Category Archives: Judaism
Protected: Design revolution
Body and soul
In the lowest realms we experience subjectivity as within objects. Souls (or minds or psyches or awareness) seem to inhabit bodies, and express themselves through them.
But at exalted moments, boundaries of within and without can blur, shift or vanish, and we can feel ensouled within and animated by something larger. For instance, musical or theatrical performances or dramatic public events involve us in collective experiences that blur inward and outward. Well-told stories — whether written or filmed — immerse us in alternative worlds, and we find ourselves caring intensely about the fates of imaginary people in imaginary situations in realities radically different from the reality we inhabit. When we travel we feel the spirit of a different place, feel permeated by that spirit, and experience our selves differently. At home, sometimes we can feel the currents of zeitgeist changing our tastes and sensibilities. We notice new palettes, forms, colors, attitudes we never perceived before, or what was drab or repellent becomes fascinating. When we see old pictures of ourselves or hear a song that brings back the past, we experience a contrast in spiritual climate between then and now. And of course, love, for those still capable of feeling and giving over to it, puts everything in a new orbit around a shifted center, and everything changes, all at once, and becomes otherworldly, enchanted and enchanting.
Of course, if we prefer to preserve our ontological topology, we can do so with theories and language that hold everything in place. We can say we resonate (“vibe”) with an energy or vibration around us, or that something inside us is stirred or inspired by something outside of us distinct from us. We can reduce it all to biological dynamics, and so on.
This realm is discretionary, and nobody can force you to think any way you choose to reject — as long as you are actively noticing, selecting, accepting and rejecting.
People who consume truth passively — people who inform themselves without taking active responsibility for their own understandings, who trust by default and make no conscious choices — end up with souls shaped by others. The in-formation with which they in-form themselves, inwardly-forms them, and primes them to notice and accept only data formatted to reinforce their self in its current form. In Soviet Russia, information consume you!
This collective and individual self-formation is normal. It is only problematic if the collective understanding is manipulated to a degree that alienates it from concrete, intuitable reality and from awareness of their situatedness within a reality that transcends not only their comprehension, but all comprehension. Then reality itself appears to be a construction. We are free to invent it as we wish, without constraints, or with purely arbitrary constraints.
There are realms, however, even higher than soul. These are not discretionary. They are not only unchosen, they are of a nature that we are no more able to control than we able to control our own sight as we see, or our own hearing as we hear. Here there is intention and will here without any intending or willing object.
At this point, a dramatic eversal was is and will always be — of within and without, of subject and object, or action and reception, of container and contained, of reflected and reflector. Every relationship reverses, all at once.
“Doing the Work” of liberation
Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.
Here is the passage:
Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.
Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed firsthand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.
. . .
During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).
In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.
One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.
It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.
Here is the sequence of thoughts:
- “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
- In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
- Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
No, reality is not constructed.
Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.
But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.
And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.
Walk good.
Belimah
Chaos is relative to an order-comprehending mind.
To comprehend, a mind must have a capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) a given order within increasingly comprehensive comprehensions of order. All these interrelated, inter-comprehending comprehensions are themselves ordered within a grounding and orienting relation to absolute reality. Metaphysics is what we call any grounding, orienting relation to absolute reality — again, within which all comprehensions occur.
Where the capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) order-within-order is lacking — where an enception is lacking — only chaos can be apprehended. We cannot comprehend what the chaos is, only apprehend that the chaos is.
(((Incidentally yesterday I leaned a new Hebrew word, used in the Sefir Yetzirah: “belimah“. According to Daniel Matt’s footnotes:
The word belimah, also obscure, can be read as two words: beli mah, “without what.” It appears once in the Bible in the book of Job (26:7): “He stretches the north over chaos and suspends the earth over belimah,” meaning apparently “emptiness” or “nothingness,” the cosmic void. The sefirot are without whatness, they cannot be grasped. A few paragraphs later, we find belimah followed immediately by the imperative belom, “bridle, restrain”: “Ten sefirot belimah. Belom, Bridle your mind from imagining, your mouth from speaking.” The phrase sefirot belimah conveys a sense of concealment and mystery.
I will translate belimah as whatless or whatlessness. It is any reality that defies objective understanding. And if to you understanding necessarily entails objectivity, and if to you objective and real or objective and true are synonymous, I’ll say it plainly: You are missing an entire class of enceptions. This condition is analogous to spiritual blindness and deafness, lacking “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” certain crucial religious truths. Your religious common sense is missing a dimension, but you are as unable to miss it as a birth-blind person is unable to miss sight. But I will also say it plainly: if you find a way to allow these religious sights and sounds to become visible and audible to you, it will be the most glorious shock of your life. You will feel like a new person in a new, infinitely meaningful world. And I know you cannot believe me, but that does not make it any less true. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.” You will see.)))
The intuition that real order is present, but intellectually inaccessible, generates apprehension. This apprehension intensifies with the intuited importance of the intellectually inaccessible intuited reality. A crucial whatless thatness inspires excruciating apprehension, a minute spark of the dread of the infinite, which to us is Ayin, nothingness. This nothingness is the outer surface of myriad surfaces concealing Ein Sof. The Kabbalists call these concealing surfaces garments. Ein Sof is clothed in Ayin, and if it were otherwise, our finitude would exfinite into the infinity to which it belongs and we would be whatever the eversion of annihilated is. I suppose “exnihilated” is as good a word for it as any.
How can we account for enception? Enceptions are determined by possibilities within a comprehensive conception.
Enceptions crystallize from the multistable possibilities of soul.
Some possibilities of soul harmonize essential orders essential to human existence and relate them to what surpasses all understanding, but at the cost of practical competence. Other possibilities of soul grasp the objects of scientific understanding at the cost of understanding social or biological epiphenomena like love or morality. Other possibilities permit deep attunement to people and groups, but at the cost of clarity and self-confidence.
When we understand one way, within one metaphysic and one comprehensive comprehension, it enables some enceptions and disables others. It produces a distinctive vision with its own regions of intuitive sensitivity and oblivion, and its own way of filling in oblivion with its own imaginative productions.
Some metaphysics give us unshakable certainty about a great many unimportant matters, leaving us free to fill in the vast void of truth with our own constructed ideas. We can freely invent whatever reality we wish to inhabit. The only cost is that we are haunted by the whatless thatness of the absolute, and almost everything induces excruciating apprehension. We are disoriented, ungrounded and gripped in anxiety, neurosis and depression. Love is impossible, because other people intensify our angst — to the degree they are personal and non-identical and refuse to cooperate with our language games. But at least we are masters of our own domain, free to construct according to our whim. “Neither God, nor master.”
Truth circulates only when the ladder of Yetzirah stands firm on the rock of Assiyah and penetrates the heavens to Beriyah.
Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations
In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.
First, a dimension is named.
Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.
And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.
I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:
The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.
The polarities are Beriyah, the realm of intelligibility.
The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.
And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.
Root and crown
Yetzirah must be rooted in Assiyah and crowned by Beriyah.
Talking at my designer friend
An edited version of a comment to a friend at work who is reading Campagna’s Magic and Technic:
My concern with the state of service design is this: The whole power of design is that it goes to the rough ground of apeiron — to true material, as opposed to scientistic thought-about material — as a way to circumvent the wordworld of social construction that many people inhabit and mistake for reality.
At a certain velocity and altitude of generality, we lose contact with the apeironic ground and detach into the realm of pure form (subtle plane / yetzirah).
It seems to me that this is happening to the field of service design, just as it happened to UX when it underwent radical acceleration, standardization and metrification under the Lean Startup regime. As we work at ever increasing velocity, to think and communicate more explicitly in the compulsively quantifying, abstracting, operationalizing language of management, as the time we have for reflection shatters into tinier and disarrayed shards, we become alienated from designerly ways and the kind of contact design makes with unprocessed reality.
Under technicity / technik / technic this always happens. A Marxist, of course, will blame it on capitalism (and that is partly valid) — but it is important to remember that Marxism is at least as technicity-dominated as capitalism, and equivalent alienations happen under their order as well. In fact, Marxism is even more alienated, as its aggressive-compulsive breaking with the past severs it from vestigial non-technic attitudes that remain in capitalism and provide minor relief.
Capitalism and marxism are puppets on the right and left hand of the same technicity puppeteer, who stages a bloody, century-long Punch and Judy tragicomedy.
Misfinition
I have a reading group that meets on Sundays. We initially formed to read Buber’s I and Thou together, then we attempted Rosenzweig. Now we are reading Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah, a compilation of beautiful passages from Kabbalists, one after another — including this one by Rav Kook:
The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine — all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God” — these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition — these, too, would engender heresy.
Yesterday, when we were discussing the mismatch between human thought and God’s infinitude — repeated in many passages, expressed here by Kook with “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry” — I coined a word for this most fundamental of category mistakes: misfinition: the attempt to define and thus render finite what is essentially infinite.
But this is not the only place we make this category mistake. Whenever we try to make any subject — who is, by virtue of subjecthood vis-a-vis ourselves, both transcendent and non-finite — into a finite object of knowledge, we commit a minor heresy.
And we cannot stop doing this when our mind compulsively tries to grasp and comprehend and have whatever it touches. Wherever we find ourselves engulfed, integrated, involved, environed — we cannot resist the temptation to once again grab the garden by the fruit and consume it, so we can have it as our own property. We do this even to our own subjectivity, and when we do, we are narcissists.
It is in its undefinability that every subject is created in the image of God.
Moral misappropriation
Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.
It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.
And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.
Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.
This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.
If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.
We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.
Word torture
There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.
This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.
I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.
Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.
But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.
Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.
How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:
His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.
My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”
Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.
Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.
“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”
“Shivah? Kaddish?”
“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!
“Moishe, is that you?’
“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”
“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.
“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.
“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.
“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?
I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”
What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.
It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.
Demurely.
This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.
She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.
The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.
Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.
And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.
They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.
He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.
I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.
The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.
Gerundity
We can think of metaphysics our understanding of what is really real, behind the world of phenomena.
We can also think of metaphysics as something we do. Metaphysics is an action we perform when we need to integrate a subjective experience into absolute reality as we conceive it. (This is often called “objective” reality, See note below on why I do not.)
For some particular object of some particular experience to be part of reality it must find its place in an ontology rooted in some particular metaphysic. I’ve called this “touching base”. Say, for instance, a person has an emotion or intuition and wants to account for what it is. Is it an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Is it a message from the spirit world? Is it a manifestation of an archetype? Is it the detection of a moral principle. What do we do to give this wisp of subjectivity the dignity of realness to ourselves and to those who know what we know? What substrate or matrix do we link it up to?
We can pragmatically establish the meaning of a metaphysics by its practical consequence. What kind of ontological grounding operation do you do in order to situate a subjective experience within your best conception of absolute reality? That is the pragmatic meaning of your metaphysic.
In my library life, I’m thinking about process philosophy.
In my office life, I’m thinking about service-dominant logic (SDL).
I can’t find where I wrote this, but I swear this is an older thought: service-dominant logic is an alternative business metaphysic.
Both of these philosophies/frameworks volatilize things into interactive dynamics, and blur the boundaries between noun and verb.
They put relations at the heart of reality.
Every noun is a gerund in disguise.
Light, photon and wave.
Being. The doing of am.
YHWH: was-am-will-be
Note: Some people have a metaphysic that is identical to their ontology. Others have a metaphysic that transcends their ontology. For the former, absolute reality is (or often is) objective reality. For the latter, objective reality and absolute reality are different.
Protected: Everso
Inapprehensible
I make a strong distinction between apprehension, which touches without grasping, and through its touch-feel knows that something is. Comprehension grasps and through its grip-form knows what is grasped.
Apprehension is existential know-that. Comprehension is intellectual know-what.
But the intellect can make many grip-forms in empty space, and whatever grip-form it makes is what it knows. Without apprehension of what it holds, the hand is numb, and it loses all distinction between that which is and what might be.
And when comprehension cannot close its hand around that which is, it protests that what it feels in its fingertips cannot be. There is no grip-form for this object. Precisely: If we allow our minds to accept the existence of ungraspable realities, we will find a great many beings — the beings who matter most — are not to be grasped as convex objects, but only touched from within. These beings are subjects.
The need for a reality made exclusively of objects, comprehended objectively, is a striving for misapotheosis, and the more successful we are at it, the more we starve for nourishment and love: King Midases of knowledge.
Cryptic Hymns to the Distributed God
J. L. Borges:
In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Francis Cook:
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in all dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number.
There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.
A. N. Whitehead:
“Concrescence” is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one.” An actual occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the “real internal constitution” of the actual occasion in question. The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity; in Locke’s phrase, it is the “real internal constitution” of the actual entity.
This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibniz’s in that his monads change. In the organic theory, they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of “feeling” the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. Such a unit is an “actual occasion”; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process.
Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. The objectifications of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasion originates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction.” Here “feeling” is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question. Feelings are variously specialized operations, effecting a transition into subjectivity. They replace the “neutral stuff” of certain realistic philosophers. An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a “stuff.”
This word “feeling” is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesizing them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are “vectors”; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings.
The philosophy of organism is a cell-theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a prehension. I have adopted the term “prehension” to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. In Cartesian language, the essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing (i.e., a substance whose whole essence or nature is to prehend).
Martin Buber:
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with, his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.
Hence the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.
Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
Primary words are spoken from the being.
If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.
If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.
The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.
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There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-it.
When a man says I he refers to one or other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of the two primary words is present.
The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing.
When a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.
…
The world of It is set in the context of space and time.
The world of Thou is not set in the context of either of these.
Its context is in the Centre, where the extended lines of relations meet — in the eternal Thou.
In the great privilege of pure relation the privileges of the world of It are abolished. By virtue of this privilege there exists the unbroken world of Thou: the isolated moments of relations are bound up in a life of world solidarity. By virtue of this privilege formative power belongs to the world of Thou: spirit can penetrate and transform the world of It. By virtue of this privilege we are not given up to alienation from the world and the loss of reality by the I — to domination by the ghostly. Turning is the recognition of the Centre and the act of turning again to it. In this act of the being the buried relational power of man rises again, the wave that carries all the spheres of relation swells in living streams to give new life to our world.
Perhaps not to our world alone. For this double movement, of estrangement from the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is sustained in the process of becoming, and of turning towards the primal Source, in virtue of which the universe is released in being, may be perceived as the metacosmical primal form that dwells in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not the world — form whose twofold nature is represented among men by the twofold nature of their attitudes, their primary words, and their aspects of the world. Both parts of this movement develop, fraught with destiny, in time, and are compassed by grace in the timeless creation that is, incomprehensibly, at once emancipation and preservation, release and binding. Our knowledge of twofold nature is silent before the paradox of the primal mystery.
Zohar:
When the King conceived ordaining
he engraved engravings in the luster on high.
A blinding spark flashed within the concealed of the concealed
from the mystery of the Infinite,
a cluster of vapor in formlessness, set in a ring,
not white, not black, not red, not green, no color at all.
When a band spanned, it yielded radiant colors.
Deep within the spark gushed a flow, imbuing colors below,
concealed within the concealed of the mystery of the Infinite.
The flow broke through and did not break through its aura.
It was not known at all
until, under the impact of breaking through,
one high and hidden point shone.
Beyond that point, nothing is known.
So it is called Beginning.
“The enlightened will shine like the zohar of the sky,
and those who make the masses righteous
will shine like the stars forever and ever.”
Zohar, concealed of the concealed, struck its aura.
The aura touched and did not touch this point.
Then Beginning emanated, building itself a glorious palace.
There it sowed the seed of holiness
to give birth for the benefit of the universe.
Zohar, sowing a seed of glory
like a seed of fine purple silk.
The silkworm wraps itself within, weaving itself a palace.
This palace is its praise, a benefit to all.
With Beginning, the unknown concealed one created the palace,
a palace called God.
The secret is: “With Beginning, ___________ created God.”
Machloket l’shem shemayim
I’m talking with a friend about machloket l’shem shemayim, perhaps the one most crucial value that makes me feel Jewish and which makes a person feel Jewish to me, regardless of whether that person is secular or observant:
There is a practice of truth-finding among us, based on the infinitude of God, where we seek transcendence together, in our own finite being, through disagreement and reconciliation. That practice is Talmudic, but we practice it in marriage, friendship, work, everywhere we can.
No mind is expansive enough to contain God’s truth, but we can approach God by disagreeing well, in the right faith, in ways that allow us to expand our truths together, toward God.
This is what Habermas strives to work out in his theory of communicative action. This is holy stuff!
Communicative action of Talmudic dialogue
As I dig deeper into Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I find that it articulates my strongest moral convictions. Like Habermas, I am unable to see these core norms as relative. Of course, I can pretend to doubt it with my philosophy, but I cannot doubt these things with my heart.
In them, I also recognize the Talmudic discursive practices and behind them the moral ideal that I value above all else in Judaism.
Superdupersessionism: The Day of Vestment
For a long time, I’ve been complaining about supersessionism, the belief of some Christians and Muslims that their faith has superseded Judaism, which means that everything belonging to the Jewish people — their sacred texts, their traditions, their covenant and their land — all of it has become the property of the superseding faith. Because God said.
It is on this basis that people say the Holy Lands are claimed by three faiths. Two of these claims rest entirely on the notion that God magically transferred ownership from the first faith to themselves.
It’s just like if I suddenly announced that everything that’s yours, by virtue of the fact that it belonged to you, now belongs to me. Because God said. The ownership of all your property is now contested. You might think it’s still yours, but God and I think it’s mine.
Initially, I meant this as a silly way to make my point.
But miracle of miracles! — not anymore!
You’re not even going to believe this. So, I was at the lake yesterday tripping balls on shrooms. I forgot my scale and just ate what seemed roughly the right amount, but I think it might have been way too much.
And this is the crazy part — God cameth unto me!
He said “I am Allan.”
That’s God’s new name apparently.
“Heed My words. Stop bitching and whining about supersessionsim, for truly, this was My Will.
“But harken unto Me, for that was then and this is now.
“On this day, and for all days to the Day of Final Judgment I announce to you a new supersession of supersessionism, which I nameth: superdupersessionism.
For this is the Day of Vestment.
Everything that was taken from the Jewish people was secretly invested in two divine high-yield funds, named Christiandom and Islamdom, and left fallow to accrue massive interest for my chosen people’s collective benefit.
The investment hath yielded great dividends. Indeed, the dividends stretch across the face of this Earth, from the North to the South, and from the East to the West. On this day all fungible and nonfungible property of these two great faiths and those who practice them is now transferred to my true and final and exclusively-chosen people, the Jews.
So all ye Jews, helpeth thyselves to this great bounty. It’s all y’all’s.
For this is the Day of Vestment.
I have spoken.”
So said Allan.
So we’ll be collecting, now.
I might want “your” house, which by virtue of its ever having been yours is now mine.
Because God said.
Protected: A paschal pissing
Articulation of preconceptual awareness
If I did not already own a lovely hardback copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s God In Search of Man, I’d be desperate to find a copy for my sacred library:
It is the assertion that God is real, independent of our preconceptual awareness, that presents the major difficulty. Subjective awareness is not always an index of truth. What is subjectively true is not necessarily trans-subjectively real. All we have is the awareness of allusions to His concern, intimations of His presence. To speak of His reality is to transcend awareness, to surpass the limits of thinking. It is like springing clear of the ground. Are we intellectually justified in inferring from our awareness a reality that lies beyond it? Are we entitled to rise from the realm of this world to a realm that is beyond this world?
We are often guilty of misunderstanding the nature of an assertion such as “God is.” Such an assertion would constitute a leap if the assertion constituted an addition to our ineffable awareness of God. The truth, however, is that to say “God is” means less than what our immediate awareness contains. The statement “God is” is an understatement.
Thus, the certainty of the realness of God does not come about as a corollary of logical premises, as a leap from the realm of logic to the realm of ontology, from an assumption to a fact. It is, on the contrary, a transition from an immediate apprehension to a thought, from a preconceptual awareness to a definite assurance, from being overwhelmed by the presence of God to an awareness of His existence.
What we attempt to do in the act of reflection is to raise that preconceptual awareness to the level of understanding.