Category Archives: Everso

Volume titles

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Works

I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.

The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.

Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.

My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.

I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.

But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.

So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.

So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.

For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.

But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.

In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.

The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.

If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.

And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.

Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.

Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.

And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.

I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.

I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.

Chokhmah obscura

Everso, Kabbalah, Polycentered design

I think of Chokhmah as the infinitesimal pinhole of a camera obscura through which the infinite light of Keter projects into an almost as infinitesimal five-dimensional plane the width, breadth, depth, duration and awareness of the whole cosmogonic unfolding. In this projection within One, each one of us lives and dies as an everted holographic vision of the whole, a subject of Malkhut.

This is a response to a (god)heady passage from Scholem:

Among the symbolical descriptions of the unfolding of God in His revelation, special attention must be given to that which is based on the concept of the mystical Nothing. To the Kabbalist the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God; apart from that he admits of no act of creation worth that name which might be conceived as fundamentally different from the first inmost act and which takes place outside the world of the Sefirot. The creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God Himself. This is also a crisis of the hidden En-Sof who turns from repose to creation, and it is this crisis, creation and Self-Revelation in one, which constitutes the great mystery of theosophy and the crucial point for the understanding of the purpose of theosophical speculation.

The crisis can be pictured as the break-through of the primordial will, but theosophic Kabbalism frequently employs the bolder metaphor of Nothing. The primary start or wrench in which the introspective God is externalized and the light that shines inwardly made visible, this revolution of perspective, transforms En-Sof, the inexpressible fullness, into nothingness. It is this mystical ‘nothingness’ from which all the other stages of God’s gradual unfolding in the Sefirot emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the “supreme crown” [Keter] of Divinity. To use another metaphor, it is the abyss which becomes visible in the gaps of existence. Some Kabbalists who have developed this idea, for instance Rabbi Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona (1300), maintain that in every transformation of reality, in every change of form, or every time the status of a thing is altered, the abyss of nothingness is crossed and for a fleeting mystical moment becomes visible. Nothing can change without coming into contact with this region of pure absolute Being which the mystics call Nothing. The difficult task of describing the emergence of the other Sefiroth from the womb of the first — the Nothing — is somehow managed with the aid of copious metaphors.

In this connection it may be of interest to examine a mystical jeu de mots which comes very close to the ideas of the Zohar and was already used by Joseph Gikatila. The Hebrew word for nothing, ain has the same consonants as the word for I, ani — and as we have seen, God’s “I” is conceived as the final stage in the emanation of the Sefirot, that stage in which God’s personality, in a simultaneous gathering together of all its previous stages, reveals itself to its own creation. In other words, the passage from ain to ani is symbolical of the transformation by which the Nothing passes through the progressive manifestation of its essence in the Sefiroth, into the I — a dialectical process whose thesis and antithesis begin and end in God: surely a remarkable instance of dialectical thought. Here as elsewhere, mysticism, intent on formulating the paradoxes of religious experience, uses the instrument of dialectics to express its meaning. The Kabbalists are by no means the only witnesses to this affinity between mystical and dialectical thinking.

In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the “hidden cause.” To this comparison, Moses de Leon adds the symbolism of the point as the centre of the circle. The primordial point from Nothing is the mystical center around which the theogonical processes crystallize. Itself without dimensions and as it were placed between Nothing and Being, the point serves to illustrate what the Kabbalists of the thirteenth century call “the Origin of Being”, that “Beginning” of which the first word of the Bible speaks. The somewhat pompous phrases in which the opening lines of the Zohar’s interpretation of the story of creation describe this emergence of the primordial point — not indeed from the Nothing as remarked in another context, but from the ethereal aura of God — can serve as an example of the mystical imagery of the whole book:

“In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recess of the mystery of the Infinite, En-Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, neither red nor green, and of no color whatever. But when this flame began to assume size and extension it produced radiant colors. For in the innermost center of the flame a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En-Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the ethereal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely unrecognizable until under the impact of its break-through a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and therefore it is called Reshit, that is ‘Beginning’, the first word of creation”

By the Zohar, as by the majority of the other Kabbalistic writers, this primordial point is identified with the wisdom of God, Chokhmah. God’s wisdom represents the ideal thought of Creation, conceived as the ideal point which itself springs from the impulse of the abysmal will. The author extends the comparison by likening it to the mystical seed which is sown into Creation, the point of comparison apparently being not only the subtlety of both but also the fact that in either the possibilities of further being are potentially, though as yet invisibly, existent.

Creation redescription

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

From Absolute One

…

Pure Infinitude to Articulate Infinitude (through definitude, divine Withness)

Articulate Infinitude to Defined Finitude (through nihilitude, divine Orness)

Defined Finitude to Formational Beings (through finitude, divine Notness)

Formational Beings to Material Actualization (through combination, divine Andness)

…

From Unformed Matter,

Inarticulate, undefined, unformed, at one with

Absolute One

The passage above is not translation. It describes in pure English what I have been shown in Hebrew.

+0(

Belimah again

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Reading further in Scholem, I just came upon that miraculous word belimah. Here is what Scholem says about it.

Various peculiarities of the terminology employed in [Sefer Yetzirah], including some curious neologisms which find no natural explanation in Hebrew phraseology, suggest a paraphrase of Greek terms, but most of the details still await a full clarification. The precise meaning of the phrase Sefirot belimah which the author constantly uses and which may be the key to the understanding of what he actually had in mind when speaking of the Sefirot, is a matter of speculation. The second word belimah which may be taken to denote or to qualify the specific nature of these “numbers” has been explained or translated in accordance with the theories of the several writers or translators: infinite Sefirot, or closed, abstract, ineffable, absolute Sefirot, or even Sefirot out-of-nothing. If the author of the book wanted to be obscure, he certainly succeeded beyond his wishes.

ASCII sigil

Esoterism, Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil, Wheel

The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.

+0(

  1. “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
  2. “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
  3. “(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.

The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!

It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.

This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.

Intellectual sacrifice

Everso, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:

Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.

My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.

In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.

Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.

Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.

Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)

But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.

In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”

Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.

Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.

Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.

I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.

I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.

I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.

If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.

The fruit is restored to its orchard.

Pearls and Shells, reinvocation

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism

In earlier invocations of the “Pearls and Shells” anomalogy, the pearlescent element, nacre, insulated the subject from the object and environment, and allowed these not-self beings to peacefully neighbor or environ the self.

This individuating substance was imagined to be mind: We coat whatever realities we cannot incorporate into our own selfhood with intelligibility. Mind helps us cope with not-self, also known as alterity.

The earlier anomalogy goes like this: An oyster inhabits an existence suspended between two alterities. The first alterity, the outer alterity, is the all-encompassing ocean. The second alterity, inner alterities, is whatever particles from the ocean get inside the shell with the oyster. The oyster responds to both alterities the same way. It secretes its own selfhood, its mind-nacre, and coats the offending alterity, layer upon layer, until the alterity is smooth, lustrous and undisturbing. The particles are painted smooth and round and become pearls. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the oyster can live side by side with these irritants, because they are comprehended with nacre. The ocean, too — the dread source of all irritants and inexhaustibly teeming with existential dangers — is coated with layer upon layer of protective nacre. It is painted on all sides, repainted, innumerable times until it is thick, smooth and protective. The oyster coats the ocean with nacre, and the inner surface of the shell, the mother-of-pearl lining makes the ocean habitable for the oyster and its treasure-house of pearls.

The nacre substance is the same in both alterities, and its function is the same — insulation, protection, self-preservation. What differs is the topology — the situating curvature. Pearls are convex and are comprehended by the oyster. The shell is concave; it comprehends the oyster. Flip your shell inside-out — that is, evert it — and you will find yourself holding a pearl. Evert a pearl, and you will find yourself held within a shell, or rather, the shell will find you held within it.

Lately, I have noticed that my thinking has moved to a new standpoint.

The next invocation of “Pearls and Shells” goes like this: Perhaps the nacre with which we paint the defining boundaries between selfhood and otherhood is not mind, but something beyond mind that conditions and enables it. Perhaps nacre is the principle of “not” — nihilitude.

Nihilitude belongs to infinitude, and is inseparable from it. Nihilitude generates and sustains finitude within infinitude, without disturbing the all-inclusive purity of infinitude with even a trace of exclusion. Indeed, exclusion of nihilitude from infinitude would be an abhorrent exclusion.

Perhaps nihilitude is the substance the ocean self-secretes into itself in order to allow a spark of itself to be an oyster, liberated to be not-the-whole-ocean, through imprisonment within a mother-of-pearl vault. The vault fills with ten-thousand pearls, each of which, touched by the oyster’s tender midas flesh, is counted among its pearly hoard.

As behind, so beyond. And so thrice-present between.

Psych everso

Everso

Psychology is how a materialist copes with transcendence. Realities barely within the soul’s reach but well beyond its grasp — including the soul itself — are flipped inside-out, everted, into objects and stuffed inside each individual’s mind.

Everything-sized souls, everted, become minute, and are sealed inside the physical body — ghosts who haunt our physical frame.

And the membrane of nihilitude that insulates each self from infinitude, everts into a vacuum of interminable finitude, endless stacking of spaces, times, subjects.

When wind blows through this ghost, it disturbs our sense of reality, but we know that it originates in the unconscious and terminates in delusion. So it is for psychologists.

Looping in on exnihilism

Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy

To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?

The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.

Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.

Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.

Topology of mystery

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.

Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.

We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.

But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.

The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.

The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.

And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.

The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.

Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.

Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.

Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.

Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.

Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.

In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.

An insincere exhortation

Ethics, Everso, Philosophy

This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:

We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.

The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.

Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.

Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.