Category Archives: Religion

Designerly hypostatization

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Ruach (Spirit) can intuit existential threat, just like Nefesh (Soul), but where Nefesh returns to dust (Hyle), Ruach returns to Neshamah (Nous). In both cases, finite being anticipates its dissolution and reabsorption into the indefinite nothingness from which finite life emerges.

Ruach, however, can ascend through the veil of nihilitude, and dissolve in Neshamah, before redescending, reconstituted ex nihilo in a newly given world — without returning Nefesh to the earth.

This is what “born of the spirit” means: Ruach is reborn from Neshamah, and Nefesh finds itself re-selved and re-enworlded.

Neshamah is the superpersonal Self in the hypostasis of creation-revelation ex nihilo known as Beriah.

Ruach is the transpersonal self in the hypostasis of transcendental subjectivity known as Yetzirah.

Nefesh is the objectified person in the hypostasis of objective actuality known as Asiyah.

Nihilitude separates Ruach from Ruach, and all Ruach from Neshamah, in whom every Ruach subsists. Ruach dreads the piercing of nihilitude and the inconceivable indefinitude beyond everything.

Exnihilation and annihilation are indistinguishable from below; from above the distinction is unimportant. To Neshamah, birthpangs, deathpangs, graves and cradles are all alike — finitude desperately and futilely defining itself against its infinite ground. To Nefesh, every pang is a potential threat to present life, and life is to be preserved at all cost.

Existential dread is the herald of transcendental reformation. Nefesh fears demise. Ruach fears damnation. Neshamah repels as it attracts, leaving the choice open.

Is this the metaphysical truth? No.

Are these Neoplatonic hypostases hypostatized? Yes!

It is a design meant to faithfully situate and orient any self who adopts its implicit transcendental subjectivity — as a fully present I-here-now, aware of and responsive to its transcendent ground.

The transcendental subject is its “hermeneutic presequence“. Its pragmatic consequence is an evolving world rendered intelligible, livable and valuable, inexhaustibly renewable ex nihilo, liberated from nihilism.

Its given reality is manifestly valuable: our material world, nature and artifice alike; our inherited past and our future bequeathal; our inner potential unfolding in participation in life with others.

What makes this philosophical design true is the faithfulness of its situating ideas to its given world. It harmonizes given reality and given truth, and at times the two even seem one and the same. Circular? Spiral.

Why the arcane language? Partly its aptness. Partly because our situation convenes a plurality of ancestral inheritances — Hebrew, Indian, Greek… — and we owe gratitude. I cannot prove this, but neither can I doubt it.

…

So, what can I do to get you to drive home today in this shiny, terrific new enworldment?

Intertranscendental

Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

The word transcendental is becoming increasingly important to me. I just did a search for the term “transcendental” and there are surprisingly few returns. But those few packed some interesting insights, if only autobiographically so. One in particular is incredibly relevant to my current (postneoplatonic?) project:

…subjectivity can be thematized in two radically different ways, namely in a natural or psychological reflection on the one hand, and in a pure or transcendental reflection on the other. When I perform a psychological reflection, I am interpreting the act reflected upon as a psychical process, that is, a process occurring in a psycho-physical entity that exists in the world. This type of self-consciousness — which Husserl occasionally calls a mundane self-consciousness — is just as worldly an experience as, say, the experience of physical objects, and if one asks whether it can provide us with an adequate understanding of subjectivity, the answer is no. Natural reflection presents us with a constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject, but it does not provide us with an access to the constituting, transcendental dimension of subjectivity.

It is here that the pure or transcendental reflection is introduced, since its specific task is to thematize a subjectivity stripped from all contingent and transcendent relations and interpretations.

This excerpt is from Dan Zahavi’s Husserl’s Phenomenology.

It makes a technically precise distinction between the “lower” two selves of the Kabbalah. Nefesh (soul) is the “constituted, objectified, and naturalized subject”, and Ruach is the transcendental subject. Back when I was into poetically claiming that souls are universe-sized — or that a soul comprises the fullest pragmatic consequence of what we (each of us) can mean when we say “everything” — or when I’d say that “everythings vary in size” and that “some everythings are bigger than others” — or when I wanted to write a book called Ten-Thousand Everythings — and so on — what I was talking about was Ruach, in the plural: spirits, transcendental subjects.

The principle animates one of my favorite provocations: a personal subject and an academic subject are both subjects in the same sense. And that same sense is that both are essentially transcendental subjects. And, as happens with all transcendental subjects, the transcendental subject gets reduced to the objective subject matter, or rather the content, since much of the content is not material at all, though it is frequently materialized in application and examples.

I assess mystics and philosophers by how aware and alive they are to the peculiarities of transcendental being, which is always participatory, and never directly accessible to the comprehension of the objective mind. This knowing is far more performative than epistemic.

What interests me at this moment is one particular word: intersubjective.

When philosophers use it, the subject in question is a transcendental subject.

But if we are not careful, we easily vulgarize intersubjectivity into interactions between objectified subjects, and thematize it into interpersonal psychology, politics or the like. It turns into explorations of differing feelings, values, “lived experiences” and so on, and, even if “priors” are ritually listed, the transcendental “a-priors” are naively, innocently but often aggressively smuggled in as “objectively” true and inarguable. This type of intersubjectivity almost always imposes a transcendental subject upon participants in any “dialogue” it conducts, and it renders authentic dialogue impossible.

Because dialogue constrained and refereed by one transcendental subject, when precisely that transcendental subject is what is in question, is not authentic dialogue at all. It is conversation between two objectified subjects dominated by one transcendental subject.

Authentic dialogue is intertranscendental. Dialogue is a meeting of two transcendental subjects who answer to something beyond either, whose truth transcends the objective given truth of each transcendental subject, and which is neither objective, nor transcendental, but determinative of transcendental possibility and all objective validity.

It is to this source of appeal that rabbis refer when they speak of machloket l’shem shamayim (argument for the sake of Heaven) as a kind of disagreement with a truth of its own that is truer than either side of the dispute.

In order to engage in intertranscendental dialogue we must maintain loyalty to something higher than our own transcendental subject and whatever objective reality and truth are given by it.

This appeal is made to a transcendent being — transcendent vis-a-vis any transcendental subject — a transcendent superpersonal “self” called Neshamah.

And this is what my postneoplatonic framework is indicating — for those with enceptions to conceive what is given.

Note: In case it is not obvious, “postneoplatonic” is meant to be funny.

“Enception”

Metaphysics, Philosophy

I’ve struggled to develop concepts and language around the idea of “enceptions”, a capacity to take-as-given some form of experience, whether concept or percept. These forms are received as gestalt wholes, and poking around etymonline.com I’ve succumbed to the temptation to steal some Heideggerian jargon and use it in a clashingly confusing way: gestell. A gestell or enception — I am using them synonymously — receives some experience as a gestalt.

An enception is not — and necessarily cannot be — an intentional object of experience, but is rather a condition for any objective given. To steal and misuse yet more jargon from eminent Germans, an enception (or gestell) is a transcendental “category”. My Kantianism is akin to Cassirer’s.

So givenness of a form is dependent on a capacity to take it. This much is simple. But how does one account for enceptions, especially with respect to acquisition of new capacities?

One central fact must be considered: enceptions rarely, if ever, occur in isolation. They tend to change entire fields of experience, as if crystallizing a supersaturated solution of perplexity. A re-understanding of one particular truth seems to ripple instantaneously across one’s understanding of everything, on the whole and in every part.

I’m re-rereading my all-time favorite book, by Richard J. Bernstein, and in it he quotes Thomas Kuhn saying:

When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, …when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

But does the change really originate in the particular idea? Does the change of understanding radiate outward from the idea in question?

The question reminds me of our casual notions of lightning. We tend to assume movement from some set point of origin in the sky. But the apparent movement of lightning is not an object moving from one place to another — bolts mythically hurled from clouds — but, rather, a charged field, the site of a complex resolution of destabilized difference, that dramatically strikes certain objects in the path of change. What seems to be the origin is sometimes the destination, or one of multiple origins destined to meet at one or more cracking midpoints.

Increasingly, enceptions strike me as articulations of an all-inclusive field, and that the field itself somehow determines the natural jointing of the articulations. And our own linguistic articulation tends to follow the forking fracture-lines of this field, producing the famous and disputed correspondence between word and thing.

According to this conception, the field itself — the all-inclusive “everything” — is what changes, and the focal object, the thing that induced the change to the field, is one of myriad simultaneous effects in this restructuring of the field.

The field is all-inclusive everything both actual and possible, beyond which nothing can be conceived, and therefore exteriorless — at least objectively.

This is what Levinas called a totality. And Heidegger’s gestell (as opposed to my own) is clearly (at least as it seems to me) an example of one totality that takes givens in a distinctive way.

Some totalities confuse their apparent all-inclusivity with infinity.

But a totality is a quasi-infinitude. Each totality is only one of a plurality — one within One — a real, realistic image of a reality that infinitely exceeds its comprehension.

Each totality strives to contain all others, and to the degree it succeeds, it fails.

Despite the philosopher who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds — “Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, which every thinking mind will strive to overcome” (Hobbes) — I would even allow myself to rank philosophers according to the quality of their laughing — up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And supposing that Gods also philosophize, which I am strongly inclined to believe, owing to many reasons — I have no doubt that they also know how to laugh thereby in an overman-like and new fashion — and at the expense of all serious things! Gods are fond of ridicule: it seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even in holy matters. — Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Conception articulates ideal forms from an all-comprehensive, exteriorless whole — a quasi-infinity. The articulations are capacities to take as given a set of possible and actual forms within a given reality.

This is why our fundamental conceptions matter so much to us — our metaphysics, our key symbols, our founding stories, our given truths — literally everything and every given thing is at stake.

Construction combines givens into systems of various complexity and scale.

Construction builds up larger units from smaller ones, but every unit is given by conception, each articulated from the largest conceivable universal unit.

But some construction can destabilize the conceptive order.

And some construction can force a partial or total reconception.

Like forking lightning the totality shatters the whole into new articulations and new shards, new givens.

“Transcendental tinkering”

Design, Esoterism, Philosophy

“Transcendental tinkering” is a nice slangy expression of what theosophy actually does.

What theosophy claims to do is much better handled by design. I will say it again: Design fulfills alchemy’s hopes.

This fulfillment only happens, however, when design does its deep work of transcendental tinkering.

When it limits itself to aesthetic and functional tinkering, design betrays its promise.

Third runner-up: “psyche hacking”.

Designerly praxis, hexis, psyche, nous

Design, Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Faith is a subjective integral stability that takes reality as given in some particular way.

I have understood praxis as the reciprocity between practice-informed theory and theory-guided practice. I think this is right as far as it goes. But praxis always has a knowing-doing subject, and that subject is developed through praxis.

Is it habit? Certainly habit is necessary. Social constructivists would love it to be sufficient.

It is not, however, sufficient. Not every construction, however habituated to it we might become, is spontaneously recognized as a gestalt. Some complex forms stabilize as simple gestalts, where others remain familiar complexities that we are able to construe with increasing speed and ease. Contrary to constructivist prejudice, gestalt recognition isn’t double-plus fast construal and construction. It is a spontaneously recognized form latent in a person’s given sense of everything, much as stable crystal formations are latent in a supersaturated solution. Perceptive and conceptive wholes — gestalts — articulate within a metaphysic supersaturated with formal potentiality. With apologies to Heidegger, I call any capacity for gestalt gestell. (Technik is only one degraded possibility of gestell, just as the They is only one degraded possibility of public being.)

Beneath habit — and often in existential tension with it — is faith.

(When faith stabilizes on an atomistic, reductionistic understanding of reality and forms habits of distrusting gestalts and accepting only systematic accounts, the tension between habit and faith snaps, and social constructionism becomes self-evidently true. Your skepticism is selective, o ye of excessive habit.)

At the heart of praxis is faith-in-motion that integrates and stabilizes in the midst of the practice-theory cycle. Faith is both the cause and the effect of praxis.

This morning I wrote an email to a professor, to get advice on possible programs of study. In this email, I described what I have been doing in the wee hours of the morning for the last quarter century:

Background: I have been working as a human-centered designer (HCD) for the last three decades, while spending my mornings trying to find adequate conceptual framing and language for HCD. Design work is material and systematic, but it is also intersubjective and conceptual; ultimately, it involves as much transcendental tinkering as it does material craft. Designers tend to strategically suppress these esoteric undersides of our craft. I think the field would benefit from clear articulation of the realities of our work.

My studies have led me into some iffy corners of the philosophical world. I wouldn’t call these regions irrational, but they might not be acknowledged as philosophical in some philosophy departments.

My reason for pursuing a degree is that I have been working in isolation for decades, without any critical accountability or community, and I think my work has suffered for it. But the wrong kind of criticism can be worse than none.

I have developed a design praxis. I want to convey this praxis to other designers so we are equipped to explain and justify ourselves to others. Some of that equipment will be arms and armor.

Zeno’s Golden Rule

Ethics, Fructivism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Years ago, I got embroiled in a debate regarding the value of the Golden Rule.

My philosophical sparring partner said the rule invited superficial abuse. We run the risk of doing to or for others what we would want, instead of what they would want.

My argument is that application of the Golden Rule itself is also subject to the Golden Rule. Would you have another apply the Golden Rule superficially to impose their preferences upon you? No? Then how would you have the Golden Rule applied? Do that.

Now let’s say that even this meta-application of the Golden Rule results in something unwanted by the recipient of our well-intentioned act. Now what? Apply the Golden Rule again. Perhaps we would have them learn what we want (or even if we want something done) before doing something to or for us? Maybe we would have them ask us about it, or even ask for our explicit permission.

But even here, preferences vary. For example, if I were to ask my wife permission before kissing her, she would have refused every time, each time with intensified disgust. But she did want me to be attuned to her and not just barge in whenever I got an impulse. The Golden Rule required me to learn to read the waters over an alien and mysterious psyche, and, further — crucially — that I maintain respect precisely for this mysteriousness. Trying to explicate the mystery meant instant ick. Ok! I got to work learning how to intuitively navigate this incomprehensible terrain, because I have my own weird ways, too, and I wish to have them respected as a condition of deepened intimacy.

How many recursions of the Golden Rule was involved in this last example?

As many recursions as intervals of space traversed by Achilles in Zeno’s thought experiment.

Achille infinite traversals are an artifact of the framing of Zeno’s problem, not individual acts of traversal. Only by confusing cognition with being does motion seem impossible, despite motion.

Ultimately, the Golden Rule, understood radically, points to a reality that cognition renders impossible.

We intuit that transcendent being — being who transcends intelligibility.

Some of this transcendent reality lives in the people around us.

And some of what we have decided to honor as Transcendence is the most immanent thing of all, the graven images of our own intelligible imagination!

Mystical experiences, inspiring ideas, answered prayers — they are all so easy compared to the infuriating arbitrariness of a spouse, friend, neighbor or enemy.

“What resists is real.” — Bruno Latour

Crystallizing ring

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Religion

Faiths are profoundly weird things.

To start with, faiths are not things at all, nor are they made out of things. Faiths are not constructions, and they cannot be constructed.

The logic of a faith — and faiths always do have a logic — is a logic that emerges from it. The faith precedes and produces the logic.

This is true even when they express themselves as arguments, as they do in ideological expressions.

Hearing the testimony of a convert persuaded by an ideological or doctrinal argument, it rarely seems as though the logic of the argument was what compelled belief. The logic serves more as an adhesive for constructing an idea that, once assembled, can be recognized — conceived as a whole — a crystallizing ring that reorders all, centrifugally and centripetally. Or it is the processional order (seder, liturgy) of a participation that keeps moving after the ritual concludes. The logic does not prove, it animates one’s thinking, speaking, acting and feeling. One is moved by faith.

It seems that this animating conception, once conceived and in motion, takes the believer in. This taking-in reconstitutes the believing, the believed-in world and the believer.

The reality remains as it always was, but inhabited differently. And this inhabiting is not even primarily theoretical. It is practical. It is material. Such conceptions transform and re-enworld a person and that person’s relationship with the givenness of literally everything and every possible thing everything comprises.

Once moved by faith, belief itself moves by faith, is animated in faith.

An incomprehensible truth: The particular beliefs themselves are not the material of the faith or its enworldment, though they seem to be, but rather a product of the faith and an artifact of the enworldment. They are the fruit by which the faith is known, but they must never be confused with the faith itself, which cannot be grasped by the fruit. One does not possess a tree, much less an orchard, by eating apples.

To treat a faith as a belief-system, or to speak of faith as if it is a degree of strength of conviction that a belief-system is true — these indicate profound religious confusion. Religion is only expressed as doxa, it is not constructed from doxa. Anyone who tries to build a religion out of doxa is more likely to be buried alive in word rubble than to penetrate the roof of heaven.

In nature, conception initiates gestation. Cells grow and divide, differentiate and multiply, within a viable environment. In spirit, conception initiates an articulate gestalt within an intelligible All. Givens divide and grow, differentiate and multiply… eventually into constructible quantities. In both cases we are like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous joke. “How’s the amniotic fluid, embryos?”

How’s the faith, spirits?

What the hell is faith?

Be careful what you inhabit, for you will become of it.

All this is a reflection on a wayward mystic friend, addicted to online edgelord content, somehow in lockstep agreement with edgelord doxa. Anyone who comes to second-naturally despise India, Indians, Jews and Israel — two peoples of mystical genius — will cacophonize against my own faith. It’s all doxa, for sure, but its opinion on what is ortho is wrong — diabolically wrong. In ancient Hebrew it is the heart — lev — who thinks. Do not presume that abstract mourning is less felt.

Transcendental pluralism

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Transcendentalism across its varieties claims that experience, including thought, imagination and perception — in other words, inner and outer and everything between — has some necessarily a priori structure by which it is given, which conditions that given world.

I am what could be called a transcendental pluralist.

The psychic order by which experience is given can legitimately vary, sometimes radically, but these various orders are not arbitrary. Only some transcendental orders are possible.

An authentic transcendental structure clicks and crystallizes into an articulate sense of everything, to which experiences are given and conceived together. This is what a subject is, when understood properly, that is, nonobjectively.

The conditions of any possible transcendental order are the metasubject of metaphysics, and its truth is the furthest thing from objective. It is the source of subjectivity, and subjectivity is the condition of objectivity and the phenomenon of objects.

Transcendental orders can be induced to change. Such changes are conversions.

The event of conversion — whether a minor insight on some aspect of one’s life about which one (literally) changes one’s mind, a scientific paradigm, a philosophical turn, or a religious conversion — these are all top-down reorderings of transcendental organization.

Conversions are hard to understand and talk about. They are impossible to understand without reference to an actual experience of conversion.

But those without such experience go ahead and understand them anyway, by whatever understanding of everything they already have. These misunderstandings are the stuff of religious and antireligious fanaticism.

The strongest opinions on religion — for and against, alike — are held by people lacking all religious experience. Some have altered their belief systems, but only the irreligious can confuse belief systems with religion, or strength of conviction that these belief systems are true with faith. There is fervent emotional passion about beliefs — pro and con — but this fervor is not religious, but in fact the diabolical opposite.

Faith is transcendental organization, and faith “in something” is a function of fit between the articulate organs of faith’s essential organization and some conceptual, material or practical system.

What constructivists (and relativists) miss is the question of responsibility.

Any construction that aspires to truth must respond to matter and it must respond to transcendental authenticity. This does not mean that it must obey matter or transcendental authenticity, just that it must respond to them in good faith. It means that our belief systems are only authentically believed to the degree that they articulate what we actually experience both inwardly and outwardly. Mismatches can and always must exist, but good faith requires candid confession of confusion, unclarity, doubt, even local disbelief, and these mismatches are rarely clear or easy to pin down.

We tend to ignore or suppress these mismatches, because they all threaten to destabilize our transcendental order. They seem to be existential threats to truth, to our sense of identity, to literally everything — because they, in fact, are. But there is more to reality than any particular everything. And precisely this moreness is the essence of religion.

These perplexing mismatches between faith and system are where the light of infinitude shows through the cracks of finitude and threatens to submerge it in holy reunification.

Now I will speak religiously to the religious:

Yetzirah responds both to Asiyah — what materials will and won’t do — and to Beriah — the simultaneous plurality of all possible transcendentalisms.

In Yetzirah, we are Ruach, the transcendental formation to whom the world is given as an articulate, exteriorless whole, and by whom its given world and all its given truths, possibilities and entities are received in Asiyah.

In Asiyah we take what is given as given objects of perception and truth and construct from them. To the best of our ability, we construct systems that combine into interoperating units with emergent systemic wholeness.

These systems may or may not correspond with the articulations of Ruach’s articulate everything. If they do, they are experienced as meaningful, natural and might resonate with Ruach’s sense of personal purpose and at-homeness. If they do not, they will feel unnatural and alien.

When “modernity” is used pejoratively, often this refers to refusal to seek transcendental ratification for systems. If a system functions, that is sufficient. This fills the world with unnatural and alien systems, and makes reality itself feel overwhelmingly meaningless and complicated. When people stop expecting meaning and lose sight of meaning as a goal, or even possibility, when we stop expecting to feel at home and no longer believe we have a right to personal purpose, we succumb to nihilism.

Organism is the intersection of articulate everything without exterior and every thing systematized without interior.

Thing without interior is empty shell, klippah.

When we see an image of a tzadik, saint, bodhisattva or angel with a halo, it is natural to assume the light is radiating from them into the world around them. It is important, though, to understand this radiance a second everted way, for in Beriah relationships evert, and in Yetzirah, Asiyah and Beriah interpenetrate.

From Beriah, light radiates into its focus, centripetally. The halo radiates into the soul, before radiating back out into Asiyah.

The angels on Jacob’s Ladder ascend and descend, and this is the respiration of light.

The circular sefirot is sometimes depicted with a flame-like perimeter. It is a macrocosmic halo, and the flames are actually descending into finitude ex nihilo from the infinite Ein Sof, the infinite One.

Angelic being invites infinite light to concentrate ex nihilo in Ruach in order to reflect and refract into the world.

Diabolical being blocks everything from beyond Ruach and has only darkness to reflect or refract. Ruach envies the Infinite One and wants its quasi-infinitude to be absolute. It casts whatever defies it into nonexistence, and whatever will not perform nonexistence for it will be annihilated and made nonexistent.

Eversion reverses relations.

Totalitarianisms seek to displace and replace Neshamah (transsubjective selfhood Beriah) with themselves.

In Asiyah, you objectify reality. In Beriah, reality subjectifies you!

The Russian reversal joke performs this truth. In Soviet Russia, for example, television watches you.

Diabolical means thrown across. Dia– “across” + –bolos “thrown”. Diabolical means both throwing part of infinitude out into nothingness, and being thrown out from infinitude into quasi-infinite finitude without interior: klippah.

Being chosen, though, also means choosing to take one’s given place within infinitude.

Exnihilism is annihilation everted. Exnihilism prays epiphanic irruptions through the veil of nihilitude from inexhaustible infinitude. Birth is everted death; birthpangs and deathpangs are crossings between infinite and finite being.

One profound conversion may seem like a crossing from a false world to a true one.

Two profound conversions may seem like a crossing between two contingently true worlds.

Three profound conversions, something truer and realer than any true world may reveal itself.

Complacentia

Enworldment, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Asiyah is the objective dimension of nature and artifice.

Yetzirah is the transcendental dimension of soul (subject).

Beriah is the metaphysical dimension of spirit (relative infinitude).

Atzilut is the transcendent dimension of infinitude.

Objective reason is an inadequate mode of knowing beyond Asiyah. The attempt to grasp soul/subject and metaphysics objectively is the supreme category mistake, made by materialists, positivists, managerials, psychologists and metaphysical dogmatists, alike.

Objectifying the superobjective is the human species’s analogue to a dog chasing its tail.

Isn’t this framework objective? Yes, it is objective, but not merely objective.

This way of understanding things has become my latest and best naive realism.

I am unable to doubt it. I cannot avoid understanding everything in its light.

Worse, I find myself entirely disinclined to interrogate it.

This is an abject failure of philosophy, but a triumph of faith.

It is an enworldment to inhabit, a palatial sukkah.

…Palatial … palate … taste, sophia…

Saint Friedrich of Sils-Maria said:

Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).

Years ago I noticed that I asked Why only when I could not feel Why.

Rerereading Richard J. Bernstein

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I am once again rereading Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism.

I’m reading it with a thesis: that the Greek word phronesis roughly corresponds to Hebrew derash and refers to the same domain of truth.

My obsession with alternate domains of truth and modes of knowing originates with this book. I’ve wandered pretty far abroad, along divergent traditional paths, and now I want to bring it all home and see how things look.

And modes of knowing is only one of several enduring influences this book had on me. Almost every book in my sprawling library is three or fewer degrees from its bibliography, most fewer.

I am pretty sure it was my first encounter with Jewish styles of thought. At one point I thought Bernstein had invented an entirely new genre of literature. He seemed to be expressing his own ideas through the medium of other people’s dialogue. After a decade of Jewish life, I now know to call this talmudic. Many thinkers and friends drew me into Judaism, but none more than Bernstein.

He also gave me my first exposure to phenomenology and pragmatism, both of which provided crucial philosophical grounding (ironically!) for a philosophical understanding of design. I think more than three-quarters of my design philosophy is represented by and directly attributable to this one book.

Richard J. Bernstein died in 2022.

For me, his memory is a constant blessing. I would like to believe his living presence in my life is a share in his immortality.

Design, enworldment and holistic orders

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Thinking out loud here…

I have been gnawing endlessly on a question of holism.

My thesis is that when people say the word “holism” they generally assume only one of two kinds of holism, reducing the other to the one they know.

I have given these holisms various names over the years.

  • Systemic wholes, belonging to a constructive order that constitutes wholes from assembled parts, bottom-up.
  • Gestalt wholes, belonging to a conceptive order that comprises parts articulated from wholes, top-down.

I believe that these two orders naturally diverge, like notes in scales of different keys, becoming less and less in tune with one another as they ramify, either upwards in ever-expanding systems or downwards in ever-finer articulations.

Further, I believe design is the discipline responsible for getting the two holisms to converge in a local, temporary and tentative unity. I call this unity of dual holisms “enworldment” and I conceptualize the effort of convergence as a “hermeneutic sphere”.

Not every system we construct — however perfectly integrated its functioning, and however much it generates emergent qualities (which makes the system a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts) — will be conceived as a meaningful thing within our sense of everything. A system can be meaningless or even induce nihilism, because it is incompatible with our overall sense of everything. This is fine if the system we are constructing is hidden, or handled only by specialists, but all too often these systems are allowed to damage cultural meaning. No matter how well physics accounts for the behaviors of particles in space, or applies this knowledge to build miraculous digital devices, none of it can make us feel the importance of our lives together.

Not every given thing we perceive as real or conceive as true — however self-evident, meaningful and important it may be to us or to our community — is a suitable part of a system. Some things cannot be integrated and interfere with the functioning of a system. A faith can be overwhelmingly meaningful and even the source of everything we care about, yet what it implies to be true cannot hold up under any systematic scrutiny nor is it helpful in any practical application. This is fine in purely symbolic spheres of life, for instance art or religion, but if they are applied beyond their sphere, they produce inadequately integrated systems. No religious scripture can explain electricity or help an engineer build a battery.

To get both, we must not only tack between parts and wholes in each order to get whole and part to reinforce one another, we must tack between the two orders of wholeness until both orders together form a whole reinforced equally by the wholes and parts of each order. Two hermeneutic circles, in a single hermeneutic sphere.

The question bothering me is whether there really is a “hermeneutic sphere” of two holistic orders, each with its own hermeneutic circle — or whether the plain old flat hermeneutic circle already accounts for both orders. What I call “construction” could just be the bottom-up side of the same hermeneutic circle, whose other side is top-down “conception”.

There is a fine line between playing with a structure (as we might play with a new tool) to see what can be done with it, versus going whole-hog Pygmalion with it. If only the line were only fine, and not also faint, snaky and nebulous.

In my defense, the truth of this framing does not have to be absolute. A physicist inclined to seek constructive wholes still faces the possibility of future scientific crises, challenging the entire conception of the problem that orients the work and shapes the instrumentation of physics as it is currently practiced. And even the most radical neoplatonist must admit that modern chemical engineers can do things with matter beyond the imagination of the most accomplished alchemist, even if those alchemists had superior metaphysical insight.

For all practical purposes, holism is dual, regardless of the ultimate unity, which could very well be beyond all human comprehension of any kind.

Design only cares about practical purposes, which most certainly includes questions of meaning and purpose.

Opening of Enworldment

Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In the constructive order, parts are composed into systemic wholes.

In the conceptive order, wholes comprise articulated parts.

In enworldment, conception and construction unify into one integral whole: a whole which is both an embodied soul and an ensouled body. An articulate gestalt is embodied by a system; a system of parts is ensouled by an articulate gestalt.

Enworldment establishes a vast finite one within the Infinite One. Each vast finite one is a quasi-infinite totality, which from within itself is interior without exterior: one everything comprising all conceivable things, bounded by nothing, for nothingness is essentially inconceivable, imperceptible and therefore incomprehensible — yet intuitible.

Intuition takes givens as given — immediately, spontaneously, usually with given form, but sometimes formlessly. Not all intelligibility comprehends. Intellection, nous, neshamah apprehends incomprehensibility and suprehends in it a call to take part and participate in what comprehends all comprehension.

To insist that either order — constructive or conceptive — is produced by the other precludes enworldment. To enworld, we must assume a present where unification of conception and construction requires conciliation of two orders.

Determining whether the conciliation is a reconciliation or whether the unification is reunification is unnecessary. The two may or may not share an original unity, but they certainly do not yet share a unifying destination, and it is the latter we must pursue.

Pursuit of enworlding unification must, in the beginning, acknowledge two: unformed matter and immaterial spirit. Two which converge to give us material forms and substantiated knowledge, neither of which produces the other.

Interworld alienation

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Allowing some ugly technical language better avoided, here is how it is.

Assiyah is lifeworld, plain and simple. It naturally takes givens as given — Pshat mode of truth — and constructs systems from them. Pshat is one given ontology and objectivity — one naive realism — in which individual being, Nefesh, exists as an object among objects.

Yetzirah is hermeneutic disposition to take some things (perceived or conceived) as given, to be passively oblivious to others and to actively reject or suppress others that threaten the coherence of one’s overall conception of everything. It is the transcendental ordering of any Pshat givenness, and it is normally entirely in the background of everyday life, manifesting only as Ruach — individual (I) and cultural (We) identity and nonidentity (Them). Drash is a mode of truth that attends to this transcendental ordering of Pshat in the background of how we and others understand reality in some particular way — that is, to subject proper, the source of objectivity. Often, this attempt to understand a subject is approached in inadequate Pshat modes of object-comprehension, thus everting it and causing profound and consequential category mistakes.

Ruach-being receives reality as a given all-inclusive everything (a given universe or cosmos), articulated (jointed, partitioned) as every possible thing everything can comprise, material, ideal or otherwise. These articulations are the intelligible forms of that Ruach, including the self-form with which Nefesh identifies itself as a thing among things. Again, an embodied I, an embodied we, an I within we.

For Nefesh-being (animal soul) is the size of a living object who embodies it. Nefesh essentially embodies and constructs systems from givens.

Ruach-being (spirit) is the size of an entire everything as given to one subject. The everything is absolutely particular but relative to Ruach, it is universal, and the very universe itself.

Every subject proper is Ruach, whether personal subject, academic subject, a historical subject (a people). Any I or we to whom reality is given in some particular way and taken-together as some articulate everything of all possible things is Ruach.

Ruach is rarely unidimensional. It contains multitudes of subjects-within-subjects. Any I might understand autobiographically, professionally, politically, mathematically, fictionally, scientifically, legally, psychologically, ethically, ethnically, maybe religiously, etc., but all these various subjects attempt to harmonize into a single, coherent way of taking reality as given as real. This is not always easy, and never perfectly achieved. Self-integration, if attempted, is a lifelong effort. This is true for any individual I, and this is the stuff of biography. But for any We of the scale of community, whose life might span centuries or millennia, self-integration is the stuff of politics and history.

And it is all profoundly complicated by the reality of matter, which cooperates or resists and forces adaptation from unformed matter, from which material givens are substantiated.

Both metaphysical materialism and idealism are right but neither is nearly right enough. Reality is neither top-down immanence nor bottom-up emergence, but both and neither. We are suspended in the between, matter below, meaning above, each alike, the aether inside the square and radiating from the edges of the Chinese coin.

Enworldment is given, embodied reality — given by Ruach and taken by Nefesh, spontaneously recognizing material and ideal forms — taking them and responding to them as given, and from them constructing systems. Systems suggest new forms, forms suggest new systems. And sometimes the systems Nefesh constructs clash with every available articulate form without suggesting any new form. Systemic wholes stand alone without any support from above. And sometimes Ruach imposes its forms upon materials which cannot accommodate them. The forms cannot be actualized in any system. They are out-of-touch ideals with little or no practical value.

In rude moods, I have talked about this coming apart of the conceptive and constructive order as “bullshit and chickenshit” — the impracticable impositions of Ruach upon Nefesh being “bullshit”, and Nefesh’s soulless and dispiriting systematizing being “chickenshit”.

And it is this problem of interworld alienation that drives some of us through the roof of Nothingness itself, into Beriah, the inexhaustible, eternally pregnant source of reborn Ruach.

As gestalt, so system; as system, so gestalt

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Design forms matter in order to make materials serve as an intuitive medium of spirit.

A designer develops two orders of whole-and-part — the articulate gestalt of spirit and systemic emergence of matter — ensouling materials and materializing souls on the middle plane of persons, Man.

Earth — matter behind material — ascends to wholeness, part-upon-part, generating functional modular units of increasing scale, each unit constituting its own emergent qualities.

Heaven — spirit beyond soul — descends to particularity, whole-within-whole, articulating meaningful gestalts of decreasing scale, each gestalt comprising articulate fullness of its own.

Each order is governed by its own iterative craft, each a hermeneutic circle. One constructs systems constituted of parts, each whole a part of something yet greater; the other conceives gestalts comprising articulate parts, each part itself a whole for something yet smaller.

Design conjoins both iterative crafts and brings both orders into unity. Design is the craft of the hermeneutic sphere.

Let other disciplines work one order or the other, thinking theirs the only one. Designers must see them in their difference in order to unite them as one.

A designer is neither artist-oracle nor technician-chemist, but each transmuted by the other in marriage, as they effect transmutation of materialized soul and ensouled material.

Let other disciplines subscribe to metaphysical materialism or idealism. The praxis of design reveals each inadequate alone and and both interadequate only together — always rooted in the mysterious ground of exnihilitive One.

A designer is a true artifex, making marvels of outward technological magic and inward miracles of life — an agent of enworldment.

A post-post post

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Toward the end of the twentieth century it was pure coolness to be post-something.

A decade into the new millennium, this move was growing stale. And now, two decades in, post- is rancid.

It would be tempting to call today’s zeitgeist “post-post”, were it not for the fact that post- means something precise and crucial.

Post- indicates some truth or state of being has been internalized and integrated so fully that its own antinomies have emerged from its own internal logic, inducing a crisis, demanding departure without destination.

This time’s departure from post-, though, is the furthest thing from that.

This time is so diffuse and dissipated that it lacks capacity to enter or integrate anything. It never arrives anywhere and inhabits it long enough and attentively enough to notice much of anything. A time inattentive to consistency and unconcerned about self-contradiction never develops a degree of integrity required to detect antinomies. This time just drives past everything, sporadically glancing through the glass, barely noticing and seldom wondering about what is outside. If we sought a parable for what happened between the heyday of post- and now, we might find it in “Flowers for Algernon”, if we could sustain attention through an entire short story.

A decision to be post-something in this time might mean any number of things. Most will assume a clueless lagging behind the times or maybe insensitivity or contrarianism. But it might indicate a need for the precise meaning of post- that overrides distaste for mustiness.

Bearing all this in mind: what kind of spergy sociopath would aspire to be Postplotinian?

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Tragic truth

Autobiography, Judaism

When we try to defend ourselves against psychological damage, we do not escape damage. The defensive posture and the defenses themselves are damage. It is most noticeable when the threat is gone, but the defenses persist.

Tragic truth: It is a terrible choice to defend instead of reconcile. Reconciliation is not always possible. Damage is not always avoidable.

If we defend when we could have reconciled we do wrong.

The most important matters confront us with choices and deprive us of rules.

To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

Remez

Kabbalah

I think I will return to translating Remez to the traditional “allusive”, but with the understanding that Remez alludes beyond any and all interpretation, to inexhaustible mystery.

(And sure enough, as soon as I made this change to the table I felt a reply, and affirming influx of Sod. My table and I have come to agreement on who we want to be together, and this is symbol craft.)