Obscurity ensues

Biography, Esoterism, Judaism

There is a time to make sense to others, and a time to make sense for oneself.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

After 14 years of relative stability, changing again.

I cannot understand, integrate and develop radically new ideas and translate them into terms accessible to sane, intelligent people. That happens later.

For now, expect relentless obscurity.

Kabbalistic reflections on Guenon

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Guenon:

The Self is thus the principle by which all the states of the being exist, each in its own proper sphere, which may be called a degree of existence; and this must be understood not only of the manifested states — whether individual, like the human state, or supraindividual, in other words whether formal or formless, but also, though the word “exist” then becomes inadequate, of the unmanifested states, comprising all those possibilities which, by their very nature, do not admit of any manifestation, as well as the possibilities of manifestation themselves in their principial state; but this Self subsists by itself alone, for in the total and indivisible unity of its innermost nature it has not, and cannot have, any principle external to itself.

This one-sentence passage is very dense and of the highest importance, so I want to break it down into its elemental components, and connect them with Kabbalistic concepts, which are rapidly becoming my native tongue. My own Kabbalistic connections will be italicized and parenthesized.

  • Self is the universal principle. By the principle of Self all other states of the being exist.
  • There is no principle by which Self exists. Self is the principle of all principles.
  • States of being exist in various degrees of existence, which may regarded as spheres. (In Kabbalah, these spheres are articulated into “four worlds”, Olamot.)
  • The human individual state is formal. The supraindividual state is formless. (In Kabbalah, the formal and individual world is Assiyah. The formless, supraindividual world is Yetzirah.)
  • Manifested and unmanifested states is a different distinction from formal and formless. So far, we have spoken only of manifested states which can properly be said to “exist” (again, the actual world of Assiyah and the formational world of Yetzirah. Now we are transcending to the unmanifested worlds of Beriyah — creation — and Atzilut — emanation).
  • Of the unmanifested states some do admit of manifestation and are the possibilities of manifestation in their principial state. (The former is the world of Beriyah, which manifests by principle and in its lowest Sefirah — Beriyah Malkhut — creates the highest Sefirah in Yetzirah — Yetzirah Keter — from which the world of Yetzirah manifests, via the Yetzirah Sefirot).

(Those unmanifested states that do not admit of manifestation are only of Atzilut, but not of Beriyah. These are pure ineffable mystery, for the sake of which All is, and we feel this for-the-sake-of whenever anything matters to us. When we say “God is love” the truth of this statement is charged by Atzilut, and beyond Atzilut, Ein Sof.)

I have what might be an unusual understanding of Yetzirah is essentially supraformal, because it forms, but is not itself form, just as seeing sees but is not seen and hearing hears but is not heard.

I’ve come to understand the Sefirot of Assiyah as attempting, in human objective terms, to represent the worlds above, but by uppaya (skillful means to teach transcendent truths inexpressible in the terms of the present faith-state of the learner).

We try to indicate the forming of Yetzirah by the conceptual forms of the Sefirot Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed. Those are formal indicators of supraformal manifested being, formal fruit by which we know the tree of formation.

(The Hod-Netzach pair in Assiyah, incidentally, is the locus of uppaya.)

By my understanding The subtle (or astral) plane is not Yetzirah itself. The subtle plane is only these non-material objective entities that belong to the Sefirot who objectively represent Yetzirah.

The entire point of my weird term “enception” is to establish a distinction between capacity to form, formation and form, capacity to conceive, conceiving and concept! A capacity to form — to conceive or perceive — or most generally, to receive (the literal meaning of the word “kabbalah”!) is created from Beriyah, manifests in Yetzirah as a action — forming — and then actualizes in Assiyah as forms, concepts, sensibly recognized (perceived) material objects, etc.

So an enception is the analogue to the faculty of sight, hearing.

Without the requisite enception, one remains oblivious to what one would otherwise receive. When a person exclaims “I was blind, but now I see!” this is the annunciation of enception. It is by this — disoblivion, anamnesis — that we experience Beriyah.

And it is by this that we can never again take nihilism at face value. Everything can, at any minute irrupt from oblivion and bathe the world with overwhelming meaning. Nothingness is where this meaning enters, and so nothing is no longer an argument against anything. Exnihilism annihilates nihilism!

None of this is meant to suggest these worlds are not metaphysically real, only that our attempts to make them objective is uppaya.

Reification is different from objectification. This Kabbalistic ontology hyperreifies and disobjectifies the worlds beyond Assiyah.

Exnihilist light

Exnihilism

Forms are objective. All content of experience is form. Things as perceived by our senses are form. Ideas conceived by our mind are form. To our naive experience everything seems to be material and ideal objects, which is why we say things are “objectively real”, known in “objective truth”. In actuality, they are all formed from infraformal material, and could be formed otherwise.

Formation is subjective. Formation is “unconscious” not because it is submerged or suppressed objective content but because its essence defies the grasp of consciousness in the exactly same way perception is imperceptible as an object of perception.

Across formations strange events occur. Epiphanies irrupt out of oblivion, ex nihilo. Superformal meaning floods into the world.

A heart pumps light through vessels of clear reception and veins of pure service.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Knowing the absence of knowing

Biography, Design, Judaism, Philosophy

I get excited when I meet service designers who entered the discipline from practical need.

Such service designers encountered some problem or set of problems they recognized as beyond the reach of their own methodology.

This is much harder than it sounds: The adage “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is profoundly true. To see beyond the expert’s disciplinary scotomas requires a poet’s originary eye.

These people recognized that they not only lacked the tools and methods to solve a kind of problem they faced, they lacked concepts and language for defining and communicating them. Despite this  conceptual chaos known as perplexity they searched out ideas, vocabulary, methods, tools and logics until they found them in service design.

There are many fine service designers out there who were drawn to service design in undergraduate school. They were presented with an array of career options and for various reasons — interest, ability and opportunity — chose service design.

But having that before-and-after experience of a real-life practical perplexity resolved into a defined, solvable problem leaves a permanent trace in a practitioner — an appreciation that is lacking in people who learned to see both the solution and the problem before they ever struggled without either.

The same is true of human-centered design in general. HCD was not always here to learn and use. It only became self-evident and inevitable only after it was, through arduous work, instaurated as a discipline. HCD was a hard-won accomplishment. People who have been trained in HCD methodologies sometimes speak knowingly about the many methods they have learned and could learn, but this knowingness betrays an obliviousness to the blind chaos and nothingness from which these methods emerged. They cannot imagine looking at a design problem and seeing only an engineering, marketing and technical writing problem. They can’t see how Don Norman did anything terribly impressive, and so perhaps his reputation should be reassessed and downgraded.

It is the same difference as people who lived through the fog and fear of historical events, whose outcomes were the furthest thing from assured, and those who learned the history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, and are blind to the blindness that permeates every unfolding present and believe the unknown only hides in darkness.

The study of history is difficult because we are so possessed by the present. It is freeing ourselves from the omniscience of now and reclaiming the unknowing of the past that is hard. It becomes much harder when our “historical fiction” revises history to force it into conformity with contemporary prejudices, instead of alien and much more interesting prejudices of the past — which are the very essence of history. Popular entertainment product like American Girls and Bridgerton exclude history from their contemporary costume dramas, and this is why young consumers of this “relatable” content are radical presentists. Every totalitarianism tries to establish its own year zero, and to lock away in oblivion the prehistory that produced it.

It is those simple world-transforming insights that are hardest to conceive, but then after, hardest to unconceive. Once we see them we cannot unsee them. We cannot even conceive life before their conception. They shape even our memories and our grasp of prehistory.

Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.

I hope Kabbalists recognize me as someone who came to the tradition from the most urgent need.

I was made to memorize this Emily Dickinson poem in ninth grade:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

Letterpress “theory-practice” print

Biography, Design, Letterpress, Star

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.

Metaconversions

Philosophy, Religion

If you have experienced no authentic conversions you’ll conceive conversion as change in belief. “I used to think this, but now I think that.” You may be pretty sure you’ve experienced conversions, but that you describe it using different language. Everything transpires within the same universe. Deep changes in how we experience the universe are psychological. Subjective reality changes, but objective reality remains the same. There is much chatter about pluralism, empathy, self-awareness, understanding, ethics and even spirituality, and these epiphenomena feel important to us. They are crowned with faint but opaque halos of vague significance.

If you have experienced one authentic conversion, you’ll conceive conversion as a revelation of a formerly concealed reality. “I was blind, but now I see.” You transitioned from a false faith to the true faith. The universe veiled something infinitely profound, ineffable and important.

Once you have experienced two conversions, though, you’ll conceive conversion as transition between faiths, each with some gain and some loss. You are converted to a radically pluralistic world where conversions are a perpetual possibility. Conversions are no longer as consequential as before, because they happen against a stable background of enworlding faiths. It is a major conversion to minor conversions and sporadic trivial conversions. Liberalism is far deeper than anyone suspected!

But then, after who knows how many minor conversions — maybe six? nine? seventeen? — deep patterns emerge. We notice: When everything changes, some subtle constants never change, and these constants become impossible to doubt, at least in practice, and only if we are subjectively fastidious. And now a major conversion happens. And this one feels like the first conversion. “I was blind, but now I see.”… transition from a false faith to the true faith… something infinitely profound, ineffable and important is now plainly revealed.

Everso and the four worlds

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriyah, 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 Beriyah 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 Beriyah.

Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriyah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriyah) is ideological.

Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriyah, 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 Beriyah. 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.

Intentional focus

Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Religion

In phenomenology, all consciousness is understood to be consciousness of something. We call this something the intentional object.

But must this something be an object?

By object, I do not even mean physical object. I mean forms of every kind. Objective forms are, in fact, primarily conceptual, even when we perceive them as material.

(This points to why I enjoy provoking folks who call themselves “materialists” and call them idealists who traffic in ideas about matter — without ever encountering matter herself.)

Supraformal and infraformal realities can be intended, and intended in quite different ways than objects. But most of us, apparently, only know how to intend objectively, and this is not only intellectually limiting — it is intellectually crippling. It makes religion impossible.

A better word might be “intentional focus”.

Reflexive rehabilitation of “diversity”

Politics

In my understanding, the importance of critical theory is not primarily in its methods of critique but in the focus of its critique.

The critique of critical theory’s objects of criticism are meant to afford us access to our critical own subject. The ultimate aim of the effort is to critique ourselves as interpreters, understanders, actors — and critics.

In other words: Critical theory is meant to be reflexive.

My objection to the recent identitarian turn (documented in Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap) is total loss of that reflexivity that gives critical theory its value and humanity. In identitarian critique the critic self-objectifies their own critical subject as a category (or constellation of categories) that serves as its object of criticism. But the identitarian object of “self critique” is a decoy self. The decoy self redirects attention away from the first person critical subject and focuses it exclusively on third person objects of criticism. This keeps the subject who does the criticism — (again, the critical focus of genuine critical theory) — concealed in the background, unperceived, unconscious — unconstrained by critical self-awareness — and releases it to perform all the abuses of power it prohibits on principle.

We act out a critique of objective self-categories we claim to be (an identity or intersectional identity complex), while sparing the most powerful, self-serving, most incorrigibly biased identity of all, the subject who compulsively performs the identitarian critique, and mistakes it for “objective” history, morality and reality.

Sartre famously called this self-objectifying move bad faith. In bad faith a person adopts a defined social role in place of our more protean, responsible I.

Reflexivity attempts to catch oneself in the act of delusion, distortion, neurosis. We try to notice what we imaginatively superimpose upon phenomena, what we try to ignore, or what we selectively exaggerate, suppress and distort. We actively seek out where we have been shown wrong, where our predictions have failed, where others object to our accounts and characterizations.

And we do this not for them, or, at least, not only for them. We do it because it allows us to develop better sensitivity and understanding of what is given around us — and what transcends our own minds.

This helps us be better more respectful, responsible citizens of the world — but it also enhances our understanding of the human condition — of how we, as humans, are situated within reality.

Our own experience of the world is enriched immeasurably. We can feel the mysterious ground behind mundane life. We can feel a depth of possibility, where before there was flat factuality.

All this being said: I have grown (or shrunk) to despise Progressivist identitarianism so intensely that I’ve become disproportionately, neurotically averse to its core symbols, some of which are core to my own ideals. One of these ideals is “diversity”.

I am re-embracing this word, and reaffirming my commitment to it.

Of course, my commitment to diversity is far more radical than Progressivism’s. In fact, I believe our institutions will only flourish again when Progressivism itself is subjected to its own standards of diversity in the institutions it dominates.

Progressivism, like every other power should be confronted and challenged, most of all by itself — reflexively. Progressives should be critiquing Progressivist-dominated institutions and asking what policies, practices and unacknowledged biases perpetuate, conceal and justify its abuses of power.

This work can and should be done under the banner of diversity.

Thambos

Philosophy

A footnote from Hadot’s book on Plotinus: “Thambos designates a kind of ‘sacred terror which one feels at the approach of a person or object charged with supernatural force’…”

I’m researching and actually finding books about ancient Greece’s repertoire of words designating responses to transcendence.

Again, my friend Jokin’s Basque saying comes to mind: “What has a name is real.”

Conversely, what lacks a name, lacks reality. At least for the good residents of Wordworld, where people feel happiness and sadness and anger and, now, trauma.

The view from the Tilt-a-Whirl

Philosophy

A dust storm gains visibility from the debris it picks up and sets in motion. The mass in motion makes it real. From without, it is a dark, chaotic and destructive object, tossing and trampling the land, ruining whatever blocks its path. But from its own wildly whirling standpoint, the world is already spinning out of control. Everywhere it looks it sees violent power, careening and smashing everything.

Nobody goes to a carnival just to stand and look at the rides. To really experience the carnival, climb into the Tilt-a-Whirl and watch what happens to the whole world around you. Now it is obvious who hurtles through space. It is the observers who think they stand on solid ground.

Ptolemy. Galileo. Einstein.

Whirl

Philosophy

There truly is no point in arguing into a closed epistemic-moral-logical circle, especially when that circle touches neither ground nor sky but just swirls about in mid-air.

At this middling height and depth, nothing is anchored enough to arrest its motion.

And its motion is all it is, however much it seems to turn on its revolutionary objects.

Argument feeds its force and gives it new material to pick up and wind into its own forms, now bound up in its own twisted objectivity.

We just have to wait for it to stop whirling and to waft apart… vapid… dissipated… dead air.

Barbell

Philosophy

My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.

I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.

That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.

We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff  within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.

But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.

This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.

Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.