A clarification on ethnicity vs identity

Politics

Ethnicity is our participation in an ethos and our belonging to it.

Identity is how we conceptualize that belonging.

But we can misconceive identity and become hopelessly confused about it. This is what has happened to Progressivists.

The way Progressivists conceptualize identity has nothing to do with actually participating in or belonging to any ethos — including those with which they identify.

What Progressivists know least of all is that the only ethos a Progressivist can belong to is Progressivism — and Progressivism alone.

There are no intersections with Progressivism, only within it.

The moment someone begins to participate in the Progressivist ethos — when they start to belong to it — they lose their ability to participate in their former ethos. They no longer belong to it. They no longer represent it. Their old ethnicity has been traded in for a Progressivist-issued identity, which authorizes and obligates them to “speak as” a member of their former ethnicity — but, in truth, the only speaking they can do post-conversion is ventriloquizing Progressivist formulas.

The Progressivist ethnicity is oblivious to all participatory being — including ethnicity — so they have no idea what they belong to. If they weren’t oblivious to ethnicity, they’d recognize that Progressivism is their only genuine identity, and the identities they list as theirs, which they mistake for the elements of their self-constitution are only Progressivist furniture. Their being is possessed in full by Progressivism.

Again, whoever views their own ethnicity in the glaring identitarian light of Progressivism, immediately ceases to belong to that ethnicity.

In my last post, I mocked the term “Latinx” — a truly dumb word used only by folks who’ve defected to Progressivism and therefore have no legitimate claim to speak for real Latinos.

In that post, I claimed the “x” stands in for their new unconscious ethnicity.

But I missed a vicious dad joke opportunity, which I must now remedy.

The real problem with the “x” suffix is…

…it should be a prefix.

Even simpler: The minute you view your ethnicity from the identitarian schema of progressivism you’ve lost that ethnicity and are no longer in any position to represent it. You’ve defected to a new denatured global ethnicity: Progressivism. The customs of your new ethnicity demand obsessive categorization of all persons into identities, and then viewing persons, including yourself, as Platonic manifestations of these categories. Everyone who still participates in your former ethnicity will see that you have become alienated from the identity you imagine yourself the spokesperson for, but you won’t care, because in your nightmare you are awake and they are the ones who are still asleep.

The Progressivist ethnicity

Politics

Progressivists talk endlessly about identity, but rarely mention ethnicity. Why?

I’ll tell exactly why: because Progressivism is itself an ethnicity – but one that denies it. Progressivism has its own ethos, its own moral code, its own culture. But it conceals all this behind a universalist veil.

Progressivists sincerely believe they have transcended ethnocentricity through their awareness of ethnocentricity, that they have effectively addressed bias through awareness and careful technical neutralization of bias, that their dissection of their own privilege with their razor-sharp – but single-edged – critical tools has enabled them to identify and renounce all privilege. Their belief that they’ve overcome naive realism allows them to exercise it in its purest form. The result is an unacknowledged, thoroughly denatured ethnocentricity masquerading as moral objectivity.

To become Progressivist, one must trade in one’s former lived ethnicity for a Progressivist-certified identity.

That identity has little or nothing to do with the lived ethnicity it purports to represent. The identity functions more like an identification card to present to fellow Progressivists, to inform them of your rank and function within the ethos.

When a Progressivist “speaks as” an identity, this is to show one’s ID card, which authorizes the card-carrier to enjoy the privileged access to objective truth and morality to which all Progressivists are entitled – that is, other Progressivists will assign validity to what is said – plus whatever special perquisites one’s identity within Progressivism affords.

But that is the outside view. Viewed from within, one has awakened to their true condition. It is a conversion. It is political salvation. “I was blind to my privilege – but now I see!”

But what they don’t see is the blindness they’ve adopted in exchange for all their new apparent insights. It is blindness to the fact that Progressivism is an ethnicity that displaces all other ethnic participation. And it is blindness to the possibility that one might still be blind where one suspects it least, where it matters most – in one’s own most deeply held moral convictions.

To clarify the difference between Progressivist-assigned identities and authentic ethnic participation and belonging, we need new language.

The term “Latinx” offers a model.

Studies show that very few Latinos or Latinas outside academia use it. Most actively reject it. “Latinx” marks someone who has traded their ethnic belonging for a Progressivist-issued identity.

Progressivists believe the “x” signifies indeterminate gender. But I propose that it signifies severance – a cut, a disconnection from the culture it claims to represent.

The “x” marks what must remain unknown. Because if the convert were to name their new ethos, they’d be bound – by their own principles – to renounce the power it gives them. But that power is the entire point of the new identity. The “x” conceals the new ethnicity behind a mask of moral transcendence. The “x” is an ignorance that is strength.

So let all those who identify as Latinx be called Latinx, as opposed to whatever ethnicity they once participated in.

And let’s also let Progressivists who identify as Black be called Blax.

And so on: Jewx, Gayx, Womynx, Asianx, Muslimx, etc.

And if Progressivists complain – as they certainly will – we can chalk it up to cultural difference.

Moral misappropriation

Ethics, Judaism

Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.

It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.

And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.

Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.

This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.

If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:

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.

And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.

We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.

Materialoid idealists

Philosophy

To think a lot about matter, to use the language of physics as your “final vocabulary”, to force all ideas to ground themselves in scientific truths before they are accepted as valid — none of these mental operations makes a person a materialist. It makes the the person an idealist who uses materialist concepts and language to construct a mental world. It makes them a materialoid idealist.

They think the mental model of the world inside their head is a faithful duplicate of the real world, and whatever they deduce about their mental world is necessarily true of the real world. They might say “I might be wrong”, but their doubts are epistemological, when they should be ontological. They misconceive what truth is.

Materialoid idealism is a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism.

Like all fundamentalisms it is collective-solipsistic.

Like all fundamentalism, it appropriates language meant to orient us to a reality of which we are a part, in which we participate, but which transcends us and reduces it to a set of ideas that fit neatly inside one’s own understanding, that is our own property, which we worship as supreme.

Fundamentalism is ideoidolatry.

Materialoid idealists are scientistic fundamentalists.

There is a weird sort of hostile consanguinity among fundamentalists. It’s like “honor among thieves” — an adversarial kinship among folks who live in opposition to one another but who operate at the same plane of existence. It is why debates between theists and atheists never go anywhere. They are self-reassurance rituals, that outside the us-versus-them, there is nothing.

This kind of person has two kinds of hate.

There is the ordinary comprehensible hate of fellow fundamentalists who believe the wrong things, who worship the name and notions of Allah or Jesus instead of the name and notions of Feynman or Marx.

Then there is the deeply anxious uncomprehending hate of aliens whose beliefs and practices simply make no sense at all, and which bring up all kinds of visceral, sincere but ineffable unpleasantness.

The second hate is so much worse that fundamentalists will set aside their shallower hate and ally against it, however much it exposes how little they actually care about the positive ideals they go on and on about to justify their true negative ideals.

Real materialists interact with materials, their thinking is a response to difficulties they encounter in the course of these interactions, and what they come to believe about materials are ideas that effectively guide their interactions.

The cartophiles

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

Many of us are like lovers of maps and mapmaking who have never traveled outside our own room. We pore over our maps and draw up our own atlases, but we have never seen any place that wasn’t presented to as an image as flat as a map. Our maps are made out of words, and even images are midased into hieroglyphs when touched by our wordeyes.

Techne + logos

Design, Etymology, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Etymologically, technology implies service-dominant logic!

techne- — craft.

-logy — speak, tell.

Technology is the explicit tip of craft. Technology is explicit know-how.

Originally, technology was not the product of explicit know-how, but rather, the system of explicit know-how that enables production.

In that intellectual deformation Heidegger called technik/technicity, the industrial faith of engineering, all relations are frozen into commodifiable things.

And no, Marxists, this is not capitalism. Or not only capitalism; it is you, too. Your own ideology is dominated by technik, which is why wherever you overthrow capitalism you replace it with something even more industrial and soulless.

This problem is deeper than economy, deeper than the question of who owns and controls the means of production, deeper than our methods of production. It cuts all the way down into how we conceive materials, how we approach them, how we relate to them.

Marxists turned the contents of Hegel’s idealism upside-down, without ever inverting his idealist metaphysic. The content was churned inside the unmoving container of mind, which remained, as it always does in such ideologies, “its own place”. It is an idealist metaphysics that thinks its thoughts about matter and thinks all this thinking gives it the object of its thought.

Such “materialism” never receives the blessing of material’s apeironic smile. “Typical man,” she says, “always confusing your ideas about me with me.“

Truth strata

Philosophy

However much the content of our philosophies claims relativity, constructionism, or ephemerality, the act of making such claims indicates universal absolutes. It appears to be a performative contradiction.

Is this a restatement of the same argument we’ve all heard — that relativism self-refutes, by making a non-relative assertion? Yes and no. The content is the same. But here, we are doing something different.

We are not refuting or negating the relativist claim, but rather indicating a transcendent tendency of thought — a self-transcendence that leaves strata of thought-modes in its wake.

The claim of relativity establishes a new mode — one that is not itself relative.

And the recognition of this modal establishment constitutes yet another mode.

Some truths are relative, constructed, and ephemeral. Others are less so.

And some truth is absolute, universal, and eternal. The evidence of this final kind of truth is most conspicuous when we attempt to deny its realness.

Representational eclipse

Metaphysics, Star

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.

Hemlock candidates

Biography, Fables, myths & parables

One thinker believed he finally discovered the absolute truth, and became a total asshole.

A second thinker arrived at one of many possible conceptions of truth — but it was a conception of such vast scope, clarity, usefulness and inspiration that anyone who understood it was in danger of mistaking it for the absolute truth — and  that thinker became an even worse asshole.

Subject of study

Philosophy

When I read esoteric texts — texts where the content is not immediately understandable, for instance philosophy, sociology, theology, hermeticism — and work hard to understand the content I am reading, the primary goal of the effort is not to understand the content. That is a secondary goal.

The primary goal is to experiment with new subjectivities. With esoteric content I must make changes to my own subjectivity in order to comprehend what is being conveyed. To understand means to change myself into a subject capable of comprehending the material.

But these changes to myself extend beyond the content, to my overall experience of reality. I find myself noticing different things and finding them significant in new ways. My aesthetic tastes change and see beauty and repugnance in different phenomena.

Each change makes experiential tradeoffs. Some things get sharper, clearer and more important. Other things become fuzzier, cloudier and lose significance. Existence as a whole takes on new tones and flavors. I’ve read things that make reality seem hopeless and not worth the trouble. I’ve read other things that make reality seem deeply tragic, essentially painful but infinitely valuable.

Most of all, the overall effect of all this subjective change has highlighted realities that never change. These alone seem true to me.

And what most people around me regard as “the truth” seems an artifact of some truly unfortunate subjective states they never chose, but to which they are loyal, not out of love but lack of alternatives.

The crafty animal

Philosophy

We understand ourselves better when we conceive of ourselves as beings who craft. Our meta-understanding of understanding — our conception of how understanding happens — becomes more comprehensive and pragmatically sound when we root it in craft.

If you are acquainted with the history of laboratory science, you know that modern science dawned with the material crafting of scientific experiments.

Yes, humans think, we observe, we use language. And we understand important things about ourselves when we understand ourselves as thinkers, observers and speakers. But when we try to put these things at the center of our existence, we lose something essential about our being and our understanding of being, and all resulting notions suffer from disastrous detachment from infinity.

Not so with craft! Craft preserves material as what it truly is — not infinitesimally small particles or all-encompassing expanses or energy or space-time continua or anything the mind a divine physicist can conceive — but rather, the purest and most protean apeiron.

I’m game for the philosopher’s eternal mad libe: The human being is the _____ animal.

The human being is the crafty animal.

Word torture

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

There is much to hate about Boomers, but their most hateful fault is their sexuality.

This sexuality is characterized by two equally unfortunate ideals: frankness and naturalness. Deployed in tandem, these ideals destroy everything mysterious and fascinating about love, and reduce it all into stinky, sweaty, hairy, biodegraded mess encapsulated by the Boomer’s favorite word for what most enjoy doing to each other: “make love”.

I think I speak for my generation when I say I’d much rather make war.

Some social critics have blamed the divorce pandemic of the 1970s on the Boomer’s infamous narcissism, egocentricity and irresponsibility. There is no doubt those Boomer vices played a significant role.

But I think there is a more direct and obvious explanation: the horny grossness of Boomers just made them unable to stand being around each other.

Admittedly, this is hate speech of the worst kind. But I blame society, both for my hate and for my hypocritical embrace of this hate. And I blame this particular unrepentant outburst on the Boomer author of a horrible book I’m trying to read read now — a book on Kabbalah.

How can I be expected to exercise moral self-discipline, after days of writhing, retching and throwing up in my mouth over sentences like this:

His wife said, “Raphael, why do you waste your energy on trying to make books for Jews?” He would reply, “Because your father, his memory is a blessing, wasted his energy trying to make books for Jews, and when I married you, his business was part of your dowry. And besides, I love making Jewish books almost as much as I love making love to you.” Then she would be silent.

My margin note: “stunned silent by disgust at horny Boomer frankness.”

Another passage relates a joke told by a rabbi on a first date.

Seated at the cafe, Kalman tried to relax by telling a joke.

“So there are these two old Jews who are obsessed with knowing what happens after you die,” he said, putting his fork into a slice of coconut cream pie. “They swear a solemn oath that, God forbid, whoever dies first will stop at nothing to contact the one who survives. Moishe dies. Yonkel sits shivah, says kaddish for eleven months..”

“Shivah? Kaddish?”

“Jewish mourning rituals. But nothing happens. Then, after a few years, one evening the phone rings. It’s Moishe!

“Moishe, is that you?’

“‘Yes, it’s me, but I can’t talk long.”

“So then quick, tell me, what’s it like?” asks Yonkel.

“Oh, it’s wonderful here. I sleep late, have a big breakfast, and then I make love. If the weather’s nice, I usually go out into the fields and make love again. I come back inside for lunch and take a nap. Then I go out into the fields and make love, sometimes twice. I have a big dinner, and then, most evenings, I go out into the fields again and make love. Then I come inside and go to sleep.

“And that’s heaven!?” Yonkel gasps.

“Heaven?” says Moishe. “Who said anything about heaven?

I’m a rabbit in Minnesota!'”

What a relaxing first date joke! And how was the joke received? Did she scream or run away? Nope.

It worked. Dr. Isabel Benveniste demurely covered her mouth with her napkin and laughed; her eyes twinkled behind her thick glasses.

Demurely.

This love interest, if you can’t tell, is a stock Boomer favorite: the bombshell-hottie-disguised-as-a-nerdy-librarian. In this case she is an astrophysicist who stole the rabbi protagonist’s heart while delivering a lecture on the origins of the universe.

She looked taller, more severe, off the podium. What little makeup she wore was perfect; her black curly hair fell flawlessly about her face.

The rabbi, it turns out, was inspired to became a Kabbalist after a mystical experience in an observatory.

Kalman Stern just stood there gazing through that opening in the dome and into the starry firmament. He repeated his teacher’s words: a point of light . . . containing everything yet to come.

And for just one moment, the heavenly lights reciprocated his affections: They condensed themselves like a torrent gushed through the narrowing walls of a sluice. They slid through the slit in the nine-inch Alvan Clark refractor dome’s open mouth.

They squeezed themselves into a single spark of moistened light and planted a silent kiss on the lips of Kalman Stern. He swallowed hard and blinked, trying to clear his vision. He never told anyone about it. Even if he had wanted to, he didn’t know how.

He wasn’t aware of it then, of course, but that was also when he became a Kabbalist.

I swear, if I can force myself this through this writing and drag myself all the way to the end of this book, it will be a miracle. It will be nothing less than a new and irrefutable proof of the existence of God.

The problem is, there’s some good information — even profound insights in this book. It’s hellish indignity, but, in my life, that’s where wisdom hides out — under steaming heaps of cringe.

Gerundity

Design, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

We can think of metaphysics our understanding of what is really real, behind the world of phenomena.

We can also think of metaphysics as something we do. Metaphysics is an action we perform when we need to integrate a subjective experience into absolute reality as we conceive it. (This is often called “objective” reality, See note below on why I do not.)

For some particular object of some particular experience to be part of reality it must find its place in an ontology rooted in some particular metaphysic. I’ve called this “touching base”. Say, for instance, a person has an emotion or intuition and wants to account for what it is. Is it an epiphenomenon of neurobiology? Is it a message from the spirit world? Is it a manifestation of an archetype? Is it the detection of a moral principle. What do we do to give this wisp of subjectivity the dignity of realness to ourselves and to those who know what we know? What substrate or matrix do we link it up to?

We can pragmatically establish the meaning of a metaphysics by its practical consequence. What kind of ontological grounding operation do you do in order to situate a subjective experience within your best conception of absolute reality? That is the pragmatic meaning of your metaphysic.

In my library life, I’m thinking about process philosophy.

In my office life, I’m thinking about service-dominant logic (SDL).

I can’t find where I wrote this, but I swear this is an older thought: service-dominant logic is an alternative business metaphysic.

Both of these philosophies/frameworks volatilize things into interactive dynamics, and blur the boundaries between noun and verb.

They put relations at the heart of reality.

Every noun is a gerund in disguise.

Light, photon and wave.

Being. The doing of am.

YHWH: was-am-will-be

Note: Some people have a metaphysic that is identical to their ontology. Others have a metaphysic that transcends their ontology. For the former, absolute reality is (or often is) objective reality. For the latter, objective reality and absolute reality are different.

Sacrificial offerings to the ideoidol

Biography, Love, Religion

Many of us cling to ideas that make us feel sane, but which, in actuality produce insanity.

The worst kind of idol is mental. Very few of us worship golden idols, but all but very few of us worship ideoidols.

I know parents who were faced with a choice between their ideoidol and their own child. In the wordless depths of their soul, they are placed as a crossroads:

Do I sacrifice this idea I believe in so fervently for the sake of my child, or do I sacrifice my child to this idea?

All but very few sacrifice the child to the idea.

Goebbels shot his own children before allowing them to live in a denazified world.

I know a child who was unable to accept her parents’ fundamentalist faith. When insistence failed they used shame. When shame failed, they had her exorcised. When exorcism failed, they threw her out of their home.

I know another child whose mother joined a cult that taught a great secret. The secret was so simple it was hidden in plain sight: she lived in a world of her own creation, and the purpose of this world was love. Whenever her child said something disturbing or confusing, this was a lesson that could teach her whatever wisdom she chose to learn. The child became a great teacher, who taught her deep truths that somehow she’d already known all along. After that, he was no longer distressing at all.

Today, many parents refuse to acknowledge own children’s obvious psychological distress and instead believe their own ideology when it soothes them with lies: the despair and confusion the faith itself inflicts is just sensitivity toward a worthless and dying world. The ideoidol masticates and slurps and smiles an oily, bloody smile. “Your child’s deep despair is the only sane response to an unjust and doomed world.” As the child dissolves into a formless blob of dark feelings and appetites in gastric juices, the ideoidol strokes the mother’s head, coos and flatters her self-awareness, her selflessness, her deep concern, her willingness to do the work.

Virtuous Bill

Biography

In college I knew a guy named Bill.

Bill saw himself as a values-driven person. Certain virtues mattered a lot to him and he put a lot of effort into living up to his own high standards. He was morally serious, emotionally sensitive, altruistic, literary and pensive. He was anti-racist, anti-sexist, and generally anti-bigot. He was an uncompromising idealist. Everyone knew this about him.

The problem with Bill, though, was that it wasn’t enough for him to live up to his own standards. He wanted to experience his virtues and himself as virtuous; and for that he needed moral foils. People who were morally frivolous, amoral or even vicious made his own morality stand out in relief. It gave his virtues something to do — something to resist or oppose or silently endure and resent. The slight shittiness of slightly shitty people helped Bill experience who he really wanted to be.

Whether he was aware of it or not, he seemed to enlist whoever happened to be around him in his personal moral dramas. In his presence, I could always feel some scene he was acting out, and the role I was cast to perform. And it was rarely a flattering character. I felt pushed and pulled and twisted and pressured into a character only tangentially connected to myself, and I often felt torn between going along with Bill’s game which required some degree of self-betrayal or swimming upstream against the social current Bill was establishing and creating unpleasant and exhausting tension.

I now recognize that Bill was a man from the future.

His ideals perfectly match those of many educated young people today. They match the ideals of many educated old people who prize youth and try to stay youthful by imitating the young. But back then it was much less common, and acceptance was not nearly as automatic as now. Back then it took some vision and courage, and willingness to be scorned by cool people. I believe Bill deserves some credit for being far ahead of trend.

Today, whenever I’m enlisted as a moral foil, which is every day — when I feel myself being someone else’s capitalist, or white guy, or old man, or dirty Zionist, or milquetoast liberal, or suspected closeted conservative, or whatever they’re after — I think about Bill and his virtuousness.

Another banality of evil

Politics

Since Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, Adolf Eichmann has been the paradigmatic example of “banality of evil”: the autistically unemotional functionary who is “just following orders” with no individual evil intent, but with no sense of moral responsibility for the role he plays as a cog in an evil machine.

But this is only one species of banal evil. Another banal evil is at large today, but one that is almost the exact reverse. This one trades unemotional autism for hyper-sentimental borderline disorder. Instead of just following orders, she “just follows her heart” with no sense of obligation to understand what evils this sentimentality tolerates, supports, encourages or generates. She feels no obligation to think at all — only to emotionally react to whatever is thrust before her gaze — with no sense of moral responsibility for supplying emotional fuel to an evil machine.

Inapprehensible

Judaism

I make a strong distinction between apprehension, which touches without grasping, and through its touch-feel knows that something is. Comprehension grasps and through its grip-form knows what is grasped.

Apprehension is existential know-that. Comprehension is intellectual know-what.

But the intellect can make many grip-forms in empty space, and whatever grip-form it makes is what it knows. Without apprehension of what it holds, the hand is numb, and it loses all distinction between that which is and what might be.

And when comprehension cannot close its hand around that which is, it protests that what it feels in its fingertips cannot be. There is no grip-form for this object. Precisely: If we allow our minds to accept the existence of ungraspable realities, we will find a great many beings — the beings who matter most — are not to be grasped as convex objects, but only touched from within. These beings are subjects.

The need for a reality made exclusively of objects, comprehended objectively, is a striving for misapotheosis, and the more successful we are at it, the more we starve for nourishment and love: King Midases of knowledge.

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

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.