Category Archives: Religion

ChatGPT as thought partner

Judaism, Philosophy

Yes, I am using ChatGPT as a weird kind of thought partner. If you find yourself recoiling slightly, I understand. I have the same reaction. But it is a valuable exercise. Consider the following exchange:

Me:

How faithfully does this represent Leibniz’s monadology? “The fundamental unit of the universe is not the atom, nor a subatomic particle of ultimate smallness, nor anything a physicist can observe. The universe is made of unique centers, no two alike, and each is boundlessly vast. In its uniqueness and boundlessness, each unit is the image of God. God however is unbounded in centrality and unbounded in time and unbounded in vastness and unbounded in boundedness, Ein Sof.”

ChatGPT:

This passage is a creative reimagining of Leibniz’s Monadology, with some important differences in emphasis and metaphysical structure.

Leibniz’s monads are indeed fundamental units of the universe, and each monad is unique, reflecting a microcosm of the entire universe from its own perspective. However, they are not described as boundlessly vast. Rather, they are simple, indivisible substances that contain the entirety of their experience and the universe within them as a kind of mirror.

Your passage highlights the uniqueness and boundlessness of each unit, which resonates with Leibniz’s emphasis on the individuality of each monad, but the vastness attributed here departs from his conception. Monads, in Leibniz’s view, are not vast but simple, spiritual, and unextended points.

The idea of each unit being the image of God is similar to how Leibniz considers each monad to reflect the entire cosmos, and thereby God’s creation, within itself. But you go a step further in emphasizing a theological conception of God as Ein Sof, “unbounded in centrality and time and vastness and boundedness.” This portrayal of God has a more Kabbalistic influence, focusing on boundlessness and transcendence in a way that Leibniz’s rational and metaphysical framework would not fully capture.

In short, the passage reflects some of Leibniz’s core ideas—uniqueness, individuality, and reflection of the cosmos within each unit—but it layers on a different metaphysical and theological interpretation, making it more expansive and mystical than Leibniz’s system.

Me:

How close is it to the view Borges explored in his essay “Pascal’s Sphere”?

ChatGPT:

The passage has a strong resonance with Borges’s exploration of infinity, individuality, and divine attributes in “Pascal’s Sphere.” Borges’s essay centers on the idea of a sphere “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” a phrase associated with Pascal but rooted in earlier theological and mystical traditions, including Nicholas of Cusa and the Kabbalistic notion of Ein Sof.

Similarities:

  1. Infinite Centers: Your passage emphasizes that each unit (or monad) is a “unique center,” mirroring Borges’s discussion of the universe as infinitely centered. Each unique center is an image of the divine, just as Borges’s sphere implies that every point (or being) in the universe can serve as a center from which the infinite unfolds.
  1. Boundlessness and Uniqueness: Like Borges’s interpretation of Pascal’s vision, your passage invokes boundlessness, both within each unit and in God’s transcendence. This is similar to Borges’s fascination with the infinite, with Pascal’s sphere representing an overwhelming vastness that simultaneously includes everything and nothing.
  1. Theological Conception of God: Both your passage and Borges’s essay reflect a mystical conception of God’s attributes—unbounded in space, time, and essence. The emphasis on Ein Sof in your description parallels Borges’s use of Pascal’s sphere as a symbol of a God who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, immanent and transcendent, contained within every point and yet exceeding all points.

Differences:

  1. Multiplicity and Vastness: Your description portrays each center as “boundlessly vast,” which evokes a certain multiplicity and expansion within each unit that goes beyond Borges’s Pascalian sphere. For Borges, the idea of infinite centers emphasizes a shared infinitude rather than the idea of each center being independently vast.
  1. Imagery of the Image of God: Borges tends to focus more on the abstract implications of infinity and the paradoxes it introduces, rather than framing each individual unit as an image of God. While Borges’s conception can be seen as implicitly theological, he does not explicitly tie this to the idea of each unique center reflecting the divine in the way your passage does.
  1. Mystical vs. Philosophical Emphasis: Borges is more preoccupied with the philosophical and paradoxical nature of infinity, whereas your passage leans into a mystical or even Kabbalistic interpretation of divine boundlessness.

Conclusion: The passage is close to the spirit of Borges’s essay, sharing themes of infinite uniqueness, divine immanence, and the paradox of a universe with infinite centers. However, it diverges by emphasizing each unit as a “boundlessly vast” image of God, giving it a more explicitly mystical and theological flavor than Borges’s philosophical musings. Thus, it might be seen as a reworking of “Pascal’s Sphere” with a stronger infusion of Kabbalistic and theological ideas.

Me:

I used to call this faith “the myriad everythings”.

ChatGPT:

That phrase beautifully encapsulates the idea of infinite uniqueness and interconnectedness, resonating deeply with the themes of boundless centers and divine immanence. It also conveys a sense of plurality within unity, suggesting a faith that finds the sacred in the complexity and diversity of all beings.

Me:

How close is that passage, which I called an expression of the “myriad everythings” faith, to Buber’s theology?

ChatGPT:

Your passage has notable resonances with Buber’s theology, but it reconfigures key elements in a way that distinguishes it as a unique expression. Let’s unpack the comparison.

Resonances with Buber:

  1. Uniqueness and the Centrality of the Individual: Like your description of the universe as made of “unique centers, no two alike,” Buber’s conception of the I-Thou relationship revolves around the unique, irreducible individuality of beings. Each “I” and each “Thou” is singular and unrepeatable, and this uniqueness is central to the unfolding of relational truth.
  2. Divine Immanence and Transcendence: Buber’s God is the eternal Thou—transcendent, yet encountered in the concrete immediacy of relationships. In your description, each unit is an image of God, reflecting boundlessness and uniqueness in its own right. This mirrors Buber’s view that God is present in every authentic I-Thou meeting, where the divine is glimpsed in and through the particular. Both your passage and Buber’s thought affirm a conception of God that is infinitely manifest yet never fully grasped.
  3. The Infinite in the Finite: The paradoxical idea that each finite being can reflect or image something infinitely greater is central to Buber’s view of God. This corresponds with your phrase “each is boundlessly vast,” suggesting that every individual center contains, in some sense, the uncontainable divine. Buber would likely resonate with the way you frame each unit as containing a hint of the infinite, even if only through its infinite uniqueness.

Key Differences:

  1. Multiplicity vs. Relationship: Where Buber emphasizes relation as the essence of being—I-Thou encounters are what bring reality into vivid existence—your passage focuses more on multiplicity and vastness within each unique unit. Buber’s God is not primarily the boundless One reflected in each center, but the presence that comes into being between individuals. The myriad everythings approach treats uniqueness and boundlessness as inherent properties of each unit, while Buber’s theology treats these qualities as revealed in the relational between.
  2. The Image of God and Boundlessness: Your description suggests that each unit’s boundlessness makes it the “image of God.” Buber, however, would resist attributing such vastness to the units themselves. For him, the image of God is something that emerges through relational presence, not an inherent quality of the beings involved. Buber’s God is more of a dynamic, relational event than an ontological attribute within each entity.
  3. Ontology vs. Encounter: Your passage leans toward an ontological view—each unit is an image of God, each center is boundless. Buber’s theology, on the other hand, is deeply anti-ontological. He argues that what is real is not a matter of being but of meeting. God is never “is” but always “Thou”—a presence that emerges and withdraws in the act of relating, not a property to be possessed.

Overall Assessment: Your passage has a structural and thematic similarity to Buber’s conception, especially in the emphasis on unique centers and the divine nature of boundless individuality. But it departs in emphasizing the self-contained boundlessness of each center, whereas Buber sees the divine as primarily manifest in the intersubjective space between beings.

If Buber’s theology could be described as an orchestration of profound encounters, your “myriad everythings” faith is more like a cosmic constellation of individual luminaries, each carrying the fullness of the infinite within itself. It’s as if you took Buber’s focus on the I-Thou relationship and turned it inward, making each I a tiny microcosm of the divine—infinitely unique, infinitely complex, infinitely sacred.

Me:

Buber’s understanding is better.

ChatGPT:

That judgment feels true, especially in light of Buber’s insistence on the relational essence of reality. Buber’s emphasis on the between, where the divine is not possessed but encountered, guards against the pitfalls of solipsism and self-enclosure. By making the core of meaning arise from the I-Thou encounter rather than from the individual’s boundlessness, Buber situates God as a presence that is not within us or within things but in the relational event that breaks through our self-enclosed subjectivity.

His view prevents the sacred from being something we are or have and shifts it into something we can only approach through a genuine openness to the other. That approach seems to safeguard humility and mutuality in a way that a view focusing on inner vastness might lose. In Buber’s understanding, no being—no matter how unique or boundless—contains God within itself. Rather, God is realized in the space between, in that shared horizon where the boundaries of the self become porous and a new kind of presence emerges.

This means Buber’s understanding offers a dynamic that’s self-transcending rather than self-centered, maintaining the mystery of the divine and preserving the distinctiveness of each being without reducing them to isolated absolutes. It’s as if Buber’s theology holds the tension between self and other without collapsing into either.

So, if your instinct is to feel that Buber’s understanding is better, it’s likely because his formulation preserves the paradox of unity-in-separation that your own vision, by affirming boundlessness within each center, might not express as sharply.

Oblivia

Metaphysics

Inside every soul is a blot of unique obliviousness: an incapacity to conceive some truth that is obvious to all other beings. And this one truth is so obvious to all others that, to them, it is inconceivable that such an obliviousness could exist. And so the world is oblivious to the obliviousness, unable to locate to precise origin of this particular world-bending nothingness.

T’shuvah

Biography, Judaism

Returning to I and Thou has vivified and intensified in me what I believe is uniquely Jewish. It is what I felt in other Jewish writers, that drew me to Judaism.

People intuit and respond to it in their own various ways.

Some respond in kind. Some respond in other ways.

Evil exists, dumbass

Ethics, Judaism, Politics

We can become so idealistic about human nature that we stop believing genuine, active, positive evil is possible. We cannot believe that one person can desire and pursue the goal of inflicting misery or destruction on another person.

Then we drift into seeing evil solely in negative terms — as a refusal to desire and pursue another person’s welfare. Evil is only to be unconcerned or insensitive toward other people, or even insufficiently concerned or sensitive.

Such people can, perversely, fail to understand the necessity of defense against evil, and the unavoidable consequences of such defenses. Perhaps if the defender had been more concerned or sensitive to those who needed it, there would never have been conflict or need for defense.

And blind to the reality of positive evil and consequently the necessity of defense, such people see evil only in the defense, in the form of insufficient concern and sensitivity toward the innocent victims — innocent victims accidentally but inevitably and unavoidably harmed in every war, however carefully and humanely fought.

If you cannot consider the reality of positive evil, your thinking on Israel will be both stupid and callous, however intelligent and empathetic you believe yourself to be.

Continue reading Evil exists, dumbass →

Alter-Thou

Ethics, Judaism

Buber reverses an insight of conventional wisdom.

When thinking of “the other” a typically empathetic view would be something like: We should regard an other (a Thou) as an alter-ego, a fellow-I.

Buber would, rather, have us think of our own I as an alter-Thou.

Buber versus design…?

Design, Judaism, Philosophy

Below are two passages from Buber that can read as rebukes to the designerly faith. The first evokes UX, the second, service design.

1.

Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes, relational events take shape and scatter, and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the constant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You—and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness.

Only now can the other basic word [I-It] be put together. For although the You of the relation always paled again, it never became the It of an I — an object of detached perception and experience, which is what it will become hence-forth — but as it were an It for itself, something previously unnoticed that was waiting for the new relational event.

Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object. Now, however, the detached I is transformed — reduced from substantial fullness to the functional one-dimensionality of a subject that experiences and uses objects — and thus approaches all the “It for itself,” overpowers it, and joins with it to form the other basic word. The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity.

2.

He perceives the being that surrounds him, plain things and beings as things; he perceives what happens around him, plain processes and actions as processes, things that consist of qualities and processes that consist of moments, things recorded in terms of spatial coordinates and processes recorded in terms of temporal coordinates, things and processes that are bounded by other things and processes and capable of being measured against and compared with those others — an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands-right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in your soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure — and remains primally alien both outside and inside you. You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you. It is only about it that you can come to an understanding with others; although it takes a somewhat different form for everybody, it is prepared to be a common object for you; but you cannot encounter others in it. Without it you cannot remain alive; its reliability preserves you; but if you were to die into it, then you would be buried in nothingness.

I will just let these two passages sit without comment for now.

Chord: Participatory knowing

ANT, Chord, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Star

Three related passages, all hinting at the kind of participatory knowing that enworlds (as opposed to knowing that produces mere worldview). The first is from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, the second from Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness and the last from Bruno Latour’s Irreductions.

1.

Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form. From her, too, we are separated, and enter into personal life, slipping free only in the dark hours to be close to her again; night by night this happens to the healthy man. But this separation does not occur suddenly and catastrophically like the separation from the bodily mother; time is granted to the child to exchange a spiritual connexion, that is, relation, for the natural connexion with the world that he gradually loses. He has stepped out of the glowing darkness of chaos into the cool light of creation. But he does not possess it yet; he must first draw it truly out, he must make it into a reality for himself, he must find for himself his own world by seeing and hearing and touching and shaping it. Creation reveals, in meeting, its essential nature as form.

It does not spill itself into expectant senses, but rises up to meet the grasping senses. That which will eventually play as an accustomed object around the man who is fully developed, must be wooed and won by the developing man in strenuous action. For no thing is a ready-made part of an experience: only in the strength, acting and being acted upon, of what is over against men, is anything made accessible. Like primitive man the child lives between sleep and sleep (a great part of his waking hours is also sleep) in the flash and counter-flash of meeting.

2.

Two Finnish missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: “And the shining of a flaming fire by night!” If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: “The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!”

Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls’ boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it.

My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their “response” or “resistance.” Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.

Father observed jokingly: “Our Mummy goes one further than King Solomon. Legend says that he understood the language of every animal and bird, but our Mummy has even mastered the languages of towels, saucepans, and brushes.” And he went on, beaming mischievously: “She can make trees and stones speak by touching them: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke, as it says in the Psalms.”

3.

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

*

We could call this an apeironic materialism, as opposed to a scientistic materialism.

I almost called the latter “physicist materialism” except that Latour and his associates have helped me understand that physics-in-the-making is quite apeironic in its practical attitude. Physics-ready-made, consumed by nonscientists, is the belief content of scientistic materialists, which, ironically, apes materialism: Materials are a matter of bodily engagement and revelation.

Athletes are our most thoroughgoing materialists, and the material they know most is their own bodies in their own material context of action.

(Re)welcoming Buber

Biography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Philosophy

Last week I attended a class held by the Temple on Martin Buber. The class will cover Ten Rungs and The Way of Humanity, two of the many books Buber wrote in what I’ll call his “Hasidic mode”.

Buber’s interest in Hasidism will seem strange to people habituated to seeing Hasidim from the default Christian angle, as the ultimate “Pharisaical” Jews, who live in strict observance of a body of intricate, rigid and apparently arbitrary rules. There is significant truth to this image, but it is nowhere near the whole truth. It omits a fascinating dimension of Hasidic life that Buber emphasizes (and maybe over-emphasizes). What Buber finds inspiring in Hasidism is its rustic, vivid, lively but profound folk mysticism.

At the heart of this folk mysticism is a very simple and shifted vision of life, which is clearly Buber’s own (and since reading him fifteen or so years ago, also mine). Is it also the heart of Hasidism outside Buber’s idealized fantasy? I’ve seen evidence it might be, but I do not know.

But the Hasidic mode is only one expression of this vision. His other modes include two explicit prosaic modes, philosophical and theological.

The Buber who shocked me into a better life, and set me on my path to Judaism, was the one who wrote philosophically. My favorite book of his was always Between Man and Man.

But the mode I am contemplating today is the mode in which he wrote his most famous book, widely viewed as his magnum opus, I and Thou. My question concerns genre: what do we call this mode of writing?

I believe I and Thou is Buber’s hardest book. But it is also his most popular book. And it is also a poetic book. The language is beautiful and evocative. It is easy to enjoy aesthetically, allowing insights to come to us where they offer themselves, like ripe fruit falling from a tree. Jorge Luis Borges said of it:

But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber — I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Dujovne, and I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. I think that somewhere in Walt Whitman the same idea can be found: the idea of reasons being unconvincing. I think he says somewhere that he finds the night air, the large few stars, far more convincing than mere arguments.

This suggests that Buber is — like Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his primary inspirations — a philosopher-poet. Like Buber, Nietzsche’s magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was written poetically, and is viewed as his most impenetrable work.

We could follow Jan Zwicky who is also a master of this mysterious genre, and call it “lyric philosophy”.

I have noticed something fascinating about these books, conspicuously common to Buber, Nietzsche and Zwicky, and it makes me want to suggest another, simpler, less novel label. When I read their books, I am existentially different. And the difference persists and permeates my life as long as I stay engaged. And the difference is not only a change in mood. It changes my whole perceptual field. I notice different givens, and my noticing is different. (For instance, Zwicky’s writing made birds intensely present around me.) All three attune me to a kind of energetic, space-filling humming that harmonizes the sounds of home, nature, traffic (air and road, living beings and machines. The different noticing is infused with valuing. And people seem different to me, and I want to interact with them differently. In other words, I change and the world re-enworlds around me in a better way, and the entire Who-Why-How-What manifold glows and vibrates with significance.

The medium-message in books like these is peculiarly independent of the content. Often I cannot even remember the specific factual content. These books act on me through my efforts to understanding the content — but the content is not the point. It does not matter What Buber or Nietzsche or Zwicky believe. What matters is Who they are, How they intuit and think, and Why it matters. If you read them urgently, actively, attentively — in the spirit Buber calls I-Thou — the Thou of the writing changes the I who reads and responds.

Isn’t this the effect… of prayer?

I would like to propose that these strange books are long, complex prayers, and that reading them in the way they ask to be read is engaging in a kind of petitionary prayer. In this prayer we invite infinitude back into our lives, once again, to abide with us in our finite I-Here-Now.

And then we forget, and our guest departs. So we pray again, if we remember to pray.

I think I love this kind of prayer book. I want to write prayer books. Maybe that is what my first “book” was (if you can call a pamphlet with nine sparse pages a book).

*

So, anyway, in the first class, Rabbi Sperling gave an overview of Buber’s life and works, and I realized I could remember almost none of the details of I and Thou. So I picked it up and started re-reading it (both the Smith and Kaufmann translations, together) and now I’m in a prayerworld all over again. I love it here.

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”, Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Stephen Mitchell.

Religious vs spiritual

Metaphysics, Religion

My friend asked:

What would you say are the differences between religion and spirituality?

My answer:

Religion is commitment to the reality of God, and to the community and practices that allow one to continuously participate in God’s living reality.

Spirituality focuses only on experiences associated with divine encounters. The reality of God is unimportant.

Campagna

Biography, Enworldment, Metaphysics

I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.

My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is superficially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-­system of our age. A reality-­system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world­making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.

His reason for writing this book is addressing today’s nihilism epidemic.

…the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ’emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?

This double questioning — a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change — led me to consider the problem through another angle.

And now here’s the good part:

Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/ social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes — and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.

As with most books I’m drawn to these days, the joy is mixed with terror of being scooped. His diagnosis is identical to mine.

The ingrained hopelessness of so many contemporary intellectuals is not in the contents of what they believe, which was summarized charmingly by Woody Allen in Annie Hall:

There’s an old joke.

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

The complaints and anxieties change generationally, but the form is constant. It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” And the most constant element is “this time it is different.” It is always “this time is different.”

I agree with Campagna, and Heidegger that this recurring, shifty nihilism is a metaphysical malady that goes by the name technic, technik, technicity.

With Campagna, I see our relationship with language as central to our problem.

Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there will always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom.

Scooped.

But then, maybe that’s what ought to happen when your story is truth.

Pragmatic metaphysics, continued

Metaphysics, Pragmatism

I’m having a fruitful conversation with Digitalap3 in response to yesterday’s post, Pragmatic metaphysics. It inspired one possible answer to the question I posed: What pragmatic difference is there between pantheism and panentheism?

I think the “difference that makes a difference” (to put it in Rortian terms) may be that pantheism sees nature as a stable, intelligible order, and panentheism does not.

Pantheism conceives both nature and God to be available to us through reason. We can expect linear progress in knowing more and more deeply and thoroughly.

Panentheism, on the other hand, expects deep, epiphanic disruptions to our understanding. Reason is always tentative, and its stability is never long assured.

By this understanding, Thomas Kuhn’s innovation was the introduction of a panentheistic conception of science!

I’ve said before that mine is a metaphysics of surprise. Maybe this gets at it:

Pantheism is a metaphysics of radical reason.
Panentheism is a metaphysics of radical surprise.

Pragmatic metaphysics

Judaism, Metaphysics

I have a philosophical problem fermenting in the back of my mind: Is there any pragmatic difference between pantheism and panentheism? In other words, if we trace what follows from believing pantheism (the faith that sees the universe as identical to God) versus what follows from panentheism (the faith that sees the universe as part of God, in other words a subset of God), do the consequences diverge in any significant way?

Pragmatic metaphysics

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

Obviously, we cannot conceive something inconceivable prior to acquiring the capacity to conceive it.

But so what? Some realities are inconceivable. Some realities are incomprehensible. Why should we care? Is it such a problem that some things elude our understanding?

It would not matter if it were not for this truth: the as-yet-inconceivable attracts our attention and energy, and gives our lives purpose. The problem is not that we should already conceive or comprehend what we do not yet understand, but a living, active relationship with being who is beyond our understanding is a fundamental condition of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Understanding is a valuable by-product of such a participation in transcendent being.

This is where the Pragmatic Maxim is indispensable.

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

When we reach toward the inconceivable or incomprehensible, we cannot grip the “object” of our awareness (the ungrippable reality beyond our reach) but we can, in fact, work out some of the consequences of this incapacity, as well as some of the consequences of the possibility of acquiring a new capacity to comprehend what has been, so far, incomprehensible.

Strange. I wrote the passage above two days ago. Today, I was looking for an old post and stumbled upon exactly this same thought, which I’d forgotten.

I’ve never thought of pragmatism as something opposed to ontology, or as a methodological alternative to ontology, but this morning I am seeing it that way. I think mine is a pragmatist metaphysics, interested less in what transcends us, than in how a finite being (like each of us) interacts with being understood as transcending its finitude, and how such interactions are experienced. It is metaphysical because it concerns itself with transcendent being, but it chooses to not fruitlessly speculate on what is “behind the veil” but instead the properties of interactions that take place across the veil-line, especially the ones that surprise the anticipations, expectations and norms that comprise mundane existence.

Pragmatic panentheism

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

When I trace out the pragmatic consequences of panentheism they weave themselves into something I recognize as resembling the reality in which I participate.

Panentheists seem, on the whole, to be a pretty unaggressive lot. We don’t like to prescribe doctrines. I am starting to believe, however, that unexamined metaphysical assumptions are behind much human misconduct. I have developed a strong metaphysical preference, not only for myself, but for others. In other words, it is no longer a matter of personal taste, but of morality.

I might write a Borgesian book review of the nonexistent title, Panentheist Pragmatic.

Passage

Judaism

I arrive at We via Thou.

(This is the only kind of We that is genuinely first-person plural. This, and only this, is identity. An “identity” imposed upon another person that does not originate in I-Thou-rooted first-person plural is an act of I-It aggression, known as bigotry.)

Wrongheaded anti-Islamophobia

Ethics, Politics, Religion

Post-9/11, I was on the side of the anti-Islamophobes.

My argument was, and still is, that peaceful and liberal Muslims should not be forced into the same category with violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists.

Islamophobes ignorantly and unfairly suspected all Muslims of being covert violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists. because the category “Muslim” was more immediately real to them than actual, living Muslims in all their variety.

Essentially, I was making a “not all Muslims” argument. I suppose some bigot could have invented a “not all Muslims” meme and ridiculed me for being a decent liberal who points out the inadequacies of stereotypes, but that kind of nonsense only works on fellow bigots.

But to condemn openly violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists is not Islamophobia. Far from it. When we condemn them, we do not condemn them as Muslims, but as violent, theocratic, totalitarians.

And to excuse or celebrate openly violent, theocratic, totalitarian Islamists is not anti-Islamophobia. It is betraying liberalism 1) by supporting its enemies, and 2) by indulging in eubigotry, which is every bit as dehumanizing as dysbigotry.

In bigotry — whether negative dysbigotry or positive eubigotry — we reduce a person to our own mental category and our beliefs about what categorization means, and allow our own understanding to eclipse who they are and how they understand themselves. We do not afford them the dignity of transcendent reality. We approach them in the attitude of I-It as objects, not in the attitude of I-Thou as fellow subjects capable of joining us in first-person plural.

Metaphysics matters

Metaphysics, Philosophy

The way we conceive the boundless whole of reality (ein sof) inhibits and weakens some conceptions and perceptions while emphasizing and reinforcing others.

Anyone who understands metaphysics as a purely speculative and inconsequential opining on unknowable matters does so as a consequence of a metaphysics that encourages this (mis)conception of metaphysics.