Category Archives: Religion

On the matter of Nietzsche

Metaphysics, Philosophy

The first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil — the most electrifying in all of philosophy — proposes a thematic question:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then?

I have incessant asked and re-asked this line for over twenty obsessive years, and today I ask it like this: Supposing truth, of all things, is a woman?

When Nietzsche asked this himself, in 1885, what was the matter with him? Or better, where was the matter for him?

Some hints from the preceding book: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

And another:

Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.

“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”

Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.

And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.

For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?

And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”

When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”

Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.

If only Salome had accepted Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. The painful lessons she could have taught him!

It took a decade, but my own wife taught me this: She cannot be reduced to who I imagine her to be. She is perpetually surprising. We will never stop defying my understanding, and if I confuse her for my understanding, the defiance might not be polite.

From this I know that matter is not who physics theorizes her to be.

Supposing reality is a woman — what then?

Supposing truth is marriage —

Ontological veils

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.

Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.

Darkness conceals visibly.

Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.

According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from

revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.

If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.

My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.

The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.

In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.

Designerly metaphysics

Design, Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Before any beginning is infinitude.

Pure infinitude. Ein sof.

Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.

At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.

Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.

Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.

For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.

From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.

Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.

Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.

Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.

Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.

In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.

The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.

The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.

The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.

And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.

Bright blood

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.

If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.

But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.

If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.

Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:

We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …

The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.

Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.

What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.

Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.

What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.

In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”

…

No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.

Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.

…

An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.

If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)

Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.

The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.

But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.

Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.

I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.

When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.

(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)

Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”

I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.

And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,

And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.

We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.

)O+

Ordinances of time

Existentialism, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Philosophy

More than once, in the depths of hangover I have yogiberraed a lamentational oath: “I am never drinking ever again, for at least a week.”

The griminess suggests crass oxymoron, but beneath the grime is a Bergsonian paradox — a paradox of time.

Oxymoron and paradox are both species of irony. They are both operations of dual-meaning, whose duality introduces a third meaning.

What divides paradoxic irony from oxymoronic irony is that oxymoron flatly self-contradicts, where paradox finds truth in parallactic depth across planes of givenness. Paradox’s humor is comedic in the classic sense, which is conjoined with tragedy — and this irony stands at world boundaries as a herm.

This same lamentational oath can be meant with oxymoronic irony. And when it is meant this way, it speaks psychologically: we are absurd, our intentions are absurd, and even our most earnest words are spoken with forked tongues. We speak basely even when we aspire. We speak basely especially when we aspire.

Oxymoron ridicules the human condition, where paradox sublimates it. Dry ironic eyes do not twinkle.

Speaking kabbalistically, in paradoxic irony one voice instaurates meaning in pshat and another voice instaurates meaning in remez, and the difference announces together-across-planes sounds a chord, a sensus communis, a depth witness of drash. The chord may be consonant or dissonant, but it resolves in depth-sounding truth, an articulation, not only within, but across worlds.

Drash is parallactic witness, and within it each chronological moment is witness to past, present and future. Some moments look forward, and these moments are promethean. Some moments look backward, and these moments are epimethean.

Some moments are perfect in themselves. Some moments long impossibly for an infinite elsewhere. Speaking mythically, this longing is guarded by the Hespirades, who hold it futile. A scrubbed, polished and decharmed cousin of the hangover lament: We pine for fleeting moments of eternity. We miss most of all eternities we had and lost because we conflate eternity and permanence. We long to taste, once again, lost golden fruit we never tasted.

If a titan can ironize — and this is doubtful — the irony of Cronus would be the most oxymoronic.

How exponentially metaironic would it be to attempt a four-eyed ironic depth of playing oxymoron against paradox?

If anyone ever attempted such a thing, it would be Nietzsche:

To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive — and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it: — women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction — for the sake of truth.

One of my most rock-tumbled aphorisms: “Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

A few years ago, when the aphorism was still rough, I expanded this idea into an exegesis on the philosopher’s stone.

When conflict breaks out, we are shaken out of unity, and fall into the four-sidedness of conflict. There is [1] what I believe, there is [2] what you believe, there is [3] what I think you believe and there is [4] what you think I believe.(Naive egocentricity, of course, sees only two sides: what I believe and what I know you believe. Until one overcomes naive egocentricity and learns to see conflict as four-sided, progress is impossible.)

To begin reconciliation we try to go from four-sided conflict to three-sided disagreement, where there is [1] what I believe, and there is [2] what you believe and there is [3] our shared understanding of our disagreement.

But sometimes when we reach a shared understanding of the disagreement we realize that this shared understanding has transcended and absorbed our old conflicting beliefs. This new understanding is no longer an agreement about a disagreement, but [1] a new shared belief. The three-sided disagreement is now a more expansive and accommodating unity.

So it’s one to four to three and then back to one. Repeat, ad infinitum.

This post is now entirely out of control.

Emanation?

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.

Notes on design esoterism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.

Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.

Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.

Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.

And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.

And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.

To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.

(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)

Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.

Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.

Esoterism wants to materialize.

Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.

Exnihilism is at the heart of it.

New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.

Freedom and slavery

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah

The Israelites received one of the earliest Axial Age transmissions on Sinai.

But even after the revelations through Moses, the Israelites begged for a king. Human beings, Jewish or otherwise, crave kings.

And they got what they wanted. In the words of H. L. Mencken, they “got it good and hard”.

Later, in the enslavement in Babylon, Jews lost kings and temple and were re-liberated under the One.

Back to the wilderness.

Back to the portable Mishkan — now sacred text.

Back, finally, to the Axial root of the faith.

Under a new angel?

Within finitude, Chesed must be bound by Gevurah, limitless mercy by limiting justice.

Both Aeschylus and the Zohar teach this.

Zohar: “The Binding of Abraham and Isaac”

“It came to pass after these devarim that Elohim tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as an ascent-offering.’” — GENESIS 22:1-2

Rabbi Shim’on said,

“We have learned that the expression “It came to pass in the days of” denotes sorrow, while the phrase “It came to pass”, even without “in the days of”, is tinged with sorrow.

“It came to pass after the lowest of all upper rungs.
Who is that? Devarim — as is said: “I am not a man of devarim, words” (Exodus 4:10)
Who came after this rung?
Elohim tested Abraham, for the evil impulse came to accuse in the presence of the blessed Holy One.

“Here we should contemplate: Elohim tested Abraham.
The verse should read: tested Isaac, since Isaac was already thirty-seven years old and his father was no longer responsible for him.
If Isaac had said, ‘I refuse,’ his father would not have been punished.
So why is it written: Elohim tested Abraham, and not Elohim tested Isaac?

“But Abraham, precisely!
For he had to be encompassed by judgment, since previously Abraham contained no judgment at all.
Now water was embraced by fire. Abraham was incomplete until now
when he was crowned to execute judgment, arraying it in its realm.
His whole life long he was incomplete until now when water was completed by fire, fire by water.

“So Elohim tested Abraham, not Isaac,
calling him to be embraced by judgment.
When he did so, fire entered water, becoming complete.
One was judged, one executed judgment, encompassing one another.
Therefore the evil impulse came to accuse Abraham, who was incomplete until he had executed judgment upon Isaac.
For the evil impulse appears after devarim, coming to accuse.

“Come and see the mystery of the word!
Although we have said that Abraham is written, not Isaac,
Isaac is encompassed by this verse through the mysterious wording:
Elohim tested et Abraham.
It is not written: tested Abraham, but rather: tested et Abraham — et, precisely!
This is Isaac, for at that time he dwelled in low power.
As soon as he was bound on the altar, initiated into judgment fittingly by Abraham, he was crowned in his realm alongside Abraham, fire and water encompassing one another, ascending.
Then division became apparent: water versus fire.

“Who would have created a compassionate father who turned cruel?
It was only so division would manifest: water versus fire crowned in their realms,
until Jacob appeared and everything harmonized, triad of Patriarchs completed, above and below arrayed.”

What is truth?

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.

The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.

Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?

Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.

Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.

Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.

The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.

But back to where we began: What is truth?

Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.

(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)

Jew hatred as affirmation of Judaism

Judaism, Politics

Hatred of Am Yisrael — variously expressed throughout history as anti-Judaism, antisemitism and now, anti-Zionism — is a reliable earmark of evil.

In the 20th century we have in the lineup some of the most distinguished villains of history: Nazis , Bolsheviks and Klansmen. In the 21st century the new lineup includes Islamist theofascists, the alt-right and progressivists.

I have been unable to find any credible secular explanation for this one and only point of agreement of so many horrible people, the destination reached by so many dark, snaking, spurious paths.

What feels most credible to me is that evil instinctively hates whatever is holy. Each evil being hates according to its own contorted logic and distorted lenses, and produces novel ideologies and justification for the hatred, but invariably each seeks in its own way to do the same thing — to displace and replace the covenant.

I abduce a hidden, unconscious, occult motive. Whatever and whoever wants to be God hates whatever reminds them of what they are not.

Gnostic epistemologies

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I see very little difference between the far left epistemology of emotion (feeling as fact) and far right epistemology of faith (intuition as truth).

Both commit a sin of antisocial gnosis, claiming privileged access to some preexistent given truth that can be accessed like a datum. The very making of such claims performatively contradicts the claim that one knows. The move demonstrates ignorance of what truth is and how it comes to be known. We approach truth collaboratively with others, and refusal to do so shows that we are mistaken about what truth is and what it does and how we relate to it.

Feelings are data. Spiritual and intellectual intuitions are data. Perceptions are data. Any datum can be mistaken. Only by forming, testing, reforming, retesting, iteratively and forever tentatively can we arrive at truth. Data can give us very compelling leads, but they are the start of possible truth, not conclusions.

The process of developing possible truth and seeing some succeed and some fail, and others succeed for a long time only to fail later, or to see two conflicting possible truths each succeed for a long time, or to see one truth yield to another without ever fully failing, or best of all, to experience the surrender of one truth to accommodate another, and discover an even more successful truth… this experience of the plurality of truths and their interactions opens up a yet higher level of truth, but with radically different character from the ones that revealed it.

Gnostic epistemologies are elaborate category mistakes.

Tetragrammaton lesson

Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Symbols and diagrams

Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.

Continue reading Tetragrammaton lesson →

Crossing design with Kabbalah

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Pluricentrism

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

  • Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
  • Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
  • Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
  • Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
  • Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
  • Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
  • Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

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Olamot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.

What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.

What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.

What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.

What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.

Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.

Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.

Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.

Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.

Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.

Karl Schwab, monopolarchist

Metaphysics, Politics

I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.

I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.

First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.

Our role is to “buy in.”

We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.

Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.

Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.

Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.

We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.

Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.

And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!

And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.