Category Archives: Works

The everted present

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star

Ray Cummings: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.”

“…And,” someone adds, “space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening everywhere all at once.”

“…And,” another offers, “self is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to everyone all at once.”

Presence is God’s way of distributing Godself through time space and consciousness.

But within God, everything does happen all at once, everywhere to everyone.

Adonai echad.

The present is the Absolute everted within Itself.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Pascal’s Wager 2.0

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:

  • If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
  • If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.

Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.

Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.

Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.

But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.

Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.

But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?

In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?

So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.

  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
  • If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:

Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.

This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.

Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:

To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.

I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it…

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.

Practical fantasy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Back in the early 2000s, my brother and I developed a “practical fantasy” vision of bicycles.

Scott ran a bike shop. Over the years, conversing with many customers, he began to notice that everyone who cares about bicycles carries in their soul some ideal image of themselves within the world, and they project that ideal image onto their bicycle, onto themselves as rider, and onto some ideal riding scenario.

A gearhead is one such archetype. He owns the lightest, most advanced technology. He imagines the awed envy of fellow cyclists when they see how his bicycle is specced out and how light it is… Wannabe racers imagine themselves bursting ahead of their rivals… Wannabe couriers snake through dense traffic taking insane risks, scoffing at the certainty of gruesome injury and likely death… There are tweedy retro fetishists, transporting themselves from home to cafe to studio to bookshop. (Who me?) … Rugged all-terrain riders, carrying their survival gear into the wilderness… Ultralight nomads Eurail from country to country with their foldable, carrying only what fits in the knapsack… We defined a small set, but the full list is extensive.

Scott wanted to decode those practical fantasy archetypes, so he could equip the subset of cyclists he liked and served to fully actualize their fantasy.

Central to this practical fantasy vision was a goal: Transform the fantasist into an actual rider. Liberate the bicycle from its garage imprisonment, and liberate the cyclist from their skull imprisonment.

When I recall this vision, it is just one application of a general theory of design.

The same dynamic applies in every situation where a user of some designed instrument extends their own ideal being into the world through that instrument — enworlding and self-actualizing themselves — making themselves at home in a world they partially shape to their own ideal.

Reminder: Philosophies are one such instrument.

Everso II

Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Metaphysics

Having broken free of the bolts that gripped my skull and held me in place, I turned away from the glaring screen and began to grope in the nothingness around me — that off-screen nowhere where nothing happens. As the blindness gradually abated, I could see silhouettes and shadows cast against the ambient glow of the screen. I felt the edges of objects around me, wrapping my fingers around their contours and comprehending what they were and how they were situated relative to one another within this space. But as I explored further, beyond where light could reach, I found dark edgeless surfaces that could only be touched but not defined. I sought the limits of this space, and finally apprehended that it was an inner surface, which comprehended me in every dimension, confining me and all I could comprehend within its own interior.

Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations

Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Metaphysics, Star

In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.

First, a dimension is named.

Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.

And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.

I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:

The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.

The polarities are Beriyah, the realm of intelligibility.

The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.

And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.

Representational eclipse

Metaphysics, Star

Heraclitus:

One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.

The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.

Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.

When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.

This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”

Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.

There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.

In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.

The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.

I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.

What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.

Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.

New and improved vulgarity!

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Trefoil

I reject two very common, often unexamined, and highly consequential psychological assumptions.

Vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious mind consists largely of objective beliefs of which we are unaware, that exist beneath the surface of awareness, because unconscious psychic processes push them under. I think repressed objective beliefs do exist, but that most of “the unconscious” consists of activities of the intuition which are essentially unknowable as objects, in the same way seeing is essentially invisible to sight. The rational mind, however, inhabits a world of comprehension, and to rationality, whatever evades comprehension cannot have the status of existence. It must belong to the phantasmic inner world of sentiment — a nonexistent subjective pseudo-object.

Vulgar assumption 2: Intuition is essentially an unconscious rational process. Two consequences of this belief are equally wrong: 2a) that anything we think or do can become intuitive through practice. 2b) that anything we intuit can through analysis will reveal an implicit rationality.

In both of these assumptions I see evidence of a rationality that claims to speak on behalf of the self, but instead speaks only for itself in purely rational terms. In some cases, rationality tyrannizes over the whole self and attempts control all its behaviors. In most cases, though, rationality is made the powerless figurehead of the self, and is allowed to say whatever it wants, but has no significant influence over real feelings or behaviors. In both cases, the intellect is alienated from self.

I would like to replace these two vulgar assumptions with two different vulgar assumptions. And by “vulgar” I mean they can be unthinkingly adopted by ordinary people and become ideas so mainstream nobody even thinks to question them. As I’ve said before, the sign of a well-designed philosophy is (like all good design) invisibility. And invisible philosophy is naive realism, or, to say it in a prettier way, a faith.

A practical philosophy designer’s ultimate goal is new forms of naive realism that, when adopted, allow people to live better lives together.

When a philosophy is designed well, people easily understand what is said (it is usable), they spontaneously see applications (useful) and they feel value in the new understanding (desirable). But that is just the first encounter, when the philosophy is still an object of understanding. The true test of the philosophy’s design is after it is adopted, and the philosophy becomes the subject of understanding — that is, it is used to understand subject matter beyond itself. Now the philosophy is understood from, and it functions less like an object we experience at than an interface through which we experience other objects of understanding. And like all designed things we can change modes of attention, and experience it as a beautiful object, or a beautifying subject.

Almost every beautiful thing I see, I see clearly because of a very beautiful pair of glasses I wear, which were crafted in Germany by trained jewelers. But sometimes I remove my glasses and look at them and marvel at their form. And I love my bicycle for similar reasons. I climb into my bike (if you’ve ever ridden a Rivendell, you’ll know why I say “into” instead of “on to”) and I am now merged into this bicycle and into the landscape I ride through. But often I climb off and look at this bicycle from a distance and am overwhelmed by its appearance. Same with all my favorite objects. And of all the beautiful objects, the best are books. They have innumerable layers of subject-object gorgeousness. The book is a physical and typographic object. But it is a “crystal goblet” for its content. But its content is also a crystal goblet for various realms of reality. Despite practicing design for decades prior to reading Beatrice Ward, I could never understand it or practice it the same way again after learning to see it through her eyes. Same with Liz Sanders and Christopher Alexander. The reading was wonderful. The permanent change to myself and the world as I inhabit it (my enworldment) as a designer was immeasurably better.

I am sitting in a middle of a room lined with the most beautiful books, dozens of which have subjectively reshaped me. I am the immortality of myriad beautiful souls.

What was I talking about? Oh – vulgar assumptions. My goal in life is to improve our vulgar assumptions. A philosophy that is not adopted and vulgarized is falling short of its purpose.

My improved vulgar assumptions go like this.

Improved vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious is unconscious only to our rational mind. Subjectivity is not a realm that exists side by side with objectivity. On the contrary, objectivity is a subset of subjectivity — that small corner of subjectivity that can be defined, comprehended and explicitly spoken about. The rest can only be known about indirectly, and can never be known any other way. So, for example, if our unconscious keeps producing racist notions it isn’t because we have racist beliefs that we keep repressing; it is because we have racist subjectivity that perpetually generates racist observations and racist thoughts. Trying to manipulate the content of such a subjectivity will just make the racist more divided against herself, more emotionally hysterical and more desperate for drastic remedies for her dividedness. The resolution of the problem is through asking different questions, not from inventing different answers to old ones and bullying ourselves and others into pretending to believe what we say.

Improved vulgar assumption 2: Rationality is one kind of intuitive process, one that is mostly composed of explicit objects and operations. But many intuitions and other intuitive processes exist that are not reducible to rational terms. And this means 2a) that we should not assume intuitive design only makes use of established habits, or that any design will become intuitive once it is practiced and made habitual. And it means 2b) that we should not assume implicit rationality in any intuition or intuitive response. The why behind an intuition might not have any explicit “because”, and this only makes it more real and important.

One last thing. Even beyond the usefulness, usability and desirability of a designed philosophy, there is something even more important. Does it answer to reality beyond itself? This is the truth many younger designers are trying to bring to the design discipline. Our responsibility as designers extends beyond the needs of immediate receivers, deliverers and supporters of services and products. Our designs impact the entire world, and we are answerable for all impacts to anyone, not only to those we consider. Most designers I meet are materialists, who think only in terms of ecology, economy or psychology, but this is only the parts of transcendent reality a materialist rationality can comprehend. There is more out there (and in here) that we must answer to, and this determines whether our designs bear halos of light or void.

Manifesto as genre

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Polycentrism

I find the manifesto an attractive genre.

Most persuasive writing takes disagreement or indecision as its point of departure. Not the manifesto. A manifesto assumes agreement or at least sympathy and persuades toward full embrace and action.

A good manifesto activates an egregore.

One other winning characteristic of the manifesto is its brevity, which makes it eminently letterpressable and chapbookable. I have at least two manifestos I could write:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto — Reality is morally meaningful and you know it. And reality is pregnant with surprise.
  • Polycentrist Manifesto — The world we inhabit is one of myriad experiential and agential subjective centers. We should not be naively ego-centric, nor naively other-centric. We should polycenter ourselves. Empathy, the Golden Rule, law and principles are indispensable to polycentered life.

Metanoia , T’shuvah, Poesis.

Enworldment

Instead of treating philosophy, religion and design as my primary themes for Enworldment, I could instead use: Metanoia , T’shuvah, Poesis. Philosophy, religion and design could serve as my points of departure into these themes.

An attempt to unfold the Sefirot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Judaism

People have asked me to explain the Sefirot. It is not something that can be explained. It is not an object of knowledge. The Sefirot must be entered and known-from. It is a subject of study.

The sefirot is the crystallization of a Jewish esoteric enworldment. First, it must be understood from a panentheistic perspective that situates all that can be given as real within a divine beyond-being that is essentially unknowable. However, this beyond-being occasionally births surprising new being from its own (apparent) Nothingness. Until we intuit and internalize this situation, none of the rest of the Sefirot can unfold in understanding. It remains a welter and waste of symbols — a perplexity that makes even simple ignorance seem lucid by comparison. But once this panentheistic enception is born in us, the understanding erupts forth and embraces the world, infusing it with meaning — or rather, revealing the meaning inherent within reality. We suddenly feel the necessity of balance in apparent opposites. We know that love without limits and limits without love destroy both self and other. We sense that unconstrained progress and static stability destroy all possibility of living, steady improvement. We recognize that tradition and institution must perpetually reform in order to live, and that these are needed for meaningful life.

Once this enworldment becomes given truth for us — once it isn’t a doctrinal fact-system, but a faith — a glance at the Sefirot is a prayer. We might be diffused by practical life, scattered, made vague and dull. But with a comprehending glance, lightning strikes from above and below, connecting above and below, with a flash of ascending and descending light. Descending: Where are you? Ascending: Here I am.

A sacred symbol is a visual prayer.

Ein sof – Unbounded – Unknowable, infinite beyond-being. To us, pregnant Nothingness — inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

Keter – Crown – Finitude. The possibility of finite being, defined against but devoted to infinite beyond-being. The inner surface of tzimtzum. To us, the principle of panentheism.

Chokhmah – Wisdom – Intuition of All, as yet enfolded, undeveloped, charged with potential. To us, the flash of knowing, preceding knowledge. Enception.

Binah – Understanding – Unfolding knowledge. Alchemical “adaptation”. To us, intelligibility. Conception.

Chesed – Love – Grace, mercy, lovingkindness. Self-transcending We.

Gevurah – Power – Limitation, boundary, law. Self-defining Me/Us.

Tif’eret – Beauty – Balance, harmony, perfection, completeness, rightness. The bringing together of difference into wholeness.

Netsach – Eternity – Agency, initiative, command. Compulsion to take action, challenge, innovate, effect change.

Hod – Splendor – Devotion, receptivity, obedience. Inclination to accept, respond, participate, shelter, conserve.

Yesod – Foundation – Establishment, tradition, teaching and learning, dynamic stability.

Malchut – Kingdom – Meaningful world. Divine presence in given reality. Also, Shekinah, divine feminine.

Misusing esoteric symbols

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

I have a long habit of turning esoteric symbol systems into all-purpose concept models.

Two of the most dramatic examples: the trigrams (and hexagrams) of the I Ching and the Sefirot of Kabbalah.

When I interrogate myself on what I genuinely believe, I find that I I believe that this (mis)use of esoteric symbol systems that is the ground of their validity. It is primarily their value in practical use — helping us make sense of our own subjective experience, inspiring, motivating and animating our responses (or non-responses) and guiding our actions — that suggests that they are “true” beyond this sense-making use.

But I am a Pragmatist, and I’m not sure that I believe that truth is meaningful beyond this kind of practical use.

To repeat, the value of these models is threefold. They can help us live more lucidly, meaningfully and skillfully.* And I think it is important that the models engage us intuitively, that is, in a way that transcends what is explicitly sayable. This is the power of concept models, both in design and in religion. These models reach beneath language and help our intuitions organize themselves into living faiths, instead of forcing intuitions to push paper in the bureaucracy of talk — essentially enslaving them to doctrine.

All art and design derive their power from transcending the centralized control of language, which filters out all but the commonest experiences.

Note: * This, of course, is a paraphrasing of Liz Sanders’s Useful, Usable, Desirable framework, which is itself a concept model of supreme importance. It is, in fact, a mundane expression the Great Triad: Earth, Man, Heaven.

Earth is What-lucidity, that is objective mastery. Man is How-skill, that is practical effectiveness. Heaven is Why-meaning, a capacity to experiencing value, positive or negative.

The downside of modernity, especially its scientific aspects, is that it emphasized What/Is/Usable/Earth and How//Can/Useful/Man to the exclusion (or more, the compartmentalization) of Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven. We got amazing at explaining and manipulating the physical world. We developed myriad techniques for doing whatever we want. We accomplished this by bracketing all questions of meaning. When scientists ask “why?”, they are not asking for a meaningful why, they are asking for a causal account, “how?”

In late modernity Why/Ought/Desirable/Heaven part of life has been sawed off from everything else entirely, and quarantined in museums, theaters and religious spaces. During the day, we are scientific, practical and dutiful, doing things without any Why at all, pretending very unconvincingly to be “passionate” about our drudgery. At night, after we’ve used ourselves up doing meaningless tasks all day, we try to regain some meaning through entertainments and spiritual stuff, and it fails to replenish us.

And this is why we can do anything we set our minds and hands to, but we find it harder and harder to want any particular thing. We have a crisis of caring. We are nihilists because our ways of understanding fail to take seriously the problems of value and meaning. We are forced to emotionally hype ourselves up to care about anything outside our most mundane needs. We project our own petty childhood feelings onto the world stage, finding stand-ins for our shitty moms, dads, friends, teachers — maybe movies or stories that touched us as kids — and wherever these projections fail, we force them into some shape we can feel about, or we just drift off into confused apathy, or cosmic generalizations that license indifference and dress it up as wise detachment. This is why, once our kids are taught the correct way to think about the world, they fall into hysterical despair and display every symptom of distress. We know damn well we damaged them, but we shout over our intuitions and call them prejudiced and phobic.

Fact is, we have no idea how to make sense of the world and continue participating in it — and at the same time, care about it. That can change, but we are resistant most of all to what will save us. We’re too clever for any human way of being. The theories of physics and our good standing with our fellow nihilists is far more important to us than living lives we can love.

On the subject of subjects

Enworldment, Philosophy
  1. Never forget the etymology of the word “data”. Data is that which is given. And what can be given is limited by what we can — and will — receive.
  2. When a person says “objectively true” when what they really mean is “absolutely true”, this is data for those with ears to hear what it means.
  3. A personal subject and an academic subject is a subject in precisely the same sense.