I think I will return to translating Remez to the traditional “allusive”, but with the understanding that Remez alludes beyond any and all interpretation, to inexhaustible mystery.
(And sure enough, as soon as I made this change to the table I felt a reply, and affirming influx of Sod. My table and I have come to agreement on who we want to be together, and this is symbol craft.)
Since writing “Contemplating aloud” three days ago I have updated it at least seven times.
Maybe I should have preserved all the updates, but the urgency of getting it to perfection overrode the need to “show my work”. Maybe later I will document the intuitive-thinking process by which I arrived at this point. I do still have the change log. I doubt I will do it.
The revision process deserves attention, though, because it exemplifies craft. What I am crafting here is symbols of successive transcendence. The work is related to what the best design craft does, but at multiple simultaneous meta-levels, all of which — all of whom — require a very elusive but uncompromising scalar harmony.
It is as if a composer were trying to sound precisely the right note within a chord — which, of course, needs to harmonize horizontally with the fellow notes in the chord and the harmonies around it — but also within the sonic architecture of the concerto (so far we are inside the normal relations of musical composition), but now must answer to a simultaneous perfection of his whole corpus (suspended in eternal nowness), within his genre, within musicality itself, rooted in the essential being of sound, within being itself — every level of which exacts something entirely beyond the level before, but whose relationship must be sounded and sound. A fidelity in truth and way across planes of reality — Olamot — succeeds or fails to some degree.
In this craft, every minute adjustment reverberates across a horizontal plane of wholeness, but also, and more importantly, along a vertical hyperwholeness.
It is hard to solve a three-dimensional Rubik’s Cube. Imagine trying to solve a Rubik’s Hypercube (a four-dimensional cube, also known as a tesseract). It is to this profuse dimensionality that I refer when I use the prefix “hyper-“.
Likewise, the hermeneutic circle — the meaningful iterative interplay of whole and part — is a challenging endeavor. This work introduces multiple kinds of wholeness and particularity, all of whom must crystallize into hyperwholeness and hyperparticularity. Not to do this hyperthing to death, but to say that the Jewish hermeneutic PaRDeS framework represents a hermeneutic hypersphere seems self-evidently true. And it is this hermeneutic hypersphere that I am composing in this table.
The table is a symbolic medium, meant to transmit as faithfully and “losslessly” as possible, a hyperwhole. This piece, of course, will ultimately be actualized in the sacred materiality of letterpress. For now, glowing pixels and laser prints will have to do.
The work has been pure crafting of symbol combinations, tunings, recombinations and responsive attending to the emergent meanings, and reciprocal attentive response.
It goes like this… I make a large or small change to the table and immediately intuit the implications rippling through the hyperwhole, laterally and vertically. This intuition inspires thoughts about what I just did, why I did it, what these new intuitive resonances mean. This thought process mysteriously inspires trying something else. But it is not deductive cognition, reasoning out a possible solution to a defined problem. It is contemplation, and this contemplation invites an address in response. And then it is up to me to respond back.
Any artist will recognize what I am describing here.
As I describe this process, Abulafia and his mystical symbolic stochasm feels very near to me; and with this nearness I feel that telltale inrush of rightness, to which I might respond “amen” or “hineini”.
This process I have been describing, for me, is archetypal of the craft of design.
Design “wants” to be this, to do this kind of hyperholist work.
But down here on the flattest of flat planes, the universe of design is imprisoned in a cubicle-cell on the ground floor of a glass tower prison, where every floor from foot to crown is flat, one flatness stacked upon another.
Saying this out loud, clearly, I know why I am an exile in my own land.
I could write a book, entirely in heightened English, redescribing design through the understanding this framework is meant to convey. If I succeed, a few people will intuit the full importance of design.
It would be unfair to expect anyone else to believe in the importance of this redescription, but it would be even more unfair, and cruel besides, for anyone else to expect me to doubt it.
(Note 9/10/26: this post has been updated at least seven times since the initial publication, and the latest table has evolved out alignment with the account given below.)
Here is the latest version of the Well-Tempered Kabbalah.
This little one page-book of mine is sprawling out, with a fourth table column, “truth”. PaRDes is no longer covering understanding or truth. It is now “word” — meaning any communicative form. And I have reversed the order of Remez and Derash. I am intensely nervous to change the sequence, but it is right for my present purposes. If it is a mistake, it is an honest one, and it is a mistake I have to make all the way. My rationale is bobbing about in the prose below.
Truth is now the knowing essential to each world. I have found beautiful Hebrew and English words for each of these truths, and rather than translate they complement one another to convey meaning. Nitpas — grasped or captured truth — are the givens we use to construct truth in Asiyah. Hashkafah means roughly viewpoint or worldview, and I give it the English word “conceptive” — what enables and limits the perceived and conceived givens available to us for our experiences and understandings. If Nitpas are the grasped givens, Hashkafah is the receptive capacity required to do the grasping — a state of Ruach. If the Hashkafah of Ruach changes, Ruach itself changes, as do the givens it receives in Asiyah. Hitgalut is revelatory, which I call enceptive. Where Hashkafah does the conceiving, Hitgalut is aware that it is conceived within an encompassing intellect of which it participates, and this intellect is the ground and source of other possible conceptions. It is from here radically new understandings emerge ex nihilo from inconceivability. The etymological meaning of Hitgalut is “self uncovering”, and it shares a root with galut, “exile”. Hitgalut is welcoming home of exiled Ruach to the source of its self. And finally, there is Devekut (cleaving) — mystical union beyond thought — the goal of Kabbalah and all esoterisms.
What is slightly tragic about this work is that I am reducing Kabbalah for a focused purpose. Kabbalah is abundant with Remez, but this work is Derashic. I am choosing less evocative and open ended words, and it affords less multiplicity of interpretation. It is one application of something greater and richer and far more beautiful, to which it belongs, and remains loyal as an expression.
What I care about most is how communities may enworld themselves in shared truth, practice and artifacts.
What efforts must we undertake, what ordeals must we undergo, what resistance must we overcome to find more expansive and accommodating orders, when our own is sufficient for our own needs but insufficient for others?
This is what I want to distill as simply and beautifully as I can.
But before we can distill a truth we must mash it, mix it and let it ferment in the alembic.
I am struggling with the sequence of Remez and Derash.
I cannot avoid belief that Derash is the expression of an accomplished stability of understanding — manifested as lucidly understood content, but manifested by a spiritual “container” — which is a capacity for perceiving certain forms of reality, for conceiving their significance and implications, for expressing and insinuating these implications, and conversely, an inclination to be persuaded to belief by presence of certain conceptual articulate forms. I have called this structure of receptive capacity which does the believing of believed-in content, but does much more than that a faith. Increasingly I am choosing to call faith by the Hebrew word Ruach.
We know Ruach only by its words and actions, and so we tend to disregard everything except the fruit — the stuff we can see and grasp. We forget the tree, the roots, the soil, the whole spiritually environing garden and fixate on sensory and conceptual objects. All these forgotten origins of the objects of our objectivity and the subject by whom this objectivity exists is Ruach and the realm of formation in which Ruach lives is called Yetzirah.
To express its existence, Ruach presents concepts and descriptions of sensory objects and events (the graspable things of the actual world of Asiyah) in a way that galvanizes or reinforces or illuminates a particular way of experiencing and understanding — the manifestation of Ruach. When we participate in the life of Ruach in this way, — actively showing or receptively receiving — this mode of language is Derash.
When liberal arts managerial thought leaders sagely reveal that, they are, at bottom, essentially storytellers, and then extoll the power of story, this is Derash. When sociopolitical commentariat speak of “narratives” underlying news stories or other commenter’s ideological distortions and omissions, all this is Derash. When we notice the strangeness of the past, the awkward or graceful artificiality of its gestures and expressions, this is Derash of an alien Ruach of a past era, a zeitgeist. Romcoms are highly stylized Derash, which is why they have a short shelf-life — vividly accessible for a moment, before wilting and repelling all but the nostalgically enchanted. Scientific paradigms guiding theory choice and formation, and even the instrumentation and practices within a scientific program — the common pre-rational conceptions are scientifically disciplined Ruach.
Derash takes the standpoint of one particular Ruach, and coherently presents reality from where it stands, relating an event or unfolding series of events from its own perspective, according to its own field of relevance and interrelations, conveyed in language optimized to communicate its experience of truth, infused with its moral valences, its own sensibilities and tastes.
By my understanding Remez is the hint of significance in expressions that we, caught within the limits of our current Ruach, are unable to understand coherently or clearly. We sense tantalizing but uncanny signal in the noise, and we are drawn to it even as we are repelled by it. Remez is how transcendent possibilities of faith and understanding call to us from beyond our current limits. This is the voice of Neshamah, the Siren of Wisdom, our higher self, and her music is Remez.
Remez is destabilized polysemic chaos, belonging to a higher realm into which we may ascend. This is the realm of Beriah. This chaos is not a chaos of absence of order, but a chaos of too many simultaneous orders — an infinitely signal-rich static requiring filtering for reception by finite Ruach. Ruach ascending to Neshamah, may be reconfigured for more expansive formation, and this is newly manifested in Asiyah, narratable as new Derash.
New self, in a new world, with a new story to tell, with new responses and new responsibilities…
In my practical experience as a designer, everyone tries to understand one level too low.
People try to prematurely construct systems using current conceptual repertoires, and often they are out of tune with one another, or as Kuhn put it are unconsciously operating from incommensurable paradigms. Each misalignment is adjusted, bridged or fudged piecemeal, and consequently the system has no sense of wholeness however systematically sound its integration.
Or people use force to impose their own limited understanding upon all others, who must adopt that understanding or work with incomplete understanding. Or they go to war with other groups in their organization who see things differently with the intention of winning enough power to impose their views.
Teams rarely transcend Ruach. Their stories are Derash of their own Ruach, and the villains of Derashic stories are often those of other Ruchot.
Part of the problem is that many of our political ideologies are considered by its adherents to be ultimate truths. Whoever is outside of the ideology is outcast. All more local understandings must fit inside the ideology and harmonize within it.
I am trying to develop a framework for talking about these levels of understanding, the challenges of communicating across them, the difficulties in overcoming them, as well as the hope and importance of succeeding.
From the moment I began designing, this has been the ineffable Why driving my need to understand what I am doing when I design or when conditions obstruct my efforts to design.
I will repeat my definition of design. Design is the crafting of any kind of system in which people participate as intrinsic parts of the whole. Paul Rand was right: Everything is everything, even when those doing the designing are unaware. And when we do this we mistake the non-human systematic components for the whole, neglect the “people part” and leave the designed whole languishing in semi-oblivion.
Another random note on Remez. When an artist crafts, the art collaborates in its own making. The artist is moved to say or make poetic forms whose meanings are charged with mystery. The artist cannot fully explain the meaning intimated by these expressions, but the expression is intuited to be right. This intimation is Remez, and without Remez, the art is cut off — exiled from what gives art life and meaning.
This is why true ideologues are unable to produce art.
Ideology makes tidy fables with tidy morals.
I am pretty sure I first read whatever it was that implanted the myth of the star grid in my head when I was eight or nine, and I was at an apartment building playground near where my friend Devlin grew up. My mom was friends with a woman named Chichi (or something like that). She lived in an incredibly cool ring-shaped house, with a garden in the center. My mom would visit with Chichi and my sister and I would play on the playground with the kids who lived there. Years before we became friends, I encountered Devlin on this playground, wearing a Frankenstein mask chasing shrieking kids all around the pinestraw and cheap playground equipment ubiquitous in the mid- to late-70s, whose white, scarlet and royal blue paint was always sunbleached and chipping under rust rot, and always missing several bolts and, like our moms, barely holding together.
I must have been in the habit of bringing books to that playground, because I have two vivid book memories from that exact spot. One was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and specifically a part of the book where Charlie is menaced by vermicious knids. The other was an astronomy book, whose name I do not remember, which introduced me to the notion that from some point in the universe an observer could look out into space, and in every direction see the stars in orderly array.
This idea embedded in my imagination, and might even be my first philosophical experience. It is certainly the first philosophical idea I remember, unless we count the insight I learned from Mark Twain, that evil could be comical, which, of course, paved my path to Nietzsche.
This star grid insight, however, set me on the way to Thomas Kuhn. We could, it turns out, change what we see by changing how we see it; and one way to change how we see is by changing our own position relative to what we see.
And suddenly, transformed by that image, a new perspective on seeing crystalized in me. The difference between arbitrary scattering of stars or data-points and diamond-clear faceted order was a matter of aspect, of relative position and orientation. You can toil at mapping the vast mess you see from your seat, and scry whatever meaning you find there. But you might find something shockingly simple if you just unchain your head from its fixed point, stand up, walk around, resituate your body and eyes and observe from many positions and perspectives how things present themselves.
I’ve told this star grid story before, but I’m inspired to tell it for a specific reason today.
Today I am hearing it as a story of multistability. Gestalt psychology was, as far as I know, the first systematic study of perceptual multistability. Philosophical hermeneutics approached texts as a matter of semantic multistability.
But my core interest is psychic multistability — because when we find a new perspective of semantic stability in a text, that change reverberates in us. The meaning of the text transforms before us, and in some elusive way, we change with it. This inner change is why books linger with us and change the mood and tone of our lives.
Philosophical texts, though — and this includes philosophical fiction — induce stable, lasting shifts in our conceptual order, which extend beyond texts and reading experiences, and apply directly to the givenness of the world. We effortlessly, spontaneously perceive and conceive some part of reality differently, and experience it in a new way, intuitively, prior to any thought or language. We experience a new given truth.
And sometimes even the bounds of the text’s subject matter are breached, and these same concepts and percepts appear unexpectedly, and equally spontaneously across many fields of experience, in the intuition of analogy. (“This is just like the star-grid!”) A form (what Plato, speaking Greek called “idea”) that orders one domain applies also to other domains, otherwise unrelated.
But some psychic reorderings break the bounds of analogy and all figuration, and reveal reality as a whole in a completely new aspect, changing literally everything all at once, opening entirely new previously inconceivable meanings, the most important of which are outside the domain of form.
This is why I care about the different modes of reading and writing, and the forms of truth they indicate and induce.
These are all gestell shifts, and they are known only by their fruits. They are known inwardly by their experiential fruits in the articulate gestalts we perceive and conceive across the What, How, Why and Who of our experience; they are known outwardly by observable responses to these experiences.
We have fixed notions of what these gestell shifts essentially are, why they occur and what behaviors should result from them. We tend to admire them, at least from a safe distance. Because they are admired, they are pursued by some who lack intrinsic interest in what induces the shifts. Some try to induce the inward transformation through strict self-control, by adopting outward behaviors of those reputed to have been transformed. They want to become admirable. Others ape the outward behaviors of transformed souls, in order to win admiration for what they are not.
I am not sure how helpful these old criteria and conventions are. They may just reflect what humankind required at its point of development between 300 BC and 300 AD. Earlier times admired radically different qualities. We must change our individual and collective selves in response to what new technologies enable us to self-inflict, to cope with and to achieve. Different technologies create new self-inflicted conditions, copes and possibilities.
Religious language relies on spatial metaphors. Spiritual journeys involve ascensions to higher planes, and risks of falling into lower ones. Mediums leave their bodies and rise heavenward. And when expressing intellectual experiences, we speak optically and spatially about standpoints, perspectives, points-of-view, aspects. Many of the most consequential shifts in understanding I have experienced can only be expressed geometrically. A person can lie in bed dreaming, or sit in a dark theater watching a stationary screen, or sit in a ramshackle playground reading a book and be transported to distant imaginary, intellectual or imaginal places. How many transports are there, and how many are yet to transport us?
I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception.
And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level.
Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach.
When two or more Ruchot encounter one another Ruach-to-Ruach, each chooses: descend to Nefesh or ascend to Neshamah.
If both choose ascension, dialogue transpires. In the spirit of I-Thou, each relates to the other as Thou and implicitly assumes a shared transcendent being in whom both participate. Neshamah is that shared transcendent being in whom dialogical partners become participants.
Hans-Georg Gadamer says that in profound conversation, the conversation has us. Neshamah is the being of the conversation, who animates each Ruach together within itself. When we “conduct” a conversation, each participant is a medium through which the conversation flows.
From participation within Neshamah, revelations ex nihilo irrupt from Chayah, source of selfhood, bringing with its influx direct intuition of ultimate wherefore.
In being, Chayah becomes medium of Ein Sof.
In revelation, Neshamah becomes medium of Chayah.
In dialogue, Ruach becomes medium of Neshamah.
In subject, Nefesh becomes medium of Ruach.
In life, matter becomes medium of Nefesh.
But matter and Ein Sof are one, and this unity is Shekhinah.
Raw notes:
Is the table: world, self, truth, word?
| World | Self | Truth | Word |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atzilut (emanation) | Chayah (source) | Union | Sod (mystical) |
| Beriyah (creation) | Neshamah (intellect) | Epiphanic | Derash (homiletic) |
| Yetzirah (formation) | Ruach (spirit) | Subjective | Remez (allusive) |
| Asiyah (actuality) | Nefesh (soul) | Objective | Peshat (literal) |
Here is what is bothering me. I committed Well-Tempered Kabbalah to a perspective from the standpoint of Asiyah, which — it seems to me — is less a choice than an acknowledgment of a necessary constraint. But this “word” column is radically Asiyah-rooted. A word links an actual finite thing in Asiyah to some kind of truth within or beyond Asiyah.
For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am suspending this question for now.
Construal belongs to the mode of system. We construe a logic of construction. We figure something out and comprehend the relationship between a set of objective givens and a systemic whole they constitute as parts, linked logically or causally. This is the objective understanding of Nefesh, in the objective world of Asiyah.
Conception belongs to the mode of gestalt. We spontaneously receive a given gestalt whole. We are given gestalts both perceptually through the senses and conceptually through the mind. Each whole spontaneously resolves into given sub-wholes. The sub-wholes do not constitute the whole; rather, each whole comprises sub-wholes articulated within it. This is the subjective understanding of Ruach, in subjective world of Yetzirah.
But we do not experience our own subjectivity. Our own subjectivity manifests as given sensory and mental objects, as reality as we know it, as “objective reality”. It is only when we notice differences in responses to or beliefs about “objective reality” that subjectivity is indirectly discernible. This is only possible, though, if we do not naively invalidate other subjectivities as mistaken or deceptive. If we take other subjectivities as valid, we learn that objective understanding is rooted in subjectivity, and that material reality constrains objective understanding but does not determine it the way naive realism assumes. This process is dialogue.
If we pursue understanding of other subjectivities, and persevere until we succeed, success manifests as acquisition of new gestalts in new forms of objectivity. We are able to spontaneously perceive and conceive new gestalt articulate wholes. This acquisition is insight.
Pursuit of insight into other subjects — fellow Ruchot — is not straightforward, however. It is intellectually, emotionally and existentially demanding, and this is why we neglect or actively resist doing it. It is easier to ignore or invalidate other subjects, and subjectivity in general.
The most difficult aspect of trans-subjective understanding is the challenge of loosening and overcoming our own subjective limits. Those limits are uncannily enforced by nothingness. Each Ruach has an implicit ultimate conception of everything, beyond which there is nothing. In pursuit of inter-subjective understanding we must become skeptical toward our own sense of everything and the apparent nothingness beyond it. Everything becomes only everything to me within my own Ruach, and nothing becomes only that of which I am as-yet oblivious.
This introduces an entirely new attitude toward reality that intuits reality as largely — and in fact, overwhelmingly — transcendent in essence. This is the world of Beriah — the world by which Yetzirah and, consequently Asiyah, are given ex nihilo from nothingness.
To find our way to fellow Ruach we must puncture the roof of oblivion, and ascend to Neshamah. From there we may descend back to Ruach who can accommodate my old understanding and that of my fellow Ruach. More important than the present expansion, though, is something else: an immediate intuition of the eternal inexhaustibility of ex nihilo epiphany. This faith is intellection, also known as gnosis, the root of both subjectivity and objectivity.
Intellection is revelatory-creative, epiphanic. In intellective faith we press into the outer limits of everything as we conceive it, through the oblivion of nothingness, and intuit that nothingness is eternally pregnant with infinite moreness. The insight into nothingness resulting from this intellection immunizes against naivety of nihilism, and I call it exnihilism.
Entirely beyond philosophy is the absolute in Atzilut. From here I will observe Wittgenstinean silence.
Israel Sarug is my kind of kabbalist. He is philosophically rigorous, but a factual trickster. To borrow from Werner Herzog, he cares little for the “truth of accountants” and will not allow factual trivia to obstruct his pursuit of learning or teaching. To borrow a related idea from another filmmaker, Jodorowsky, Sarug appears to belong to the long iffy line of “holy charlatans”, or to tone it back to archetypal semirespectability, the trickster tradition, driven to interweave factual, figurative and intellective truths, suspended in ironic tension.
On the whole, the spread of Lurianic Kabbalism was almost entirely due to the activity of another Kabbalist, Israel Sarug, who between 1592 and 1598 carried on a lively propaganda in the interests of the new school among the Kabbalists of Italy. He posed as one of Luria’s principal disciples, although it seems certain that he had no claim to this title and that all his knowledge of Lurianic doctrine was derived from those stolen copies of Vital’s writings which had come into his hands in Safed. A man of considerable intellectual originality, he conceived himself to have penetrated more deeply than Luria’s genuine pupils into the mysteries of the new doctrine. This fact probably explains why his missionary zeal led him to claim an authority which strictly speaking he did not possess. The deception passed unnoticed, and down to our own days Sarug has been treated both by adherents and opponents of Kabbalism as an authentic interpreter of Luria. The truth is that in certain essential points he gave an entirely new turn to Luria’s thought and enriched it by speculative ideas of his own with which I cannot deal in this context. They are to be found chiefly in his book Limmude Atsiluth [which I transliterate as “Atzilut”], “Doctrines on Emanation.” The essence of Sarug’s interpretation of Luria may be described as an attempt to provide a quasi-philosophical basis for Luria’s distinctly unphilosophical doctrine by injecting a species of Platonism into it, and the singular success his interpretation achieved was due in part to those elements of his teaching which were not genuinely Lurianic.
When I dug further into him, I found a paper called “God as a Printer: On the Theological Status of Printing in the Kabbalistic Tradition of Israel Sarug” by Eliezer Baumgarten.
Here is the abstract:
Recent decades have witnessed a broad scholarly discussion of the cultural influences of the printing press invention. The core of this revolved around the new technological influence on the concept of knowledge, its methods of dispersion, and on social changes that it engendered in the 16th century, when it became an affordable widespread technology. This article presents the way in which the spread of the printing press influenced conceptual paradigms of Kabbalists in general, and Lurianic Kabbalists from Sarug’s tradition in particular. These Kabbalists exchanged the traditional conception of creation as an act of writing, within the conception of the world as a written text, for conceptions of creation as a printing act and the world as a printed text. I show how the professional term ‘letterpress printing’ entered these Kabbalists’ descriptions of divine emanation, alongside their conceptualization of printing as a divine activity, as writing had been conceptualized previously.
Of course, as a letterpress fetishist, I adore this analogy, not least for its anomality.
A fascinating McLuhanian element to this story also appeals to me. I’m succumbing to a temptation to link this with the trickster angel of media and mediators, by whom truths are not only propagated, but configured.
Sarug could be called the Justin Sledge of the Gutenberg age, though it remains to be decided whether esoteric insight or something else is the message of the medium of streaming digital content. Many voracious consumers of digital esoteric content seem to me more like bus tourists in Yetzirah than emigres in higher orders, and whether they are seated to the right or left of the bus they more often become ex-patriotic illiberals than liberated expatriates. They are more individualist than individuated, more inclined to follow ideological trends than to loyalty to people or persons, more spiritually escapist than religiously responsible, more “not of this world” than “tikkun olam”… yet still so imprisoned within this sealed-off, air-conditioned sightseeing bus.
The internet has misattributed to Mark Twain a quotation: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” I first heard and anchored on it as “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I hadn’t the time.” To my ear, it has a nicer waltzier swing.
Ironically, none of the sources of this quote managed to say it as parsimoniously as the internet rock-tumbled version. Presumably, they hadn’t the time.
My first book took 16 years to write, and was nine pages long. My forthcoming book on Kabbalah has taken another six years, and it will be one page long.
Nobody can accuse me of failing to write a shorter book because I hadn’t the time.
Faith moves in the present, between wherefore and therefore.
“Wherefore…?”: Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief
“Therefore…?”: Pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.
Each belief is engendered by an implicit wherefore before unfolding into explicit therefores.
Belief precedes speech and action, and is the fruit of faith. It is the rustling between whither and whence.
I originally formulated this idea using the model of the pragmatic maxim:
To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the practical consequences that follow from it.
Thanks to C. S. Peirce for the pragmatic maxim:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.
Thanks to M. Tismisesky for bludgeoning Peirce’s verbosity into a two-word provocation:
And therefore…?
Thanks to H.-G. Gadamer for his “hermeneutic priority of the question”.
To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.
Every finite one is articulated from the infinite One by degrees of nihilitude. Nihilitude and finitude belong entirely to infinitude and are essential within infinite self-articulation. Before the beginning, there is a faint trace of indivisible difference. At the beginning, infinity and the possibility of finite being divide without exclusion. In the beginning, exclusive subjectivities separate from one another. Thereafter, everything is a sum of objects, and non-objects are nothing. Each degree layers nihilitude upon nihilitude.
Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief, and pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.
The pragmatic consequence of a belief is its implicit “Therefore…?”
The hermeneutic presequence of a belief is its implicit “Wherefore…?” “and this answers what?”
Belief is prior to speech and action. Belief is the fruit of faith, a wherefore and therefore, a wither and whence of spirit, a rustling in the present.
The wherefore flows from Yetzirah; the therefore unfolds into Assiyah.
Sophists are so spiritually underdeveloped that they lack the capacity to conceive even the possibility of wisdom transcending their own. This is one of the most radical category mistakes, for wisdom is precisely active awareness of this possibility. Wisdom is wise most of all to how oblivion works and lives in ironic tension between certainty and certainty of disruptive, radical surprise ex nihilo.
Metacognitive incompetence entered the popular sphere as Dunning-Kruger.
But millennia before, Plato spoke of metasophical incompetence as double-ignorance — not knowing that one does not know. Socrates knew he did not know, and for this reason was the wisest man in Athens.
But every age has its sophists who know they know and, with the confidence and barbarous serenity of youth, dispense to all what everyone knows is wisdom: wisdom is confident, self-certain, calming, comforting, accepting. Who wouldn’t pay top dollar for such wisdom?
One fool’s dissenting wisdom:
The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…
The substance of oblivion, ignorance and the very possibility of surprise is shared with relevance, focus, discrimination and mortality. Nihilitude, and more nihilitude. Without nihilitude, we return to our source.
If Chesed is lovingkindness, Gevurah should be lovingseverity.
It is easy to see that Gevurah stripped of kindness is loveless judgment.
It is harder is to see that Chesed stripped of severity is equally loveless niceness.
Only together with Gevurah is Chesed love.
In Tiferet, this couple (and all couples) unite and inter-perfect in the beauty of balance.
I need to print revised editions of both the dialectic sefirot (which seems more true and important to me by the day), and the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet, for a mix of boring and interesting reasons.
The boring reason is transliterative consistency. My earlier prints had some minor inconsistencies that are bothering me. Da’at, Tif’eret and Netsach have been changed to Daat, Tiferet and Netzach. Assiyah has been changed to Asiyah.
More interesting are some refinements in alternative translations translations of sefirot.
These changes are all still traditional, but make a better-tempered whole.
Most exciting though are the changes in the four worlds chart.
First, I made two intensely satisfying improvements to the column labels:
In the rows, I re-tuned some of the language:
I plan to print this new sheet and live with it for a week or two before committing to plates.
This is starting to feel very much my own intimate understanding within my tradition, and it is becoming more starkly beautiful to me with each revision.
Update August 19, 2023: I was considering “lovingkindness” for Chesed. There are good arguments for it. Viewed from approximate absoluteness, as emanated from Binah, Chesed is, in fact, complete lovingkindness, from which Gevurah develops its complementary severity. But viewed from below, which is the perspective of this sheet, Gevurah can be excluded from Chesed, which is then mere kindness — the loveless niceness of unconditional mercy and tolerance — always toward some at the expense of others.
In the lifeworld dwells vital soul, to whom literal truth is given.
In the world of form-and-order dwells spirit, to whom figurative truth is given.
In the world of creation-revelation dwells intellect, to whom intellection is given.
In the world of emanation wells the source from whom being flows forth and returns.
The lines above are a summational response to a hymn by Nachmanides, translated in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:
From the beginning of time, through eternities
I was among his hidden treasures.
From Nothing he called me forth, but at the end of time
I shall be reclaimed by the King.
My life flows from the depth of the spheres
Which give order and form to the soul;
Divine forces build it and nourish it;
Then it is preserved in the chambers of the King.
He radiated light to bring her forth,
In hidden well-springs, right and left.
The soul descended the ladder of heaven,
From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.
Scholem then proceeds to discuss the three “spiritual agencies”, which in my Jacob’s Ladder “reference sheet” I labeled “subject”, but which I might simply call “self” in future editions.
The psychology of the Zohar shows a peculiar mixture of two doctrines held by certain schools of mediaeval philosophy. The first distinguished between the vegetative, the animal, and the rational soul — three stages which Aristotelian doctrine regarded as different faculties of the one soul, while the mediaeval followers of Plato were inclined to think of them as three different entities. The second, which was generally held by the Arab philosophers and popularized among the Jews by Maimonides, is based on the conception of the “acquired intellect.” According to this view, the rational faculty latent in the mind is actualized in the process of cognition, and this realization of the intellect is the sole guide to immortality. To this doctrine, the Zohar now gives a Kabbalistic turn. It retains the distinction between three spiritual agencies: Nefesh or life; Ruah or spirit; and Neshamah or soul proper, but abandons the idea that they represent three different faculties of the soul. Rather all three are already latently present in the first, Nefesh, and the higher grades correspond to the new and deeper powers which the soul of the devotee acquires through the study of the Torah and through meritorious actions.
Neshamah is the intellective self in Beriah, to whom reality is given in intellection.
This term, intellection, is a concept I learned from perennialists (followers of Schuon) and it concerns a kind of gnosis invited (never caused) by spiritual effort, which yields spiritual fruit, but which transcends spirit and vital soul. It transcends objective reason and subjective ontology.
Intellection is the true telos of philosophy. It is here that we receive gifts of immortal life from others and bequeath it to others willing to receive it. Here we move and are moved by the tossing of the golden ball.
Intellection is known solely by its fruits in figurative and literal givenness — enworldment.
A footnote in Scholem gave me another jolt of recognition this morning.
It referred the Zohar’s spiritual diagnosis of origninal sin.
He joined below and separated above, when it was necessary to separate below and to join above.
I consulted the Zohar for context:
“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.
Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.”
“The fourth commandment: to realize that YHVH is ha-Elohim, God, as is said: Know today and take to heart that YHVH is ha-Elohim), God (Deuteronomy 4:39). To include the name Elohim in the name YHVH, realizing they are one, indivisible. This is the mystery written: Let there be me’orot, lights, in the expanse of heaven to shine upon earth (Genesis 1:14-15), that the two names be one, with absolutely no division — that me’orot, lights, spelled deficiently, merge in the name of heaven: one together and indivisible, black light with white light, indivisible, and all is one. This is the white cloud of day and the cloud of fire in the night, as they have said: ‘Quality of day and quality of night’s — to be arrayed by each other to shine, as is said: to shine upon earth.
“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.
“Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.
“This is the mystery written: Let them be me’orot, lights. The shell rises in the wake of the kernel. The kernel is or, light; the other side, mavet, death. Or [light] in letters joined together, mavet [death] in separation. When this or [light] disappears from there, the letters of separation join together. …”
This understanding of sin as reversal of proper relationships reminds me of the animating insight of a poem I wrote twenty years ago in a metanoiac outburst and continue to edit and revise:
In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
bury the ground with broken branches.
Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.
Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.
Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.
Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.
Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?
Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.
The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.
The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.
The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.
And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.
Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.
Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.
Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.
Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.
Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.
In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.
By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.
But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.
And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.
This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.
Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.
Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.
The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.
I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”
I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.
“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”
Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?
Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?
I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.
From Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:
…the Zohar’s sexual symbolism reflects the influence of two different tendencies. Insofar as it shows a positive attitude towards the function of sexual life, within the limits ordained by divine law, it may be said to represent a genuinely Jewish outlook. Chastity is indeed one of the highest moral values of Judaism: Joseph, who by his chastity has “upheld the covenant” is regarded by the Midrash and the Kabbalah as the prototype of the righteous man, the true Zaddik. But at no time was sexual asceticism accorded the dignity of a religious value, and the mystics make no exception. Too deeply was the first command of the Torah, Be fruitful and multiply, impressed upon their minds. The contrast to other forms of mysticism is striking enough to be worth mentioning: non-Jewish mysticism, which glorified and propagated asceticism, ended sometimes by transplanting eroticism into the relation of man to God. Kabbalism, on the other hand, was tempted to discover the mystery of sex within God himself. For the rest it rejected asceticism and continued to regard marriage not as a concession to the frailty of the flesh but as one of the most sacred mysteries.
Every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah. In a tract on the “union of a man with his wife” which was later ascribed to Nahmanides, Joseph Gikatila gave a similar interpretation of the mystical significance of marriage. The Kabbalists deduced from Genesis 4:1: “And Adam knew Eve his wife” that “knowledge” [Da’at] always means the realization of a union, be it that of wisdom (or reason) [Chokhmah] and intelligence [Binah], or that of the King [Keter] and the Shekhinah [Malkhut]. Thus knowledge [Da’at] itself received a sublime erotic quality in this new Gnostical system, and this point is often stressed in Kabbalistic writings.
This passage expresses at once how I know marriage, philosophy, design and everything in life I care about. This is why I am Jewish.
No complete systematic whole (synthetically constructed or analytically construed) is sufficient to sustain enworldment.
A whole must also form a gestalt whole (conceived as a whole and articulated as parts belonging to that whole).
And we ourselves must belong within this whole as participants who, through our participation, instaurate it.
But to do so requires inward and outward change, co-figuration of first-person and third-person, nearly always by way of second-person. We can systematize the little we can conceive whole without any disruption to our own subjectivity.
In craft artifact and artifex change together.
The change to oneself in first-person is experienced as the click of gestalt shift.
Gestalt-shift (whether perceptual, or conceptual, or both) is a manifestation of change within one’s pre-thought order among intuitions — to the structured receptivity to whom reality is given in direct perception long before truth is given. The name of this inter-ordered intuitive being — being who precedes and conditions all experience — is faith. Faith is not a property of belief. Belief is the property of faith, the deepest self who does all believing, perceiving, conceiving and — much later — construal and construction.
New words for new properly subjective understanding. A receptivity to some form of being — a capacity to take a given. We will call this an enception. A new enceptive order that manifest new conceptive wholes and articulations within wholes is a gestell, an enframing. (Heidegger was right that technik enframes, but he was wrong that only technik enframes. I will say that technik dysenframes.)
A perceptual gestalt shift, a conceptual hermeneutic shift, an equipped perceptual-conceptual-practical scientific paradigm shift, a comprehensive religious conversion in which one is reborn into a new world — these are all gestell shifts, changes of faith, transfifurations of soul that give us reality in new ways. They are all re-enworldments.
But listen: we are tuned for objective knowledge. We forever confuse subjective changes which manifest objective change with changes to the objects themselves. We have language for the objective changes we notice in our perceptual and conceptual field, but we lack language for the subject who changed and for the nature of change a subject undergoes. When we attempt to talk about subjects, we evert them into psychic objects so we can grasp them scientifically as psychological phenomena or as behaviors resulting from something nonexistently unknowable.
This is all just the latest iteration of the same primordial category mistake of subject and object, the edenic eversion that has plagued us as a species from before the beginning of history. We think we can grab Eden by the apples and own it as property, and we cannot.
We don’t know how to avoid knowing that knowledge is objective comprehension and mastery. We think we only know for as long as we can give an objective account. We cannot help but know that whenever somebody else’s account of things is incomprehensible and makes no to us that they are full of nonsense.
So the “masters of reality” white-knuckle whatever given reality is graspable to them right now — which to them is “objective reality” itself — and stack these little givens sky high. Their constructions reach the roof of heaven in the grandest narrative edifices, which remain such, even when the grand narrative is a tale of rejection of grand narratives. The new structures collapse as fast as they are constructed and soon the tall tale of overcoming tall tales is replaced with a new tall tale of oppression by the old constructions. The Tower forever topples into The Tower. The blocks are too small for the height. Only a single block the size of the tower itself can bear such weight.
I am less and less able to doubt the truth in the dialectical Sefirot. I experience it as excessively true.
