Moses de Leon adds the symbolism of the point as the centre of the circle. The primordial point from Nothing is the mystical center around which the theogonical processes crystallize. Itself without dimensions and as it were placed between Nothing and Being, the point serves to illustrate what the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century call “the Origin of Being”, that “Beginning” of which the first word of the Bible speaks. The somewhat pompous phrases in which the opening lines of the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of creation describe this emergence of the primordial point — not indeed from the Nothing as remarked in another context, but from the ethereal aura of God — can serve as an example of the mystical imagery of the whole book:

“In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, En-Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En-Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its break-through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshit, that is ‘Beginning’, the first word of creation”

By the Zohar, as by the majority of the other Kabbalistic writers, this primordial point is identified with the wisdom of God, Chokhmah. God’s wisdom represents the ideal thought of Creation, conceived as the ideal point which itself springs from the impulse of the abysmal will. The author extends the comparison by likening it to the mystical seed which is sown into Creation, the point of comparison apparently being not only the subtlety of both but also the fact that in either the possibilities of further being are potentially, though as yet invisibly, existent.

Alchemical design

Design, Esoterism

Craft is material dialogue. Dialogue is conversation craft. Alchemy is the craft of crafts.

First, I intuited it implicitly in R. J. Bernstein and Gadamer. Later, I found it stated directly in Buber: our best access to divine being is through dialogue with others.

Dialogue presumes two things: alterity and a possibility of transformative understanding.

Dialogue requires two things: shared good faith to arrive at understanding and shared material to serve as the medium for this understanding.

In alchemy not just any material will do.

The material must be real enough to perform its configurative, transformative task.

In alchemy, material is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of ideal dross, and rendered pure matter (hyle), pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, soul is dissolved, freed from form, cleansed of accidental dross, and rendered pure spirit, pregnant with myriad reformative possibility.

In alchemy, fragmentary soul and material are dissolved and purified and passed through the narrow neck of the alembic into the chamber to combine and unite, and unified are then drawn back through the neck to recrystallize together, refaithed, rematerialized, reenworlded. New artifact, new artifex, new chamber.

This is why designers go to the rough ground of reality.

It is only here we find matter-rich materials that can support radical new understanding. What gets passed along in organizational media is precisely form, not matter. The form of the medium filters whatever data it cannot convey. The data that survives transmission is too anemic to support anything but compulsive rethinking of old thoughts.

It is the media, the material forms, the forms of understanding, the very soul-form of the organization that is in play in radical design.

Radical design is alchemy.

This sacrifice of form in radical design must be performed in the faith that resouling and reenworlding will redeem the sacrifice.

Subject and object shed form together in order to be reclothed, refurnished, rehoused, reenvironed together, all at once, in new enworldment.

This is the artifice of design.

Design is a craft requiring much technique, but much more than technique.

Mere technicians can only construct systems of unnatural artificiality. They are limited to assembling preformed components. They can build only structures the components afford. But today, the problem is the form of the components. This is why the design work of design technicians is sterile and entirely uninspiring, which is good enough in a joyless world that no longer desires or expects anything beyond fixed function.

The higher goal of design is second-natural artifice that summons whole worlds teeming with inconceivable new beings and meanings.

Alchemy might have preceded modern science, but modern science refused the very cornerstone of alchemy: its transformative Why.

This rejection of Why, first methodological, then later metaphysical, is the nihilism concealed in the heart of technik, which knows only the questions What and How, and hears that implicit question behind every truth. When someone asks “why?” the ear of technik hears a prescriptive “in order to what?” or a descriptive “how did this occur?”

Design is alchemy’s true heir, but to receive its inheritance it must reject the rejection of technicity.

Design must restore the Why to technik’s What-How so the technocratic world of techno-scientific engineering and management can answer to a higher Ought and serve our human purpose instead of enslaving humankind to its Whyless systems.

Not only are we allowed to do this, we must do what we Ought.