Category Archives: Exnihilism

The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

An appendix Thomas Kuhn added to later editions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a continuing influence on my understanding of design. In this appendix Kuhn explained that scientific paradigms should not be viewed exclusively in terms of thought. A paradigm is not just theoretical, or theoretically guided practice or practice informed theory (praxis of science, considered apart from the scientific knowledge the praxis generates), but also in terms of the physical instruments used in experimentation and observation. He used a vivid example of how a paradigm of electricity as a fluid shaped jar-like electrical containers, which the later electrical charge paradigm rendered naive.

So a paradigm shapes concept, concept system, language, behaviors and tools all together as a mutually-reinforcing system.

Years later, Lucy Suchman, one of the founders of modern design research brought ethnomethodology to the nonhuman actors in the office environment.

Ethnomethology is a branch of microsociology that locates social meaning-making as a function of mostly tacit symbolic performances, which are called ethnomethods, thus the name ethnomethod-ology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. (Many designers casually believe that design research is a less formal and thorough version of ethnography, which is not entirely wrong, but slightly confused. Our roots are more ethnomethodological than ethnographic, and that root was sunk by Suchman.)

Suchman’s mind-blowing practical insight was to treat a copy machine as a social actor, and to see her own design task as equipping that copier with ethnomethods required to participate gracefully in its social setting. This shows a strong family resemblance to Kuhn’s materialized paradigm.

It could even be said that Kuhn described unusually explicit and disciplined ethnomethods of science. Within the overarching principles and practices we call scientific method are multiple scientific ethnomethods, which are paradigms. Or it could be said that ethnomethods are looser, less explicit, more implicit paradigms.

Both paradigms and ethnomethods tend to focus themselves within specific spheres of social activity, as does the close study of either, or in the case of Actor-Network Theory, which began its expansive life ethnomethodologically studying human and nonhuman actors who populate and constitute laboratories.

But these approaches themselves all outgrew their humble origins, and became something resembling their own objects of study. The study of paradigms induces a meta-paradigm that seeks paradigms in any community of activity, even ones that are not communities of rigorous scientific activity. Ethnomethodology could easily study the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists, and without even looking into it, given the kind of metaweirdo attracted to this field, I am unable to doubt that this happened within minutes of the establishment of ethnomethodology. There is no way at all this did not happen unless every ethnomethodologist automatically assumed what I am automatically assuming and decided not to bother. And anyway, why do something so obvious that it automatically occurs to everyone?

All this innovation happened at a time when flatness was fashionable. It was a daring and disarming move to say that Kuhn’s paradigm of paradigms was just another paradigm among paradigms, and not something belonging to another plane of metastudy. The ironic move of studying the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists would be, ironically, an ethnomethod symbolically acting the unexceptionality of what ethnomethodology does.

But are these acts of principled, humble reflexivity truly innocent? What if there is a shade of benevolent bad-faith in it, an artificial doubt, a violation of Peirce’s principle: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

We choose to investigate paradigms or ethnomethodologies or to live a life of design because these things seem to us more expansive, profound and universal in important ways than even what they investigate. If they do not start out that way, they mature in that direction, and precisely because they are so expansive, profound and universal — because they overgrow their initial content of study, and then their own praxis, and culture and human condition, and, potentially, the metaconditions of the human condition (aka metaphysics), I call these all-encompassing meta-ways enworldments.

I might be wrong in my conceit that enworldments operate on a higher metaphysical plane than their objects of study (the knowledge they generate), than their subjects of study, (in the academic sense of subject, the shared praxis, the body of reciprocally-developed practice-informed theories and theory-guided practices of the discipline), than even their materialized praxes (tools, supplies, environment and other material supports).

I might even be stupidly wrong to believe in metaphysical planes at all in order to see such assignments.

But I am a person, and I am allowed to be stupid. That is my right as a relatively unimportant being! Why shouldn’t I confidently assert metaphysical truths that are absolutely true, as far as I can tell? If others see problems I miss, let them make their own counter-assertions. Let them catch me by total surprise if they can. I can’t squander my personal resources, anticipating every possible attack, or compulsively re-acknowledging that such attacks might be effective. Of course they are, and so what?

I prefer to be faithful to my true human beliefs than to be cagey in an attempt to avoid being caught and ridiculed for insuffient caution, humility and self-skepticism, or to make myself a less enticing target. I cannot help wondering what inclines people to spend their lives lurking about, looking for mistakes to catch and ridicule.

Ironically, false humility can be hubristic, and disingenuous hubris can be humble.

I think I am onto something of enormous importance and interest, I cannot doubt it, and I refuse to pretend to doubt it. If there is anything more fascinating and important in the world than the phenomenon of enworldment and its related phenomena (especially instauration ex nihilo) and the role design plays in it, it is entirely beyond me. So I intend to stand here within my own abilities and limitations and work this out in intense, innocent inspiration.

And when I look out into the world, what seems most lacking is inspiration, meaning, excitement and hope.

It seems to me that what blocks all these good, needful things is a fear of being caught making mistakes or showing our personal limits. Our negative goal of eliminating imperfections leads us to neglect the positive goal of doing things that are deeply and powerfully right.

The nihilism pandemic we are in might be the result of a misguided attempt to be tiny flawless gods according to narrow and mostly unexamined standards of what is better and worse, instead of living as imperfect, incomplete, interdependent vital organs of something greater than any or all of us, toward whom metaphysics reaches with all our being — mind, soul, body and all our myriad designed extensions of being.

We must get right with being wrong.

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Existentialism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:

“What has a name is real.”

“What lacks a name is unreal.”

What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.

What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.

In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.

In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.

The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.

To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.

Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.

Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.

This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:

Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?

Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?

In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.

Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.

A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.

The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.

Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.

Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.

When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.

Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.

But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.

Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.

An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.

Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.

When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.

The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”

Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.

Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.

But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.

When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.

Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!

Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.

These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.

If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.

Mapping olamot

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

An enception is a conceptual capacity, the ability to “get” a concept. Once an enception is established (by our enworlding neshamah to our conceiving ruach), its conceptual form can be received (whether intuitively perceived or intellectually conceived) as given wherever its corresponding form occurs in reality, both by our conceiving ruach in Yetzirah, and our constructing/construing nefesh in Assiyah.

Or so I think. I’m trying to map my own experiences to the experiences of others who seem to know this strange space I navigate. Today it seems that:

Assiyah is a world of actuality, where, using given objects of perception and truth, we (as nefesh) construct systems of materials and ideas and methods, and truth is understood pshat, construed objectively in terms of their place in a constructed system, but that objectivity is determined by the conceptual repertoire given by Yetzirah. Whatever is not in that repertoire is inconceivable and is perceived as senseless chaos. Assiyah actualizes an enworldment, giving it perceptible material and symbolic form.

Yetzirah is a world of formation, where pure concepts interrelate, harmonize or clash, overlap, attract, repel, stabilize, destabilize and restabilize at various scales, forming subjective patterns of receptivity, obliviousness, attraction and revulsion in us (as ruach) which determines what is and is not given as real and true in Assiyah. Ruach is organic enceptions within enceptions, a capacitive system in everse. Yetzirah defines the limits and terms of intelligibility within an enworldment. Ruach understands in the mode of remez, that is it recognizes and relates forms, thematizing, analogizing, discovering the connectable dots and associating them, within an enworldment. Yetzirah is concerned with carrying a possibility of enworldment into its development of integrated forms and developing, integrating and strengthening it to the point where the enworldment can be actualized in Assiyah.

Beriah is a world of instauration (creation and revelation) where a new enworldment can enter Yetzirah, always ex nihilo, effecting radical expansion and reordering of subjects (ruach), how they enworld themselves (nefesh), on the whole and in part, in actual life. Amidst this change to ruach and its enworldment, a higher self maintains its continuity in Beriah as neshama. Conversion experiences are of Beriah, and they are understood in the mode of drash, homiletically, in pure and spontaneous interpretive application without objective construal, disclosing everything as belonging within an intuited, given enworldment. Beriah is where enworldments differentiate themselves within an infinite field, where difference is possible in principle.

Atzilut is the world in which all being is rooted, regardless of degree of awareness of this rootedness, in whom all neshama is of common chaya. It is from here that all value flows, and when we feel a rush of intensely inspired gratitude and joy with an epiphany from Beriah, that is the light of Atzilut, the brilliant bloodflow of the world, and it is understanding in the mode of sod. I am almost entirely sure there is much, much more to sod than this, but this is what I have had of it, if I am not mistaken.

For many years, and with increasingly intense focus, instauratio ex nihilo is crucial to me as a designer, philosopher and mystical fanatic.

My live question is cartographic. It is bound up with Beriah, but I’ve wavered on “where” it happens. I think I am moving toward (or into) an understanding that takes Beriah as a holistic world conception that perfects at Malkhut of Beriah, and bursts whole into Yetzirah as its Keter. And what it bursts through is the veil of nihilitude demarcating the worlds. On the side of Beriah, the nihilitude is part of infinitude, but on the side of Yetzirah, it is the outer limit of existence, beyond which there is nothing.

I have learned never to take that nothing on the outer limit of existence at face value. As a designer, as a philosopher and as a mystic I have pressed against the nothingness, and punctured it, and I testify: there is very real, very beautiful being on the other side of it, and if we cross over we return with transformative treasures, the best of which is exnihilist faith.

I am writing this same piece over and over again. I am circling this problem like a GPS satellite, photographing what is below, sending geolocation data down to the surface so I can figure out where I am.

A few years back, my friend Jarrett, team alchemist, gave me a framed print of a Ptolemy, as hermetic cartographer, lunar compass in one hand, solar globe in the other. This demonstrates why I have always loved working on her teams.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Letterpress magic trick

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Star, Symbols and diagrams

As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil.

Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness.

I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion object in a blind spot demonstration, which exemplifies nihilitude (a present nothing which leaves nothing missing, showing very clearly how blindness is the furthest thing from darkness.) It is by nihilitude that the Trickster tricks, so I cannot imagine a better vanishing-appearing figure than Mercury, the trickster angel, for this vanishing act transpiring on my little magic paper strip.

Instructions.

  1. Orient the strip so the asterisk is on the left, and the Mercury sigil is on the right.
  2. Hold the strip arm’s length from your face.
  3. Close your left eye, and keep your right eye open.
  4. Focus your eye on the asterisk, while focusing your attention on the sigil.
  5. Maintaining this dual focus, slowly move the strip closer and closer to your open right eye.
  6. Notice when the sigil is no longer there, absent, while leaving no trace of absence.
  7. Say: “Nihilitude: Nothing is present so nothing is missing.”
  8. Remember that all but the tiniest sliver of reality is submerged in nihilitude. (“Exnihilated”)
  9. Thank God for the shelter of nihilitude, which is the precious gift of moral existence.
  10. Seal it with “Amen.”

There comes a perilous point in a person’s life when the decision can no longer be evaded or postponed:

Either seem sane, or be sane.

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(

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

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.

The gift-rooted organization

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Exnihilism

The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.

In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.

The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.

Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”

But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.

Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”

Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”

Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.

The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.

Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.

Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.

This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.

Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.

Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become infused with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.

But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.

But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.

Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.

To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.

Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.

Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.

This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.

If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.

We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.

Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.

Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.

The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.

That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.

This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.

But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.

(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)

But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?

Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.

Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.

Dang. Out of time.

To be continued.

Designerly nothingness

Design, Exnihilism

Complaint litany of an alienated designer:

This work harnesses none of my essential energies, but saps my will by extracting and utilizing resources I lack.

This work refuses my essential services while demanding from me what I do not have to give and, in fact, need to receive from others.

This work does not move me forward in my personal project. Indeed, it does the reverse: In pulls me backwards, by enslaving me to the very forces I feel called to challenge and overcome.

Regarding these forces I believe should be overcome — these forces we are forced to serve when our work feels most forced — they belong to an enworldment which Heidegger called “technicity”.

Technicity is essentially the utilitarian instinct driven to extremes.

Technicity creates an interminable chain of “in order to”.

In technicity we are all chained to “in order to”, and become links in that chain, with no purpose except to serve someone else’s “in order to”, who, in turn serves another’s “in order to.”

At the heart of technicity is one monomaniacal question “What is it for?”

This is true not only of “What?” and “How?” questions — even, and especially, questions of love and value. So when technicity asks “Why?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” And when technicity asks “Who?” it only knows how to mean “What is it for?” This is where the nihilistic damage happens

Design is a different way to work. It approaches questions of value and relationship as outside the realm of use. It provides a terminus for the chain of “What is it for?” It is for the sake of itself. It is useless and I love it for no reason other than love. Je ne sais quoi. Even tiny mustard seed sized specks of irrational love bring desirability to life.

But under the iron reign of technicity, design is reduced to an alternate toolset for problem-solving. And that problem is, of course, “how do I do x, in order to do y, in order to do z, in order to…” with no “because I just love it” anywhere to be seen.

Design is far too expansive to fit inside the narrowness of technicity, in any of its contemporary forms.

Of course — obviously — it does not fit inside corporate capitalism.

But neither does design fit inside managerial Marxism, which is the only viable mutation of Marxism in a mature industrial or senile postindustrial world! Your revolution, once inspired by material dialectic, has expired by it. It has been exnihilated by the fundamental fact that we are situated inside a dialectic with no exterior. We are always at the conclusion of an endless journey we are only now beginning.*

And, most relevantly to you, neither does it fit inside a technocratic administrative state, or a mini-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged organization, or a macro-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged global economy), or — most importantly of all, a nano-state (a leaderless, overmanaged, micromanaged individual soul).

Design, properly practiced, attaches uses (“usefulness”), qualities of use (“usability”), use for businesses (“viability”), uses of technology (“feasibility”) in service of something higher, which is beyond the grasp and even reach of techniques and technologies — something that bears no fruit except a totally useless “I love this.”

The technicity world shovels this quality into the inadequate lust-adjacent category “desirable.” Lust is erosless urge to possess, as opposed to love which is transcendent, erosful pursuit of belonging. “Lovable” is a better word than “desirable”.

Note: * Hegel, Marx, and all other pseudo-prophetic avatars of Prometheus — all those who foresee inevitable futures as if they preexist behind some temporal curtain — seem oblivious to the fact that there is only nothing there to see. There is only the boiling chrome of nothingness.

They miss the insidious subtlety of nothingness. As if nothingness would be so hamfisted as to hide itself beneath something we can see. They think nothingness would marked itself with something so blatant as a shadows?

No, no, no — the surface of nothingness is reflective. If we stare into it, all we see is our own self. And to an omniscient soul, everything and everyone beyond omniscience is nothingness… So they look out at the nothingness of another and see only who they are. Thus “accusation in a mirror”. If in that mercury pool, we see racism, hate, intent to annihilate, genocide! — something to fight to the death. The designated nobody, the persona non grata, bears the sins of the judge and jury. Rememver this whenever a radical bays for blood. Technicity sees its own sins everywhere it looks.

In Soviet Russia, abyss stare out from you.

It is all in our choice of nothingness. Whether we think it explicitly, or simply live it out intuitively, designers must choose, now and perpetually, the pregnant nothingness of exnihilism. The designer who looks out into the world and sees no option but to sell himself into indentured servitude in the factories and towers and nowheres of technicity, will remain a designer only in title.

Punchline

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

All pranking aside, the “Bubbler” faith is my own faith. The inconceivable-from-here being is Atzilut, but Beriah scrubs the eternity spotless every nanosecond of every day with a cloaking coat of nihilude, leaving us collectively, personally, and intuitively finite, both in the underheaven of Yetzirah and down here in the actual, factual earthiness of Assiyah.

Scholem on originality and tradition

Exnihilism, Judaism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics

A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.

Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.

But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.

Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.

There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.

Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.

The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.

It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.

Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.

It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.

Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)

To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.

This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.

Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.

And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.

Choose your nothingness

Exnihilism

Choose your nothingness: pregnant nihilitude or dead nihilism. Halo or hood is the choice we face.

No belief is good or bad. No truth can badge swipe you into heaven.

The content of belief or disbelief has no intrinsic moral value.

Belief content does, however have moral significance, because belief signifies the faith by which (by whom) a belief is believed.

To put it in Scholem’s words, belief content has “spiritual physiognomy”. Behind the facial contours of beliefs is a faith who does the believing — who intuits, feels and responds not only to truth, but to realities who challenge truth.

Faith is not only moral or immoral — it is morality per se, per esse.

What you believe is amoral. How you believe has moral valence. Why you believe is morality itself. Why animates How; How shapes What. What reflects How by the moving light of Why.

What you believe is an ambiguous symptom (again, a physiognomy) of Why and How, from which — from Whom — belief content grows and lives and bears practical fruit.

To say it more plainly:

One chooses a holy and eternally pregnant nothingness from which creation and revelation irrupt ex nihilo.

Or one chooses a blankly nonexistent nothingness into which all things come to naught.

Depending on which nothingness you choose you will live in exnihilism, or undie in nihilism.

One’s everything follows from one’s choice of nothingness.

Where was I?

Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.

(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)