Category Archives: Works

Philosophical ethnomethods

Enworldment, Esoterism, Ethics, Philosophy

I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.

The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.

What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.

Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.

But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.

In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.

In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.

Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.

Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.

Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.

This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”

Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.

Gift thieves

Autobiography, Enworldment, NOTA

I’ve talked about stealing gifts.

Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a gift is the bond of gratitude.

When a gift is received as if it is a mere ownership transfer from one person to another, with no sense of gratitude, that gift has been stolen.

Material gifts can be stolen.

Ideas can also be stolen.

But the easiest thefts are the worst thefts: the theft of supraformal gifts.

The hardest part of such a theft is perceiving the gift in the first place. But if someone gives you the gift of experiencing the gift as real and valuable, then there it is — there for the taking. Nothing but decency prevents you from grabbing it for yourself and cutting all the “strings attached” that bind both it and you to the giver of the givenness.

Ingratitude says “You gave me an idea.”

Gratitude says “Thank you for teaching me.”

Ingratitude says “This belongs to everyone.”

Gratitude says “Thank you for showing me what is ours.”

Ingratitude says “We are the supercessors. What was yours is now ours.”

Only ingrates who know nothing about relationships think gratitude is about a craving for credit.

It’s as dumb as the belief that jealousy is thwarted lust for owning another person.

Young people know all kinds of new things, or at least know how to query ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to generate some knowing — but I’ve met next to none who understand what a relationship is, or know how to move around in the world of relationship.

Mission mistatement

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.

If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.

In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.

Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.

Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.

If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.

Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:

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.

One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.

As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.

The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.

These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.

Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.

And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.

These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.

These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.

It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.

Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.

And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.

When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.

Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.

And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.

Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.

What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?

Faith.

Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.

Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies

The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.

Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.

A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.

Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.

That is our mission.

The world needs design so badly it rejects design.

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Commonality

Enworldment, Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.

I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.

Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.

Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.

At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.

For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.

But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”

Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.

This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.

Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+

Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.

L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.

Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

Kids these days.

The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.

What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.

I have at least one viable option for the future.

Sadly, everyone still knows everything.

There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.

Exnihilist manifesto, opening?

Exnihilism, Philosophy

Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.

But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.

Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.

Kabbalistic everso

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).

Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.

For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.

Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.

Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.

Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.

To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.

Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.

Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.

Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.

Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.

What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.

Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.

The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.

Desperate philosophizing

Autobiography, Design, Existentialism, Trefoil

Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.

For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”

But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”

What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.

Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.

It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.

I have a slide I show clients.

I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”

Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.

They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.

Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.

This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.

My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.

The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.

Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.

But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.

Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.

I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.

I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.

I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.

This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.

My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.

I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.

Language of reception

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I’ve returned to an old line of thought this morning, thinking about synesis, “together-being”.

In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:

“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”

I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of a given something, there is imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness that precludes even absence. When nothing is present, nothing is missed.

I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.

From Etymonline:

Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.

The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.

As I said last week,

Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

Design, Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Trefoil

Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.

Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.

The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.

Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.

Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.

Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.

Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.

Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.

Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.

Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.

Exnihilist maxims

Exnihilism

Meaning irrupts precisely from nothingness, nowhere, never.

Nil and inconceivability are indistinguishable.

Impossibility and inconceivable possibility are indistinguishable.

Meaninglessness and inconceivable meaning are indistinguishable.

Nonexistence and inconceivable being are indistinguishable.

To finite beings like us, infinity seems less than zero.

Our comprehension can only grasp what we can conceive. Only forms can be conceived.

Meaning flows infraformally and supraformally. The Midas touch of objectivity freezes meaning solid in universal form.

Neshamah Yisrael

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle.

Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo.

Ex nihilo – from Nothing.

Nothingness is precisely the aperture through which incomprehensible meaning floods into the world from Beriah.

A gift of Beriah, once received, annihilates our naive misconception of nothingness.

Never again can we take nothingness at face value and confuse it with mere absence.

Never again can we experience nothingness without anticipation and hope.

Nothingness is Ayin, the divine naught who protects our eyes from the divine light of infinite intensity.

Ayin is the blessed blindness who shields us from what we are unprepared to witness.

We are oblivious to such realities, and to us they are nothing, until they become givens – gifts.

Meaning enters the world through Ayin.

Once we know this from the heart, in faith, we are exnihilists – we can no longer see nothingness without knowing how it conceals, and how it may, at any moment, reveal.

Shema, Neshamah Yisrael.

Missing Da’at

Kabbalah, Star

Why is Da’at missing from the classic Sefirot? Why is there an empty asterisk where a Sefirah should be? My tentative answer is: we ourselves occupy that position, and understand from it, in a way that is not itself understood for precisely the same reason we cannot see our own sight or hear our own hearing.

To really understand the Sefirot, we must harmoniously understand the whole Sefirot fourfoldedly (PaRDeS) … from our fourfoldedly whole strength-soul-heart-am / nefesh-ruach-neshema-chayah self … across the interlapping fourfold Assiyah-Yetzirah-Beriah-Atzilut Olamot.

The Sefirot, of course, is a symbol — an intellectual icon through whom we can approach the infinite via the finite. Were it ten-thousand- or ten-billion-fold more complex, it would still be a gross simplification.

The Sefirot is divine design: the optimal simplification.

Exnihilist light

Exnihilism

Forms are objective. All content of experience is form. Things as perceived by our senses are form. Ideas conceived by our mind are form. To our naive experience everything seems to be material and ideal objects, which is why we say things are “objectively real”, known in “objective truth”. In actuality, they are all formed from infraformal material, and could be formed otherwise.

Formation is subjective. Formation is “unconscious” not because it is submerged or suppressed objective content but because its essence defies the grasp of consciousness in the exactly same way perception is imperceptible as an object of perception.

Across formations strange events occur. Epiphanies irrupt out of oblivion, ex nihilo. Superformal meaning floods into the world.

A heart pumps light through vessels of clear reception and veins of pure service.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress, Star

Helen and I spent yesterday parallel printing at the Stukenborg Press with art saint Bryan Baker.

I printed a third, more realistic version of the “Tend the Root” print, requested by Susan and several others who missed the realism of my first screenprinted version, and preferred it to the abstracted asterisk version. I still prefer the asterisk, for visual and symbolic reasons.

More significantly, Bryan has, after months of gentle nudging, managed to persuade me to return to manually setting lead type, which has made my letterpress obsession considerably worse.

(Last time I did this was in 1992, when I handset my wedding invitation, framed with a wood-engraved decorative border of pomegranates and dogwood blossoms. Susan and I pulled a literal all-nighter in the printing studio hand-producing the invitations. Before that, I handset the ingredients of Doritos. Legend has it my Grandpa Dave worked as a typesetter in some kind of association with Frederic Goudy. I’m also apparently somehow descended from someone connected with the founding of Charles Scribner’s Sons. I blame my ancestors for the visceral craziness I feel around books and letterpress. I also blame my design professor Richard Rose for waking this weird impulses lurking in my blood.)

I set one of my favorite aphorisms, frequently misattributed to Yogi Berra:

In theory, there is no difference
between theory and practice,
but in practice there is.

This is one of the wisest and most radically conservative and designerly utterances I have ever heard, and I love it. It demanded to be smushed into the pulpiest of papers.

Everso and the four worlds

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.

(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)

Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.

Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.

Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.

When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.

And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriah.

Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriah) is ideological.

Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.

Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.

One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.

This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.

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

Autobiography, 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?