Category Archives: Geometric Meditations
Math weirdness
I feel that The New Math: a Political History might hold the keys to the mystery of my own bizarrely qualitative and intense relationship with mathematics.
It is a weird thing, and I do not understand it, but it matters. It is inscribed in my codeset.
I have always been appallingly bad at doing math. I cannot calculate anything without making dumb, careless mistakes. (I am a disaster in the letterpress studio!)
I cannot remember times or calendar dates. I cannot retain even short sequences of figures or of anything. No kidding! — it all evaporates from my mind on contact.
It seems like some kind of quantitative dyslexia.
The only math I excelled at was geometry. I couldn’t memorize proofs, but I could derive the hell out of them them. My teacher indulged my differently-ablement, and allowed me to work on my geometry tests through lunch. I needed this time because I memorized only the barest minimal set of proofs and had to manually derive all the derivations. This was a shorter cut than to attempt memorization of arbitrary strings of shifting symbols. I was also good at computer programming, and was briefly a comp sci major in college before discrete math drove me out of the program. I coded intuitively. My classmates always came to me to help them debug their programs.
My abilities were existent, but narrow and beyond their limits dropped instantly to zero.Yet, math haunted the primitive roots of my weird soul.
An exhibit of idiosyncrasies:
James Gleick’s Chaos was the only book I owned when Susan met me in 1989. I was obsessed with the M-Set, and Mandelbrot’s preternatural pattern-recognition talents. That was an ability I prized and desired for myself.
When I read Shapinsky’s Karma I was taken by Nicholas Slonimsky’s ability to hear a piece of music once and to be able to recall and reproduce it years later — not by remembering the sounds but by grasping its structure.
All my visual designs are — and always have been — composed to OCD-level exact grids and ratios. I do not let the measurements override my eye, but my eye is never allowed to overrule the measurements. Every finished piece reconciles visual and intellective beauty.
I prized an early, dilapidated copy Roycrofter’s chapbook edition of a legendoidal “Little Journeys to Homes of Great Teachers” bio of Pythagoras. The fact that it was hastily, sloppily and semi-factually tossed off from the semi-reliable myth-drunk memory of Elbert Hubbard was not a bug, but a feature. It was only the myth I wanted. Math mysticism harmonized with my own subsonic resonances.
For a few years I sought a way to translate musical ratios (mainly tone frequencies in melodies and harmonies, and rhythmic patterns) essential to a song, graphically as spatial and color-frequency relationships. I wanted to design record cover art that, when contemplated while listening, would fuse with the music to form a panperceptual gestalt. I failed, but the hours I sat in the USC music library studying music theory books, listening to stochastic and serialist music, straining (and failing) to find elusive structural beauty in the sonic nonsense, did something good to me.
In Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices, I was intoxicated to learn of his project of watching Conway’s Game of Life in order to train his intuition to trace the morphing organisms.
Most recently, I’ve letterpress printed both pi and phi to the myriadth place. I don’t even know what e is, but now that I know of it, I will be printing that, too. I might do a kickstarter to print these irrational constants as a series.
There’s more, but this gives a sketch of the general family of tendencies.
I should also mention: All my best thoughts originate as intuitions that first crystallize as visual diagrams, preceding language. Words sometimes lag relational gnoses by years.
I’m damn near innumerate, but some quality of quantity has a shimmery, mystical, dreadful hold on my heart.
I don’t know what is going on in my head-heart, but I think New Math in my early education somehow activated it.
ASCII sigil
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(
- “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
- “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
- “(“, 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.
Protected: Hex
Hermeneut lifecycle
For a decade I have struggled with an enduring aporia, a question concerning enception. (An enception is a capacity to receive a given of some particular form.) My question concerns whole versus part, but even just saying it this way gives me the missing answer.
At various times I have talked about enceptions in terms of a holistic ordering principle among capacities (or faculties) and at others as the capacities (or faculties) themselves to be ordered.
When approaching enception part-to-whole we emphasize enceptions as multiple capacities of reception of givens — a capacity to -ceive / take in a reality of some particular form, whether through perception, conception or intuition. Without enception for a particular form, that form remains submerged in oblivion. With the enception the form can be taken as a given — a perceived given reality or conceived given truth.
Enceptions operate at every scale. The perceptions of our five senses are taken-together (con-ceived) gives us sensus communis (perceptual common sense of what is real). And our social participation mediated by language gives us another common sense of shared understanding of the world with others of our community. Communities collaboratively build varying enceptive systems of understanding, each with its distinctive knowledge and practices.
This scaling brings us to the other use of enception, the whole-to-part approach. Here an enception which is a principle of holistic ordering, which crystallizes or harmonizes multiple capacities/faculties into a stable and self-reinforcing subjective system with its own ontology and objectivity. According to this view, the enception is not so much a function of parts, but of the stability of some ultimate, ordering enception. By this view, with a change in ultimate enception, givens can both irrupt into givenness or vanish back into oblivion. This seems true.
How I managed to not see this all along is beyond me: The hermeneutic circle is also the hermeneut lifecycle.
I knew this.
West and autumn and evening:
Establishing,
Perfecting,
Immortalizing.
North and winter and night:
Questioning,
Breaking,
Liberating.
East and spring and morning:
Playing,
Experimenting,
Discovering.
South and summer and day:
Believing,
Committing,
Conquering.
Beings cycle through phases,
each phase a relation of whole and part,
with its own mood and thrust.
In west and autumn and evening,
beings participate in the order.
In north and winter and night,
beings revolt against a world
unable to comprehend them.
In east and spring and morning,
beings wander freely,
groping for possibilities of relation.
In south and summer and day,
a movement emerges,
persuading and enlisting –
proceeding from the most yielding
to the most resistant.
Hineini void
On decadence
Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.
The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.
A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.
One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.
In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.
A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.
A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.
A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)
Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.
There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.
There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.
Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.
Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.
Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.
Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.
A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.
I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.
Radical mid
Periodically, I follow a line of thought so far that I lose touch with my point of departure.
That is, in fact, my goal — my “point of failure” as bodybuilders call it. A touchstone quote from Nietzsche brings me back:
The two principles of the new life.
First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.
Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.
What is most certain for a human being is the middle.
Voegelin called this existential middle the metaxy. The metaxy is the threefold present I-now-here.
Between the beings (beyond) who superscend and comprise us and the intuitive sparks (behind) who subscend and constitute us is a tension called I. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite living oblivion, spirit.
Between the future (beyond) which draws us forward into its indeterminate possibility and the past (behind) which constitutes our time is a tension called now. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite temporal oblivion, eternity.
Between the distances (beyond) which stretch outward interminably and substances (behind) which constitutes our immediate environment is a tension called here. And this extends indefinitely into an infinite material-spatial oblivion, apeiron.
For each of us, metaxy collects in mesocosm, suspended between microcosm and macroscosm.
Husserl called this mesocosm in which each and all of us lives lifeworld.
In this lifeworld there are myriad ways to make common sense of things, some better than others.
We make personal common sense across our senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting “the same thing” in our environment, understanding it synthetically as the common object of our sensory experience.
And we all make interpersonal common sense by talking about and interacting with common objects among us — things we experience together.
As we make sense alone or together, we, ourselves, are shaped. Our objectivity shapes our subjectivity. Or, more accurately, our subjectivities are shaped, and learn to cooperate within a single, multifaceted subject. We learn to understand (to varying degrees and predominance) via all the subjects we learn in school, plus many other, far more local subjects, like the subject of the inhabitant of our home, city, region, nation and internationality.
These subjects and supersubjects are not objects and cannot be known objectively. They are who does objective knowing. The tree of subjectivity is known solely by its objective fruit. Trying to have the tree by possessing its fruit everts being. We compulsively evert being. It is how we are.
Some of these subjects are harmonious with one another and can be used simultaneously and integrally, and some conflict and can only be used serially. The latter are the ones that make us feel self-estranged. We are one person at work, another in public, another with friends and another at home.
But our souls are expansive. We want to extend our I to wider scopes of we. And we want to go deeper to involve finer and finer, subtler and subtler sparks of intuition. We want to integrate with and without, to be self-possessed but to belong. We want to concern ourselves with more varieties of materials networked across greater expanses. We want to come to understand and come to terms with our personal past and the past of our peoples and of our species, of life and of the universe, and we want to see beyond the horizon of the future and anticipate what is in store for us.
As we dilate our souls toward spirit, eternity and apeiron, structures of meaning emerge.
These structures are sacred. They link us to subscendent and superscendent transcendence, which is our source of being. It is a trellis to hold us firm as we extend ourselves, entwine ourselves, ascend beyond the I-here-now point.
Religion is a trellis.
Now I am back in the middle, rerooted in what is closest, most immediate and real.
Desperate philosophizing
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.
Whyness, Whatness and Howness
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.
Missing Da’at
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.
Protected: Sifron Yetzirah
Letterpress “theory-practice” print
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
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
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
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?
Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations
In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.
First, a dimension is named.
Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.
And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.
I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:
The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.
The polarities are Beriah, the realm of intelligibility.
The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.
And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.
Representational eclipse
Heraclitus:
One should not act or speak as if he were asleep.
The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.
Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream.
When we are “absent-minded”, interacting directly, intuitively with the world, without mediation of words, we are three-fold present: in time, in place, in self.
This is true even though wordless action, performed without inward “written instructions” leaves no linguistic “paper trail” in our memory. “Words, or it didn’t happen.”
Psychologists and other wordworlders call this wordless immediacy “the unconscious”, the misnomer of misnomers. Words know only words.
There is nothing wrong with a sheer veil of dream, but when dreams grow opaque and eclipse life beyond dream, we will know truths, but we are oblivious to anything beyond truth. Then when we say “it is objectively true” and we say “it is real” we mean the same thing.
An aggressive poke at materialism
It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.
In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.
The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.
I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.
What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.
Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.
New and improved vulgarity!
I reject two very common, often unexamined, and highly consequential psychological assumptions.
Vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious mind consists largely of objective beliefs of which we are unaware, that exist beneath the surface of awareness, because unconscious psychic processes push them under. I think repressed objective beliefs do exist, but that most of “the unconscious” consists of activities of the intuition which are essentially unknowable as objects, in the same way seeing is essentially invisible to sight. The rational mind, however, inhabits a world of comprehension, and to rationality, whatever evades comprehension cannot have the status of existence. It must belong to the phantasmic inner world of sentiment — a nonexistent subjective pseudo-object.
Vulgar assumption 2: Intuition is essentially an unconscious rational process. Two consequences of this belief are equally wrong: 2a) that anything we think or do can become intuitive through practice. 2b) that anything we intuit can through analysis will reveal an implicit rationality.
In both of these assumptions I see evidence of a rationality that claims to speak on behalf of the self, but instead speaks only for itself in purely rational terms. In some cases, rationality tyrannizes over the whole self and attempts control all its behaviors. In most cases, though, rationality is made the powerless figurehead of the self, and is allowed to say whatever it wants, but has no significant influence over real feelings or behaviors. In both cases, the intellect is alienated from self.
I would like to replace these two vulgar assumptions with two different vulgar assumptions. And by “vulgar” I mean they can be unthinkingly adopted by ordinary people and become ideas so mainstream nobody even thinks to question them. As I’ve said before, the sign of a well-designed philosophy is (like all good design) invisibility. And invisible philosophy is naive realism, or, to say it in a prettier way, a faith.
A practical philosophy designer’s ultimate goal is new forms of naive realism that, when adopted, allow people to live better lives together.
When a philosophy is designed well, people easily understand what is said (it is usable), they spontaneously see applications (useful) and they feel value in the new understanding (desirable). But that is just the first encounter, when the philosophy is still an object of understanding. The true test of the philosophy’s design is after it is adopted, and the philosophy becomes the subject of understanding — that is, it is used to understand subject matter beyond itself. Now the philosophy is understood from, and it functions less like an object we experience at than an interface through which we experience other objects of understanding. And like all designed things we can change modes of attention, and experience it as a beautiful object, or a beautifying subject.
Almost every beautiful thing I see, I see clearly because of a very beautiful pair of glasses I wear, which were crafted in Germany by trained jewelers. But sometimes I remove my glasses and look at them and marvel at their form. And I love my bicycle for similar reasons. I climb into my bike (if you’ve ever ridden a Rivendell, you’ll know why I say “into” instead of “on to”) and I am now merged into this bicycle and into the landscape I ride through. But often I climb off and look at this bicycle from a distance and am overwhelmed by its appearance. Same with all my favorite objects. And of all the beautiful objects, the best are books. They have innumerable layers of subject-object gorgeousness. The book is a physical and typographic object. But it is a “crystal goblet” for its content. But its content is also a crystal goblet for various realms of reality. Despite practicing design for decades prior to reading Beatrice Ward, I could never understand it or practice it the same way again after learning to see it through her eyes. Same with Liz Sanders and Christopher Alexander. The reading was wonderful. The permanent change to myself and the world as I inhabit it (my enworldment) as a designer was immeasurably better.
I am sitting in a middle of a room lined with the most beautiful books, dozens of which have subjectively reshaped me. I am the immortality of myriad beautiful souls.
What was I talking about? Oh – vulgar assumptions. My goal in life is to improve our vulgar assumptions. A philosophy that is not adopted and vulgarized is falling short of its purpose.
My improved vulgar assumptions go like this.
Improved vulgar assumption 1: Our unconscious is unconscious only to our rational mind. Subjectivity is not a realm that exists side by side with objectivity. On the contrary, objectivity is a subset of subjectivity — that small corner of subjectivity that can be defined, comprehended and explicitly spoken about. The rest can only be known about indirectly, and can never be known any other way. So, for example, if our unconscious keeps producing racist notions it isn’t because we have racist beliefs that we keep repressing; it is because we have racist subjectivity that perpetually generates racist observations and racist thoughts. Trying to manipulate the content of such a subjectivity will just make the racist more divided against herself, more emotionally hysterical and more desperate for drastic remedies for her dividedness. The resolution of the problem is through asking different questions, not from inventing different answers to old ones and bullying ourselves and others into pretending to believe what we say.
Improved vulgar assumption 2: Rationality is one kind of intuitive process, one that is mostly composed of explicit objects and operations. But many intuitions and other intuitive processes exist that are not reducible to rational terms. And this means 2a) that we should not assume intuitive design only makes use of established habits, or that any design will become intuitive once it is practiced and made habitual. And it means 2b) that we should not assume implicit rationality in any intuition or intuitive response. The why behind an intuition might not have any explicit “because”, and this only makes it more real and important.
One last thing. Even beyond the usefulness, usability and desirability of a designed philosophy, there is something even more important. Does it answer to reality beyond itself? This is the truth many younger designers are trying to bring to the design discipline. Our responsibility as designers extends beyond the needs of immediate receivers, deliverers and supporters of services and products. Our designs impact the entire world, and we are answerable for all impacts to anyone, not only to those we consider. Most designers I meet are materialists, who think only in terms of ecology, economy or psychology, but this is only the parts of transcendent reality a materialist rationality can comprehend. There is more out there (and in here) that we must answer to, and this determines whether our designs bear halos of light or void.