Category Archives: Works
Protected: Wombinal souls
Sense, common and uncommon
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
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.
Return to the fold
Aporia is intolerable for individuals.
But groups gripped with aporia is inescapable, all-pervasive, all-encompassing hell.
What immediately transcends the aporia-gripped mesoperson (the all-too-divisible “individual”), is yet another aporia-gripped macroperson.
No where to go. No escape. No hope.
Collective aporia is experienced as anomie.
Anomie dyspires violence: scapegoating, persecution, war, and collective suicide.
A collective can be two, three, a dozen, a gross, legion, myriads…
A collective can be a shattered individual person.
The sole way out of anomie is a return to within: principled integrity.
Metanoia is necessary but insufficient.
Teshuvah alone — echad — is sufficient.
Everso.
Even a two-millennia-old collective aporic — a mutating being at war with itself, spasmodically oscillating between perverse antiworld-religiosity and revolutionary anti-religious worldliness — can return to the fold.
Philosophical ethnomethods
I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.
The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.
What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.
Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.
But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.
In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.
In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.
Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.
Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.
Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.
This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”
Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.
Gift thieves
I’ve talked about stealing gifts.
Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a gift is the bond of gratitude.
When a gift is received as if it is a mere ownership transfer from one person to another, with no sense of gratitude, that gift has been stolen.
Material gifts can be stolen.
Ideas can also be stolen.
But the easiest thefts are the worst thefts: the theft of supraformal gifts.
The hardest part of such a theft is perceiving the gift in the first place. But if someone gives you the gift of experiencing the gift as real and valuable, then there it is — there for the taking. Nothing but decency prevents you from grabbing it for yourself and cutting all the “strings attached” that bind both it and you to the giver of the givenness.
Ingratitude says “You gave me an idea.”
Gratitude says “Thank you for teaching me.”
Ingratitude says “This belongs to everyone.”
Gratitude says “Thank you for showing me what is ours.”
Ingratitude says “We are the supercessors. What was yours is now ours.”
Only ingrates who know nothing about relationships think gratitude is about a craving for credit.
It’s as dumb as the belief that jealousy is thwarted lust for owning another person.
Young people know all kinds of new things, or at least know how to query ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to generate some knowing — but I’ve met next to none who understand what a relationship is, or know how to move around in the world of relationship.
Mission mistatement
I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.
If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.
In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.
Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.
Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.
If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.
Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.
One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.
As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.
The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.
These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.
Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.
And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.
These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.
These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.
It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.
Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.
And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.
When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.
Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.
And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.
Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.
What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?
Faith.
Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.
Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies
The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.
Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.
A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.
Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.
That is our mission.
Value exchanges, sahib
I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.
In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.
At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.
As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.
To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.
To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.
I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.
I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.
I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.
When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.
“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.
But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.
(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)
Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.
And value? Value is just some portion of love.
Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.
Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.
We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.
But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.
If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.
Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”
Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.
Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.
Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.
And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.
It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.
But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.
Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.
Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.
Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.
This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.
Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.
And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.
We all need this so much more than we know.
Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.
Commonality
Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.
I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.
Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.
Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.
At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.
For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.
But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”
Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.
This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.
Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+
Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.
L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.
Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”
Kids these days.
The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.
What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.
I have at least one viable option for the future.
Sadly, everyone still knows everything.
There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.
Exnihilist manifesto, opening?
Most endure the nihilism of our time with dull, dutiful complacency. Others blame and lash out at specific people as the cause of their deprivation. Others suspect unknown people and groups, and look for signs pointing to the source of this pervasive wrongness. Others hole up and shelter themselves against the times, hoping meaning will come to them in their solitude.
But meaninglessness is the air we breathe. Through emoting mouths, we exhale and exhale and exhale our remaining spirit.
Our time knows neither how to find meaning, nor how to make it. If, by some everyday miracle, meaning finds life, we do not know how to nurture it. Rather, we kill it in the cradle. In our vacuating ethos, such euthanasia is the only ethical thing to do. We may detest this world, but we love the ethics that sustains it.
Kabbalistic everso
I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).
Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.
For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.
Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.
Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.
Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.
To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.
Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.
Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.
Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.
Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.
What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.
Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.
The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.
Desperate philosophizing
Nietzsche is not the What of his thought. He is the How of his thinking, and his How opens up a blinding flood of Why.
For What-bound epistemological souls thinking is pure What. For them only How if it is “how do you know whether what you claim is true? How do you infer it, argue it, prove it to be true?”
But if you allow a Why with a How to show us new What… they converge into Who. “Who is this, and now — Who am I?”
What originally forced me into religious modes of thought was a total inability to answer people’s questions about What Nietzsche thought. I couldn’t answer, as asked, perfectly reasonable questions. But I had a How ready if a need for Nietzschean thinking arose. That How knew how to respond to the need for understanding or intelligent action.
Sadly, 90% of my knowing is still like this. I know how to respond to all kinds of design problems. Explaining what I will do ahead of time draws on a completely different kind of knowledge that is only tangentially related.
It is easier for everyone — both them and me — if people just learn by participating.
I have a slide I show clients.
I usually say something like, “If someone tried to explain Monopoly to you by reading you the rulebook, you would feel complete overwhelmed and you wouldn’t want to play. But if you just jump in and try to get the hang of it, it’s pretty fun, and soon the rules start making sense.”
Tragically, the more important design gets — the more expensive the project and the more executive scrutiny it gets — the more no one lets you do it until you explain ahead of time exactly how it will be done.
They all think this is being thorough and thinking things through. They think it is being thoughtful.
Fact is, this very process of verbally modeling it and explaining it out with words falsifies and complicates what happens in design. It prevents design from doing anything ordinary executive cranial labor can’t do. The whole reduction of reality to what can be said explicitly (and briefly) and measured is what makes executive turn whatever they touch into sterile, empty, corporate soullessness.
This is the misery of my life. This misery drove me to Nietzsche.
My experience with Nietzsche is what allowed me to understand McLuhan.
The crippling despair I experienced in the wee years of the new millennium — just before my encounter with Nietzsche — was entirely tied up with the need to explicitly communicate things I only knew deeply through intuition — and the terrible consequences I suffered if I was unable to explicitly communicate.
Because what happens every time is the same: I get forced to work in ways that alienate my intuition from the work, which makes the work impossible, and deeply depressing to execute.
But here is one consolation: If you can at least account for that pain — if you can point at it and talk about what is happening very clearly — 61.803398875% of the pain just… evaporates.
Perplexities are hellish enough. But if the very fact of a perplexity also perplexes you, now you are exponentially perplexed, and the angst is exponentially painful.
I never would have spent a minute thinking about any of these things, had I not been forced to.
I thought out these ideas out of sheer existential necessity. They were never interests of mine. (Or at least they didn’t start off as interests.) They’re also not things I gravitated to because I was good at them, or thought I could make a living from writing teaching, blogging, podcasting or youtubing about it.
I thought about them because I would die of despair if I didn’t figure them out.
This is why I scorn trifling souls who frolic about in philosophical content, who consume other people’s idea and see nothing but delightful play in philosophy, and who deny the role of pain in creativity-revelation.
My pain, fear and angst has been my best muse, and so I always find myself blessing my fate, even as I curse it.
I am going to make something very pretty from all this hell.
Language of reception
I’ve returned to an old line of thought this morning, thinking about synesis, “together-being”.
In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:
“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”
I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of a given something, there is imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness that precludes even absence. When nothing is present, nothing is missed.
I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.
From Etymonline:
Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.
The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.
As I said last week,
Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.
Protected: Excruciation
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.
Exnihilist maxims
Meaning irrupts precisely from nothingness, nowhere, never.
Nil and inconceivability are indistinguishable.
Impossibility and inconceivable possibility are indistinguishable.
Meaninglessness and inconceivable meaning are indistinguishable.
Nonexistence and inconceivable being are indistinguishable.
To finite beings like us, infinity seems less than zero.
Our comprehension can only grasp what we can conceive. Only forms can be conceived.
Meaning flows infraformally and supraformally. The Midas touch of objectivity freezes meaning solid in universal form.
More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism
The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context.
Email #1:
I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything true that is not well known within Kabbalah.
Microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy is assumed by all Kabbalists. And one of the core struggles of Kabbalah is the incomprehensibility of its most essential and consequential insights. Scholem indicates this problem in his aphorisms, from multiple angles. Students of Kabbalah quickly learn to release the mundane expectation that they can cognitively grasp anything important beyond the objectivity of Assiyah. Beyond Assiyah only cognitively indirect methods of intellection work at all. I think even Biale knows these things, and the unreliability of his commentary comes from something else I haven’t yet pinned down.
Rereading Scholem, I do not believe he is denying the truth of Plotinus, but rather denying that emanationist accounts of the Olamot “do” what Kabbalah set out to do. A pat explanatory model — and worse, a model objectively graspable — replaces a within-outward, first-person experiential account of one’s layered and (cognitively) elusive relationship with the One. In other words, Scholem is making a procedural, not substantive objection.
So, the emanationist model may very well be true (that is where I have recently arrived), but accepting of it, without doing the spiritual and phenomenological work of arriving at it via actual participation and reflection cheats the Kabbalist of Kabbalah’s best fruits, which are not theoretical constructions, but influx of incomprehensible divine light. This gift is received precisely through doing the work of aware participation — not by reaching the conclusion and possessing the answer.
Ironically, my earlier rejection of emanationism came from having not completing this work for myself, and from not recognizing the links between my incomplete “everso” theme and Kabbalah.
Email #2:
To clarify, I think Biale’s commentary completely misconceives Aphorism 7. Biale does, in fact, seem to treat the problem as substantive doctrinal disagreement. In doing so, he flies off in the wrong direction and both obscures and accidentally demonstrates Scholem’s point. He treats Kabbalah as objective metaphysical information that can be more correct or less correct, or reach more correct or less correct conclusions. Ironically, this is precisely the “misfortune” Scholem is indicating in this aphorism. No wonder Biale calls the aphorism “obscure”. Its meaning is entirely eclipsed by Biale’s confinement to objectivist cognition!
Email #3:
Actually, maybe I can pin down Biale’s problem.
To me, Biale seems a scholar with a lot of academic knowledge about Kabbalah, but who lacks Kabbalistic knowledge of academia’s objectivist limitations.
Objective knowledge — that is, knowledge of what is experienced and comprehended objectively — is effective only within Assiyah. But the entire point of Kabbalah is to transcend Assiyah. So if one tries to build systems of objective knowledge about Kabbalah, this knowledge might be true as far as it goes, but it is useless for progressing as a Kabbalist or for representing the most crucial insights Kabbalah offers.
Biale seems unaware of this truth — a truth of Beriah.
Neshamah Yisrael
Neshamah – the dimension of self who abides in Beriah, the World of Creation – is the self who hears the still, quiet voice of revelation through the thunderous noise of objective spectacle.
Neshamah receives gifts of overwhelming meaning – both of creation and of revelation – ex nihilo.
Ex nihilo – from Nothing.
Nothingness is precisely the aperture through which incomprehensible meaning floods into the world from Beriah.
A gift of Beriah, once received, annihilates our naive misconception of nothingness.
Never again can we take nothingness at face value and confuse it with mere absence.
Never again can we experience nothingness without anticipation and hope.
Nothingness is Ayin, the divine naught who protects our eyes from the divine light of infinite intensity.
Ayin is the blessed blindness who shields us from what we are unprepared to witness.
We are oblivious to such realities, and to us they are nothing, until they become givens – gifts.
Meaning enters the world through Ayin.
Once we know this from the heart, in faith, we are exnihilists – we can no longer see nothingness without knowing how it conceals, and how it may, at any moment, reveal.
Shema, Neshamah Yisrael.
Missing Da’at
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.