Category Archives: Kabbalah
Punchline
All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.
Scholem on originality and tradition
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.
Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.
Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)
To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.
This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.
Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.
And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.
Undead but undying
Oh!…
I just finished reading Robert Alter’s foreword to Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, and the concluding paragraph delivered a powerful jolt of insight.
Scholem’s ability to understand the power of this root contradiction [between irruptions of profuse mythic life into antimythical monotheism] and at the same time to hold it in a steady critical perspective explains much of the continuing cogency of his vision of history. The archaic past, as well as the manifold later accretions of tradition, aurochs and angels alike, remains part of our collective heritage, and because it both reflects what once engaged humanity and addresses deep human needs that refuse to disappear, it cannot be jettisoned. In this regard, Scholem’s searching investigation of the twisting paths of Jewish mysticism makes profoundly instructive reading as we approach the millennium. But he also sees sharply that the mystics, impelled by discernible historical circumstances, very often sought to escape the ordeal of history by withdrawing into a realm of ecstasy and, at worst, delusion. Thus he observes of the Merkabah mystics after the fourth century who endured an era of persecution by the Church, “from the world of history the mystic turns to the prehistoric period of creation, from whose vision he seeks consolation, or towards the post-history of redemption.” With minor adjustments, this generalization holds for each of the major trends that Scholem surveys — the pietists of medieval Germany, the Spanish Kabbalists, the Safed school of Isaac Luria, the Sabbatians, and the Hasidim. The historian and his implied audience, of course, do not have the luxury of seceding from history and cannot indulge in the Sabbatian delusion that history can be forced to an end. Scholem’s magisterial study is hardly intended to promote a nostalgia for mysticism or any illusion that we can embrace it as it was, but he makes us see the essential role it has played in the Jewish story, and indeed in the human story, and he leads us to ponder what other symbolic languages there might be to express our stubborn sense of connection with eternal things.
The insight was an illumination of some remarks made by David Biale concerning Scholem’s “Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah”.
In 1958, Gershom Scholem published a series of ten aphoristic statements entitled “Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala.” Although later republished in the third volume of his collected German essays, Judaica, these aphorisms have received little or no attention in the English-reading world, despite their considerable interest both for Scholem’s own thought and as philosophical reflections on some fundamental issues in the Kabbalah. The word unhistorical in the title immediately suggests Scholem’s intention to take off the hat of historian and philologian that he wore in most of his writings and to look at his material from a different perspective. Since Scholem’s primary achievements lay in the history and philology of the Kabbalah, his more philosophical and theological reflections have often been treated as occasional pieces, peripheral to his main contribution. I have argued elsewhere that an understanding of Scholem as a historian requires an examination of these writings and attention to his place in modern Jewish thought. …
One of the main characteristics of these aphorisms is just such an interplay between historical theses and modern philosophical language. Scholem boldly suggests parallels between modern schools of thought and the Kabbalah: dialectical materialism and the Lurianic Kabbalah, phenomenology and Moses Cordovero, Franz Kafka and the eighteenth-century Frankist Jonas Wehle. At the end of aphorism 4, he notes: “The conception of the Kabbalists as mystical materialists with a dialectical tendency would certainly be thoroughly unhistorical, yet anything but meaningless.” At first blush, to impose modern categories on a historical subject would certainly seem unhistorical. Yet Scholem assumes that the philosophical issues treated by both the Kabbalah and modern philosophy are universal, even as they are addressed historically in different terms by different movements. The seemingly “unhistorical” procedure of these aphorisms is therefore philosophically meaningful: modern philosophy and the Kabbalah illuminate and explicate the same problems and can therefore shed light on each other. But it is also historically meaningful because it allows the modern sensibility to grasp a system of thought that appears initially alien and remote.
…This telescoping of historical ideas by viewing them through modern prisms is not, however, a subject only for “unhistorical” aphorisms. It lies at the heart of one of the classic problems of all historical work: What changes do ideas necessarily undergo as they are refracted through the eyes of a historian whose categories of thought are historically different? The very ability of the historian to reconstruct the past lies in his finding a common ground or common language between himself and his sources: if the past is utterly alien, it cannot be reconstructed. Hence, the historian must engage in a delicate balancing act between past and present, maintaining the bridge between them without collapsing one into the other. The fact that Scholem gives explicit consideration to this issue in these aphorisms does not mean that he ignored it in his historical work. On the contrary, one can find repeated instances where he consciously used modern categories to illuminate and explicate problems in the Kabbalah. Indeed, one of the keys to Scholem’s success as a historian of the Kabbalah was in turning an ostensibly alien system of ideas into one with a contemporary resonance and urgency. Yet unlike Martin Buber, who also found striking parallels between modern thought and the Kabbalah, Scholem was largely able to maintain the distinction between them.
…
For Scholem’s own purposes, the aphoristic style clearly held particular attraction. Although these aphorisms are “on” or “about” (über) Kabbalah, they are, in their own way, Kabbalistic in both style and content. In order to convey the parallels between the intellectual problems of the modern historian and those of the Kabbalists, Scholem adopts Kabbalistic formulations that he, of course, avoided in his more historical essays. The aphorism conveys a sense of mystery and impenetrability: opaqueness is almost part of its definition. The sense of secrets hidden behind the explicit text in an aphorism is thus reminiscent of the Kabbalah, for which truth is by nature secret (sod). Aphorisms mirror the Kabbalistic concept of esoteric truths.
That which is hidden cannot be expressed without altering its meaning, and therefore the aphorism, which suggests more than it expresses, is a better vehicle for these reflections than direct exposition. Hence, Scholem’s choice of aphorisms is itself proof of the relationship between the historian of the Kabbalah and his subject matter. Indeed, the very number of aphorisms — ten — hints at a Kabbalistic “subtext,” for that is the number of sefirot (divine emanations). And just like the sefirot themselves, these aphorisms are at once discrete and seemingly unlinked to one another, yet at the same time unified by a common theme that is treated in each from a different angle. That theme, to which we have already alluded, is the fundamental tension or even paradox of communicating a truth that is, by definition, secret or hidden.
What is the definition of a “secret” (Geheimnis)? On the one hand, it may be something that is known but deliberately hidden, or, it may be that which is essentially inaccessible (hidden by nature rather than by design). It is this latter sense of a secret that Scholem has in mind here. Kabbalistic truth is inaccessible because God is transcendent. Historical truth is inaccessible because the past cannot be known in the same way we know the perceptual world. Both Kabbalist and historian face the same problem of how to convey a truth that is hidden.
The subtle influence of the Kabbalah on Scholem as a historian becomes particularly apparent in deciphering the language of the aphorisms. Scholem writes in German but often thinks in the technical language of the Kabbalah (either Hebrew or Zoharic Aramaic). Thus, a correct understanding of the text requires sensitivity to the Kabbalistic language lurking behind it. For instance, in discussing the epistemology of the Kabbalah, he uses the term Erkenntnis (knowledge). Yet it becomes clear in the context that he has in mind the Kabbalah’s understanding of knowledge in the form of the sefirah (divine emanation) called hokhmah (wisdom). One is thus faced with the problem of grasping both the philosophical vocabulary and its Kabbalistic background in reading the text. …
It is almost as if Scholem’s historic hermeneutics — the entering, exiting, contrasting, comparing of differing yet connected enworldments — was itself a kind of Kabbalistic praxis. And not only “almost as if” — he was clearly was doing historiological work as a kabbalist.
And indeed any hermeneutic praxis — whether Talmudic study, historiological scholarship, or (who knows?) maybe design! — can inject a kabbalistic interiority, a vivifying soul, into a traditional exoteric practice. A covert Kabbalist can preserve the practices and the language of the exoteric tradition, but circulate something else, something palpably, vividly, but nonobjectively alive — into what is otherwise mechanical, or dead or which is dead but still functioning soullessly — undead. Because “it takes a long time, but gods die, too.” All living being, all living traditions, all living organizations — are mortal.
Traditions who last over millennia learn to reensoul themselves once they “die inside” while preserving their traditional continuity. Anyone who interprets such reensoulment as an indictment of what came before might wholeheartedly idolize what comes after, but they know not what they worship, and they know not what they do when they obsessive-compulsively recrucify their eternal scapegoat.
It is Shabbat, but please hold your stones.
What is a profession, if not an exoteric tradition formed around some domain of activity?
New disciplines are inspired to life by need. They start wild. They grope their way to form and eventually, gradually, they congeal into professions.
Then the profession institutionalizes.
People go to school and are taught it.
A generation of students enter the profession without ever experiencing the problems raw or grappling with them without a toolbox filled with prefabricated techniques and little instruction manuals on how to use them.
The wild background thins, dissipates, and eventually vanishes altogether. And the better a practitioner is educated for the field — the more filled up with expertise, the more highly trained in technique, the better versed in methodology one is, the less present those initial chaotic conditions that inspired the profession in the first place are known or even perceived.
The expert carries his well-equipped toolbox of expertise, and everything looks like his kind of nail.
But with the loss of the wild background, comes loss of inspiration.
The priest class becomes the most ignorant of all of the subject of worship.
And now comes, leaden, dead, technical nihilism, animated by momentum, grinding duty and impersonal social mechanisms.
The discipline is now leadenly led (managed, administered, enforced) by uninspired, dead-souled, dispirited, dispiriting experts, and anyone who follows such leaders falls into the same careerist rut.
These are the times when professions lose their way and are ripe for reensoulment. Their traditional exoteric body lies dead — or, worse, slouches along in a zombie death march of loveless duty — but that disanimated or dysanimated corpse can be reawakened and revived by exactly the kind of inward, esoteric yet tradition-preserving revolution described and actualized by Scholem.
An enworldment that forms across comparison among enworldments is not just one more enworldment. It is a vaseface among vases and faces, a duckrabbit among ducks and rabbits. It is inexhaustible readings in a world of this doctrine and that. It is the history of histories, in a world of history.
Glimpsing the invisible nihilitude dividing finitude from finitude discloses infinitude. Now we receive, conduct, return.
Kabbalah, kashrut, teshuvah.
Navel gaze
A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.
Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.
Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.
It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.
It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.
And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.
Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.
This can happen to anyone at any moment.
The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.
(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)
I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.
This is not a tree
Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.
I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.
Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.
Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.
The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.
So many things are not a tree.
A city is not a tree.
A service is not a tree.
An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.
Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.
History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.
A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.
Protected: Instaurational outburst
Protected: Kabblahblah
Hermetic design
Scholem: “While Christianity and Islam, which had at their disposal more extensive means of repression and the apparatus of the State, have frequently and drastically suppressed the more extreme forms of mystical movements, few analogous events are to be found in the history of Judaism.”
Judaism was too weak and unimportant to effectively persecute its mystics! And that is why Kabbalah flourished and matured enough to become integrated back into its classical religious form.
This reminds me of something my friend Stokes said to me once: the reason design was able to develop its own genuine social scientific practices — and avoid suppression of scientistic management practices (imaginary scientific rigor, and its attendant misnorms, which, paradoxically, make scientific method impossible!) — was only because design was considered unimportant and unworthy of management attention. Design could do science only because it flew under the scientific management radar.
Indeed, the more important a design project is — the more scrutiny it receives from the top floor of the glass tower — the more tippy-top-down control is imposed upon it, the less doing design is possible. It is still called “design”. It looks designy. There are cool hipster costumes, profuse post-it notes, kraft paper, masking tape, markers and general arts n’ crafts creativity signifiers. There are calculatedly messy sketches and pretty polished graphics.
But the freedom, soul and joy has been driven out by fear, control and ambition.
The more I move back-and-forth between hermetic mysticism and design, the more a book on hermetic design wants to be written.
Mysticism and design are joined at the heart.
Protected: Pascal’s Void
ASCII sigil
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+0(
- “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
- “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
- “(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Protected: Note to self (and probably only myself)
Protected: As aleph, so tav
Ontological membranes
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.
And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.
Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?
It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).
Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.
An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.
Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.
Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.
But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.
Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.
But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.
These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.
This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.
Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.
Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.
Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.
…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Common senses
Below is one — perhaps idiosyncratic — common sense account of the Olamot, presented from the first-person:
Common sense of Assiyah: each of our senses gives us the world in some sensory mode — a world with reality understood to transcend each of our senses and all our senses, but gains reliability through sensory testimony. What we see and touch is assumed to be real. What we see, but cannot touch is assumed to be a hallucination.
Common sense of Yetzirah: each of us is given the world in a specific way, but our own way shares much in common with others of our community, and this commonality — this consensus understanding — is our most reliable access to the reality of the world. What all of us understand together is assumed to be real. What only one of us understands is idiosyncratic, less real, possibly delusional. What other communities take as common sense, but which are clearly false or nonsensical, might be delusional groupthink.
Common sense of Beriah: from moment to moment, age to age, the common sense of solitary persons and the common sense of communities changes, and testifies to different experiences and understandings. Reality and truth clearly can be given quite differently to different people in different places in different times. What is common across them, and how can they differ? The commonalities and differences are always given to the threefold present, according to what can and cannot be received in this particular I-here-now. All this is what existentialism (and its myriad siblings) pursues, and in response it receives ciphers, interminable questions, aporias, shocks, terrors, ecstasies. Light, dark, rippling oblivion.
Common sense of Atzilut: our various attempts to account for the givenness of the real points to a reality beyond questions and answers, beyond defined objects and defining subjects, beyond sense, within a commonality so all-inclusively common, so inescapably, so infinitely common, it is beyond comprehension.
Account of tzimtzum
One account of ztimtzum — today’s conception:
In the finite world, impurity is a matter of exclusion of inessentials.
But infinity is essentially absolute, unconditional inclusion.
When finite being attempts to approach the infinite, any exclusion from the infinite is an impurity.
Yet, finite being is somehow entirely of the infinite without itself being infinite.
Pure infinitude precludes exclusion.
We subsist finitely as impurities to the infinite.
Infinitude’s capacity for finitude depends on nihilitude, the principle of impurity — of self-exclusion from infinitude — within infinitude.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats the infinite ocean with accreting layers of protective oblivion, sheltering tender finitude from dissolution into what it is not, yet is. An infinitessimal universe-size spark.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats each defined concept with the distinction “as opposed to”. A refracted spark filling heaven with stars, worlds, sun, moon, earth, oceans, lands, people.
Nihilitude defines finite against infinite, then defines finite against finite. Nihilitude’s self-exclusion everts the relationship between the finite-and-infinite, rendering it everything-or-nothing.
Nihilitude is creation. All creation is ex nihilo.
Nevertheless, infinitude continues to penetrate oblivion, leaving halo-traces at concentrated strike points. Infinitude crisscrosses each finite being as dimensions of time space and self. The intersection of this crossing is the threefold present.
Oblivion is something that creates apparent nothingness, and is therefore not an impurity at all, but which also makes apparent impurity possible, without defiling infinitude with exclusion. Tzimtzum.
Ontological veils
The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.
Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.
Darkness conceals visibly.
Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.
According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from
revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.
If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.
My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.
The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.
In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.
Designerly metaphysics
Before any beginning is infinitude.
Pure infinitude. Ein sof.
Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.
At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.
Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.
Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.
For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.
From within finitude, piercing of the cloak occurs ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.
Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.
Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.
Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.
Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.
In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.
The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.
The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.
The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.
And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.
Bright blood
The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.
If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.
But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.
If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.
Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:
We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …
The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.
Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.
What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.
Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.
What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.
In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”
…
No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.
Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.
…
An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.
If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)
Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.
The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.
But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.
Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.
I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.
When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.
(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)
Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”
I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.
And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,
And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.
We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.
)O+