Category Archives: Religion

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct ??a?rtificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

Cosmic collapse inspo

Autobiography, Esoterism, History, Philosophy, Religion

I have momentarily shifted attention from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Dodd’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Both books discuss the human condition after the fall of the Second Temple, in the years between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. This was also the time when ideas emerged that would eventually converge, coalesce and crystallize into Kabbalah.

Why this book? Because that time feels uncannily similar to now. It was a time of political instability, social dissolution and personal alienation. It was a time of intense, pervasive anomie. Public life could no longer serve as a source of meaning. The few who sought meaning, sought it within themselves and in small communities of others who did the same. The rest lived lives of quiet, noisy or violent desperation, delusion or predation.

This was the time that developed new forms of religious culture which have become so second-natural to us that we find it difficult to conceptualize religion or culture any other way. It dominates even our imaginations. And I think this time resembles that one in that both are ends of apparently eternal orders suddenly revealed as mortal, fragile, rapidly expiring. The main difference is that what is ending now, is what started then. I am — at least in my own imagination — recollecting our cradle from our deathbed, remembering how that cradle was, too, a deathbed. The books I am reading now are intellectual histories of that time, that give samples of how some of the seminal geniuses of the time experienced, interpreted and responded to a cosmos in collapse.

I suppose you could say I’m collecting cosmic collapse inspo and “best practices”.

Chuang Tzu’s Useless Tree

Taoism

Have I really never posted Chuang Tzu’s “The Useless Tree” on this anomablogue?

Carpenter Shih went to Ch’i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn’t even glance around and went on his way without stopping. His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, “Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don’t even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?”

“Forget it — say no more!” said the carpenter. “It’s a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they’d sink; make coffins and they’d rot in no time; make vessels and they’d break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It’s not a timber tree — there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old!”

After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, “What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs — as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don’t get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves — the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it’s the same way with all other things.

“As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this — things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die-how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”

When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said, “If it’s so intent on being of no use, what’s it doing there at the village shrine?”

“Shhh! Say no more! It’s only resting there. If we carp and criticize, it will merely conclude that we don’t understand it. Even if it weren’t at the shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards, you’ll be way off!”

Fertile overlap

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.

Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.

Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.

Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.

The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.

Punchline

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.

Scholem on originality and tradition

Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics

A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.

Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.

But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.

Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.

There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.

Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.

The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.

It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.

Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.

It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.

Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)

To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.

This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.

Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.

And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.

Undead but undying

Design, Kabbalah

Oh!…

I just finished reading Robert Alter’s foreword to Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and the concluding paragraph delivered a powerful jolt of insight.

Scholem’s ability to understand the power of this root contradiction [between irruptions of profuse mythic life into antimythical monotheism] and at the same time to hold it in a steady critical perspective explains much of the continuing cogency of his vision of history. The archaic past, as well as the manifold later accretions of tradition, aurochs and angels alike, remains part of our collective heritage, and because it both reflects what once engaged humanity and addresses deep human needs that refuse to disappear, it cannot be jettisoned. In this regard, Scholem’s searching investigation of the twisting paths of Jewish mysticism makes profoundly instructive reading as we approach the millennium. But he also sees sharply that the mystics, impelled by discernible historical circumstances, very often sought to escape the ordeal of history by withdrawing into a realm of ecstasy and, at worst, delusion. Thus he observes of the Merkabah mystics after the fourth century who endured an era of persecution by the Church, “from the world of history the mystic turns to the prehistoric period of creation, from whose vision he seeks consolation, or towards the post-history of redemption.” With minor adjustments, this generalization holds for each of the major trends that Scholem surveys — the pietists of medieval Germany, the Spanish Kabbalists, the Safed school of Isaac Luria, the Sabbatians, and the Hasidim. The historian and his implied audience, of course, do not have the luxury of seceding from history and cannot indulge in the Sabbatian delusion that history can be forced to an end. Scholem’s magisterial study is hardly intended to promote a nostalgia for mysticism or any illusion that we can embrace it as it was, but he makes us see the essential role it has played in the Jewish story, and indeed in the human story, and he leads us to ponder what other symbolic languages there might be to express our stubborn sense of connection with eternal things.

The insight was an illumination of some remarks made by David Biale concerning Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”.

In 1958, Gershom Scholem published a series of ten aphoristic statements entitled “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala.” Although later republished in the third volume of his collected German essays, Judaica, these aphorisms have received little or no attention in the English-reading world, despite their considerable interest both for Scholem’s own thought and as philosophical reflections on some fundamental issues in the Kabbalah. The word unhistorical in the title immediately suggests Scholem’s intention to take off the hat of historian and philologian that he wore in most of his writings and to look at his material from a different perspective. Since Scholem’s primary achievements lay in the history and philology of the Kabbalah, his more philosophical and theological reflections have often been treated as occasional pieces, peripheral to his main contribution. I have argued elsewhere that an understanding of Scholem as a historian requires an examination of these writings and attention to his place in modern Jewish thought. …

One of the main characteristics of these aphorisms is just such an interplay between historical theses and modern philosophical language. Scholem boldly suggests parallels between modern schools of thought and the Kabbalah: dialectical materialism and the Lurianic Kabbalah, phenomenology and Moses Cordovero, Franz Kafka and the eighteenth-century Frankist Jonas Wehle. At the end of aphorism 4, he notes: “The conception of the Kabbalists as mystical materialists with a dialectical tendency would certainly be thoroughly unhistorical, yet anything but meaningless.” At first blush, to impose modern categories on a historical subject would certainly seem unhistorical. Yet Scholem assumes that the philosophical issues treated by both the Kabbalah and modern philosophy are universal, even as they are addressed historically in different terms by different movements. The seemingly “unhistorical” procedure of these aphorisms is therefore philosophically meaningful: modern philosophy and the Kabbalah illuminate and explicate the same problems and can therefore shed light on each other. But it is also historically meaningful because it allows the modern sensibility to grasp a system of thought that appears initially alien and remote.

…This telescoping of historical ideas by viewing them through modern prisms is not, however, a subject only for “unhistorical” aphorisms. It lies at the heart of one of the classic problems of all historical work: What changes do ideas necessarily undergo as they are refracted through the eyes of a historian whose categories of thought are historically different? The very ability of the historian to reconstruct the past lies in his finding a common ground or common language between himself and his sources: if the past is utterly alien, it cannot be reconstructed. Hence, the historian must engage in a delicate balancing act between past and present, maintaining the bridge between them without collapsing one into the other. The fact that Scholem gives explicit consideration to this issue in these aphorisms does not mean that he ignored it in his historical work. On the contrary, one can find repeated instances where he consciously used modern categories to illuminate and explicate problems in the Kabbalah. Indeed, one of the keys to Scholem’s success as a historian of the Kabbalah was in turning an ostensibly alien system of ideas into one with a contemporary resonance and urgency. Yet unlike Martin Buber, who also found striking parallels between modern thought and the Kabbalah, Scholem was largely able to maintain the distinction between them.

…

For Scholem’s own purposes, the aphoristic style clearly held particular attraction. Although these aphorisms are “on” or “about” (über) Kabbalah, they are, in their own way, Kabbalistic in both style and content. In order to convey the parallels between the intellectual problems of the modern historian and those of the Kabbalists, Scholem adopts Kabbalistic formulations that he, of course, avoided in his more historical essays. The aphorism conveys a sense of mystery and impenetrability: opaqueness is almost part of its definition. The sense of secrets hidden behind the explicit text in an aphorism is thus reminiscent of the Kabbalah, for which truth is by nature secret (sod). Aphorisms mirror the Kabbalistic concept of esoteric truths.

That which is hidden cannot be expressed without altering its meaning, and therefore the aphorism, which suggests more than it expresses, is a better vehicle for these reflections than direct exposition. Hence, Scholem’s choice of aphorisms is itself proof of the relationship between the historian of the Kabbalah and his subject matter. Indeed, the very number of aphorisms — ten — hints at a Kabbalistic “subtext,” for that is the number of sefirot (divine emanations). And just like the sefirot themselves, these aphorisms are at once discrete and seemingly unlinked to one another, yet at the same time unified by a common theme that is treated in each from a different angle. That theme, to which we have already alluded, is the fundamental tension or even paradox of communicating a truth that is, by definition, secret or hidden.

What is the definition of a “secret” (Geheimnis)? On the one hand, it may be something that is known but deliberately hidden, or, it may be that which is essentially inaccessible (hidden by nature rather than by design). It is this latter sense of a secret that Scholem has in mind here. Kabbalistic truth is inaccessible because God is transcendent. Historical truth is inaccessible because the past cannot be known in the same way we know the perceptual world. Both Kabbalist and historian face the same problem of how to convey a truth that is hidden.

The subtle influence of the Kabbalah on Scholem as a historian becomes particularly apparent in deciphering the language of the aphorisms. Scholem writes in German but often thinks in the technical language of the Kabbalah (either Hebrew or Zoharic Aramaic). Thus, a correct understanding of the text requires sensitivity to the Kabbalistic language lurking behind it. For instance, in discussing the epistemology of the Kabbalah, he uses the term Erkenntnis (knowledge). Yet it becomes clear in the context that he has in mind the Kabbalah’s understanding of knowledge in the form of the sefirah (divine emanation) called hokhmah (wisdom). One is thus faced with the problem of grasping both the philosophical vocabulary and its Kabbalistic background in reading the text. …

It is almost as if Scholem’s historic hermeneutics — the entering, exiting, contrasting, comparing of differing yet connected enworldments — was itself a kind of Kabbalistic praxis. And not only “almost as if” — he was clearly was doing historiological work as a kabbalist.

And indeed any hermeneutic praxis — whether Talmudic study, historiological scholarship, or (who knows?) maybe design! — can inject a kabbalistic interiority, a vivifying soul, into a traditional exoteric practice. A covert Kabbalist can preserve the practices and the language of the exoteric tradition, but circulate something else, something palpably, vividly, but nonobjectively alive — into what is otherwise mechanical, or dead or which is dead but still functioning soullessly — undead. Because “it takes a long time, but gods die, too.” All living being, all living traditions, all living organizations — are mortal.

Traditions who last over millennia learn to reensoul themselves once they “die inside” while preserving their traditional continuity. Anyone who interprets such reensoulment as an indictment of what came before might wholeheartedly idolize what comes after, but they know not what they worship, and they know not what they do when they obsessive-compulsively recrucify their eternal scapegoat.

It is Shabbat, but please hold your stones.

What is a profession, if not an exoteric tradition formed around some domain of activity?

New disciplines are inspired to life by need. They start wild. They grope their way to form and eventually, gradually, they congeal into professions.

Then the profession institutionalizes.

People go to school and are taught it.

A generation of students enter the profession without ever experiencing the problems raw or grappling with them without a toolbox filled with prefabricated techniques and little instruction manuals on how to use them.

The wild background thins, dissipates, and eventually vanishes altogether. And the better a practitioner is educated for the field — the more filled up with expertise, the more highly trained in technique, the better versed in methodology one is, the less present those initial chaotic conditions that inspired the profession in the first place are known or even perceived.

The expert carries his well-equipped toolbox of expertise, and everything looks like his kind of nail.

But with the loss of the wild background, comes loss of inspiration.

The priest class becomes the most ignorant of all of the subject of worship.

And now comes, leaden, dead, technical nihilism, animated by momentum, grinding duty and impersonal social mechanisms.

The discipline is now leadenly led (managed, administered, enforced) by uninspired, dead-souled, dispirited, dispiriting experts, and anyone who follows such leaders falls into the same careerist rut.

These are the times when professions lose their way and are ripe for reensoulment. Their traditional exoteric body lies dead — or, worse, slouches along in a zombie death march of loveless duty — but that disanimated or dysanimated corpse can be reawakened and revived by exactly the kind of inward, esoteric yet tradition-preserving revolution described and actualized by Scholem.

An enworldment that forms across comparison among enworldments is not just one more enworldment. It is a vaseface among vases and faces, a duckrabbit among ducks and rabbits. It is inexhaustible readings in a world of this doctrine and that. It is the history of histories, in a world of history.

Glimpsing the invisible nihilitude dividing finitude from finitude discloses infinitude. Now we receive, conduct, return.

Kabbalah, kashrut, teshuvah.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Navel gaze

Autobiography, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Letterpress

A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.

Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.

Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.

It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.

It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.

And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.

Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.

This can happen to anyone at any moment.

The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.

(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)

I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.

Where was I?

Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.

(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)

This is not a tree

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.

I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.

Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.

Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.

The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.

So many things are not a tree.

A city is not a tree.

A service is not a tree.

An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.

Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.

History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.

A culture is not a tree.

A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.

The Tree of Life is not a tree.

Nearing all

Religion

Young: “I can’t see how I could possibly be wrong, therefore I must be right.”

Old: “I can’t see how I could possibly be wrong, therefore I must be ignorant.”

Nobody feels their shortcomings more than a moral person. Likewise, or identically: When we become sensitized to the divine ground, we feel more acutely that remaining shimmering veils of nihilitude who shelters and sustains our finite being.

Thus “the lonely man of faith”. The thinner the separation the more keenly it is felt.

Yes, but

Religion

The first challenge to the religious life is objective reification, which peoples the spiritual world with beings with supernatural properties.

The second challenge to the religious life is subjective deification, which replaces the false scales fallen from the initiate’s eyes with new true ones.

The third challenge to the religious life is apophatic nihilism, which confuses nihilitude for infinitude, and produces radical relativism. “What truth is there beyond subject? Nothing! The transcendent truth is revealed to be nothingness: divine void.”

The fourth challenge to the religious life is whatever I’m obliviously blundering into to right now.

False humility of disingenuous doubt, perhaps.

Fact is, I do know something to which I was oblivious before. Yes, but isn’t that how it always is?

Yes, but this is known in a different mode of knowing. Yes, but when has insight happened any other way? How can you know you haven’t just upgraded scales?

But this time is radically different from the other times.

Yes, but come on. Do I really have to say it? Every time is different; and that, precisely, is what makes it exactly the same. But from the center of the universe, where you sit, this center is unlike the others, ‘coz it knows about the hazards of knowing — ignorance, blindness, self-delusion, institutional bigotry and, of course, bias. Have you been popping pills of color, Awoken One? Just Say No. You’re no better than DEIfiers of the reigning ideological subject (who this time is finally undeluded about its own objective goodness), or gullible consumers of intel on how gullible consumers of fake intel are being fed fake intel. Don’t make me beat this dead horse with its own horseshoe.

But can I believe in my heart that this time is, in fact, the same as the others? Can I sincerely doubt my own insight? Peirce’s lesser-known maxim: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

Yes, yes, whatever. But have we forgotten how an inability to doubt is no more than intellect failing at its own limits, and then adding moral insult to intellectual injury by flattering the defeat as a triumph? We are persuaded by the proof of faith now? What are you, a nun?

But by all means, old man, have your laurel wreath — braided through with Algernon blossoms.

The choice:

I can inhabit my finite faith and speak from its heart. I can be I, here, now, wrapped up in the tragicomic oblivion that makes me who I am, and protects me from being anyone and everyone and no one else.

Or I can endlessly apologize to supercilious ventriloquist cynics staring down from the dislocated peaks of Tartarus.

Hermetic design

Design, Esoterism

To gather physical and logical materials together in concerted cooperative function is a triumph of experimental technique. It is convergence of earth and man.

To inspire people, to touch and move them, to form, ensoul and animate selfhood from the tiniest spark of intuition to the grandest community is a miracle of culture. It is convergence of heaven and man.

To do both — to draw heaven and earth together so they touch, interpenetrate and dwell in us, through us, among us and around us — this is the highest aspiration of alchemy. It is the enworlding craft of design.