I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception. And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level. Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach. When two … Continue reading Articulating truth and word
For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am … Continue reading Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping
When I called the second edition of my Kabbalah reference sheet a “one-page book” I mostly meant it as a joke. As so often happens, however, this silly irony has become serious. I am thinking of it now as a book, and its title has become The Well-Tempered Kabbalah. I am continuing to work on … Continue reading The Well-Tempered Kabbalah
Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways. Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities. Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and … Continue reading Quadrephania
I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis. The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion … Continue reading Volume titles
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 … Continue reading The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe
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; … Continue reading “Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”
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 … Continue reading Mapping olamot
Willfred Sellars said: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, … Continue reading Hanging with Sellars
People ask me how kabbalah relates to design. Here is how: To nefesh in Assiyah, whole means comprehensive system. To ruach in Yetzirah, whole means gestalt given. To neshemah in Beriah, whole means enworldment. To chayah in Atzilut, whole means atonement. In Atzilut, only the One is whole, transcendent. In Beriah, wholes are enworldments, given … Continue reading Kabbalah and design
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 … Continue reading A note on “Creation redescription”
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 … Continue reading Jacob’s Lattice
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 … Continue reading Polycentered declarations
The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better. The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of … Continue reading Coaxing bolts from the blue
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 … Continue reading Scholem on originality and tradition
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 … Continue reading Choose your nothingness
A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision. Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. … Continue reading Navel gaze
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance. And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought. Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) … Continue reading Ontological membranes
I’ve probably said this a zillion times, but it is worth repeating: Myriad is a pretty way to express indeterminate magnitude — uncountably many. Originally, myriad meant ten-thousand, and in pre-digital times ten-thousand was, for all practical purposes, uncountable. Computers have since blown out the limits of countability. We need something much larger, now. For … Continue reading Infinity versus myriad
One account of ztimtzum — today’s conception: In the finite world, impurity is a matter of exclusion of inessentials. But infinity is essentially absolute, unconditional inclusion. When finite being attempts to approach the infinite, any exclusion from the infinite is an impurity. Yet, finite being is somehow entirely of the infinite without itself being infinite. … Continue reading Account of tzimtzum