The everted present

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star

Ray Cummings: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.”

“…And,” someone adds, “space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening everywhere all at once.”

“…And,” another offers, “self is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to everyone all at once.”

Presence is God’s way of distributing Godself through time space and consciousness.

But within God, everything does happen all at once, everywhere to everyone.

Adonai echad.

The present is the Absolute everted within Itself.

Terrorism and the left

Politics

I was going to ignore the Charlie Kirk assassination entirely. But I keep having the same conversation with left-leaning friends, and I’m noticing that they all have synchronized takes on the matter. They of course would view this as seeing the same reality and arriving at the same truth. I see it quite differently And that difference is interesting enough to be worth writing about.

I am not talking about the psychotic fringe of the left, which has become depressingly mainstream. One of my daughter’s friends who reads as fairly normal, at least by Gen-Z standards, was one of the open celebrants of Kirk’s death. There’s more of them than most leftists want to acknowledge. But that’s pretty boring.

What I am interested in is how mainstream, conformist, workaday corporate drone “leftist radicals” respond to this murder.

I’m seeing two synchronized takes.

The first is that same “of course, but maybe” response we saw in the murder of Brian Thompson. I literally listened to a colleague of mine say “of course a political assassination is abhorrent,” and then proceed to progsplain to me how this is sort of a natural consequence of violent speech. I saw this same memetic pattern in comments on social media threads. “this is the natural consequence of spreading hate propaganda” or of whatever your news source of choice told you that Kirk allegedly believed when you first learned of his existence  the day he was shot.

As I said before, this is yet another step in the direction of the left embracing terror. Almost all left media report this story as a dark event, but one with a silver lining: the guy had it coming. This is operationalization of terror. The message is clear: if you believe things that we do not, and you try to convince other people that you are right, we will try to destroy your life, and if we fail, someone come along and  end your life — and you know? Shit happens.

A several conservatives have talked to me about their inexplicably intense despair over this shooting. They don’t understand why this has shaken them worse than the attempted assassination of Trump. I think my explanation accounts for this reaction. This is not about the politicians. This is about the media and the everyday casual progressivist’s attitude about free speech: Free speech is a sacred right for those who say what is true and just, but those who lie and spread injustice? It is open season on them. It has been open season socially and economically for over a decade. But now, as of this week, it is open season on their lives. That is what they perceive, and I think they perceive it correctly.

That is the first of the synchronized takes. The second is a little subtler. This take claims that the moderate right is no better than the moderate left in its embrace of violence. There are, according to them, many more violent hard right white nationalists ready to spill blood in the streets than there are antifas, and they are more violent and more evil. And if they kill someone, all the crypto conservatives hiding out in cubicleland will celebrate the violence, without even a courtesy “of course, but maybe” to soften it.

This, to me, looks like the same move they use on Israel. Hamas has a long, long documented track record of explicit genocidal intent. Zero progressivists are willing to read the Hamas charter under which Hamas won the popular election that put them in charge of Gaza back in 2007. And they are entirely incurious about the actual, for-real, non-metaphorical/accusational Nazi collaboration at the root of Palestinian nationalism. Because that would make them the Nazi sympathizers in this genocide, and that would collapse their whole moralistic house of cards. They just cynically assume that Israel is just as bad and that just as many (or more) Israelis hate Palestinian Arabs as Palestinian Arabs hate Israeli Jews, and then freely invert the Holocaust to support their racist oppression theories and absolve themselves of ancestral guilt for participation or complicity in the real Holocaust. Of course, ancestral guilt is imaginary, but they believe in it. Plus, they actually did inherit this attitude, however fragile they are about it. But they alone decide who’s fragile and who’s legitimately offended at unjust, ungrounded accusal. So if they say “I’m not antisemitic” that’s not at all the same as saying “I’m not racist”, because they say so.

When you are a certain way, it is hard to imagine that anyone might be different. Cynics assume everyone is a cynic, but that some cynics are just more honest about it than others. Unprincipled people think everyone is unprincipled, but some people are deceptively unprincipled, where others are frankly unprincipled. Progressivists think everyone is as craven and dishonest as they are, especially when they appear to be the opposite. People who think and feel racistly (as Progressivists all confess!) cannot imagine that everyone isn’t plagued with the same compulsive unwanted thoughts and feelings.

This is why Progressivists project their worst qualities on everyone else. Their imagination is too limited to conceive how someone could be otherwise. And they need their enemies to share these worst qualities — (minus the insight and honesty to admit it!) — or they’ll feel morally inferior. Progressivists desperately want to imagine themselves to be morally superior.

But the fact is, some people are principled. Some people will follow their highest principles even when that involves great sacrifice. And those are the only people worthy of any respect at all.

I believe there is a significant number of principled conservatives. I also think there are principled left liberals. I’ve been dreaming of a future where principled conservatives and liberals ally against their former fringe and fringe-friendly allies. Turn the horseshoe on its side and unite the reasonable, decent center against the left-right illiberals.

My problem these days is always quantitative: How many reasonable, decent centrists are there out there?

I was asking myself yesterday how the right might behave in an analogous situation, where some Charlie Kirk figure of the left died. Someone like Greta Thunberg.

If Greta Thunberg died doing something idiotic like sailing to Gaza and actually making it to shore, how would the rightward world react?

I think the conservatives I respect most would resist all schadenfreude (maybe even successfully). Those slightly to the right of them, but left of groypers would shrug and half-conceal their smiles, and the groypers would have lots of nasty fun with her death.

But that is only if she died doing something stupid like sailing to Gaza and actually making it to shore.

If a white nationalist gunman assassinated her, I think there would be a very, very different reaction. I think the conservatives I most respect and some significant portion of the non-groyper right would be horrified and distance themselves from the violence.

The groypers and near-groypers would form a new solidarity supporting the violence.

But I suspect this number is smaller than the number of leftists whose liberalism has deteriorated to the point where they now support terrorism.

 

Mass synchronization

Politics

My friend Zellyn tells me that one GPT can train on another and mysteriously absorb its characteristics.

I hope I’m getting this right. Apparently, coders can tweak the ethical coding of a GPT to make it less scrupulous and more biased. A second GPT that trains on the output of this first vicious GPT will absorb these same vices — even if the content it trains on is not related to the vices in question.

This did not surprise me at all. Faiths are multistable things, and the structures that grasp our perceptions and conceptions of the world also structure our moral reasoning.

If you consume content from vicious ideologues, you’ll start thinking like a vicious ideologue without noticing because you’ll share their worldview. This is how the best propaganda works. It encourages the same naive realism, including naive realisms that have beliefs about naive realism and a belief that this belief immunizes them from naive realism. If that confuses you, just think about how Christians sometimes believe that their beliefs about Christianity immunize them from anti-Christian attitudes. It’s not only like that, it is the same belief structure.

This is how I explain the creepy synchronization of belief and even the words people use to express their beliefs. They are conditioned to produce the same “spontaneous” observations and thoughts as those who share their conditioning. To them it looks like independent verification, but it’s just shared faith doing what shared faith does.

If you don’t want to get synchronized, you have to expose yourself to thoughts, practices and experiences others around you are not thinking, doing and experiencing. If you are not actively trying to be an individual, you’re probably the unwitting agent of some collective. And if that collective imagines itself to be made up of radical thinkers, bold individualists and independent moral reasoners — dissenters, in fact! — you’ll think you’re one of those — despite your lockstep ideological conformity.

Metaskepticism

Philosophy, Politics

It is time for the unexamined tacit assumptions behind skepticism to be examined and challenged. Early in his career C. S. Peirce showed the way.

Skepticism assumes a sort of tabula rasa of belief, a default blank canvas upon which we can freely posit beliefs. But this blankness is sheer philosophical fiction. Truth is, we all have many beliefs that we are unable to disbelieve, even as we disingenuously formulate theoretical doubts:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

To put it bluntly, a great many skeptics refuse to take their own real practical beliefs seriously. They argue frivolously, paying no attention at all to what they take to be real in their own practical lives.

For this kind of skeptic, philosophy is a delightful recreation — a diversion — that does not touch on real life in any significant way — conceptual concoction play, unencumbered by any obligation or consequence. And this would be fine if they would confine themselves to their conceptual playrooms.

But this is where fun-time skepticism shows its dark underside. The replacement notions constructed to replace skeptically refuted actual beliefs are seductive, and inevitably become fanatical fantastical politics — ideologies — which leak out from the private study, into the classroom, and, from there, into the offices and cubicles of the practical world.

These conceptual concoctions and theories and formulas are highly brittle, and vulnerable to reality. (Nietzsche says “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.“). Ideologues must defend themselves, most of all, from genuine belief of those who are stubbornly loyal to the givens of reality.

Dishonesty becomes the cost of membership in this kind of movement — dishonesty or total self-alienation, where the partisan sincerely no longer knows what they believe or disbelieve, due to habitual self-doubt and terror at being exposed as biased or prejudiced, and is ready to conform to those who seem credible. But whose judgment seems credible to such self-alienated judgment? They say, “so it seems to me, but how can I know given the unreliability of my own perceptions and understandings? Things are never as they seem. So I should trust the best and brightest around me…” But these best and brightest are also self-alienated. The blind lead the blind into ideological ruts, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, power is weakness, truth is false, up is down, left is right, conventionality is revolution, superficiality is radical, openly sociopathic totalitarians are freedom fighters and those who defend themselves from Nazi are the new Nazis.

The famous universal acid of skepticism does not only dissolve beliefs. It also dissolves persons. And before we get all armchair Buddhist, and pat ourselves on the head for thinking non-self, anatta, this acid dissolves our relationship with reality beyond form and beyond being. Nothing could be less Buddhist than addiction to recreational deconstruction.

This kind of habitual skepticism in fact enlists us in Heidegger’s famous anonymous public, the They. It makes us an intuitionless, de-centered, unselfed political unit. It makes us, in Nietzsche’s words, a zero: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

The spell of skepticism, however, is broken if we become honest with ourselves, and recognize that we do have an implicit faith behind our professed beliefs.

This faith is as given as any other reality. We cannot freely invent it any more than we can freely invent the physical world around us. This faith is actual — we reveal it through our actions, which are based on what we assume is real and true.

To articulate this actual faith is to be philosophically honest. To hold a faith that wishes to express its actual beliefs — a faith that wishes to be honest about itself — is a good faith.

To invent beliefs that are not actual — that we would not bet our lives in, if it came down to it, is to be philosophically dishonest. A faith that needs this kind of dishonesty is a bad faith.

All we can really do with our faiths and the beliefs our faith articulates is question them and test them. Through this process, I have changed my own faith. And when my faith changed, the beliefs I articulate change. — But not before!

Consequential philosophy is not always, or even often, delightful. It is not something we do only for fun, and prance away from when it gets unpleasant or tragic. It is as different from recreational philosophistry as scientific investigation is from fiction writing. And if we abandon our hard questions as soon as the going gets unpleasant, it doesn’t even gain the depth of literary fiction — it is just easy conceptual entertainment that is easy precisely because it reinforces the habits of the status quo, however “daring” it pretends to be. And the status quo today is frivolous skepticism, and of course, frivolous cynicism toward anyone who believes anything substantial.

What are some things I know are true?

I’ve been listing them a lot lately, but I’ll list them again:

  • Morality is real and it matters. We know there is better and worse, and we are both guilty and ashamed when we do or are what is worse.
  • There is an absolute. Certainty about the absolute seems impossible, but we know that this absolute determines the truth and falsehood of our “constructions”.
  • The absolute transcends our understanding. When we equate reality with our beliefs about it, we know that this is an immoral and false denial of the absolute. (Metaphysics is something that must be overcome? Says who? Show me a skeptic who is skeptical about automatic anti-metaphysics!)
  • The Golden Rule is universally binding. At its most radical, the Golden Rule means that we must treat our fellow I’s as equal, and approach them with the dignity every I deserves.
  • How we treat others and how we approach the Absolute are inextricably bound. Exercise of the Golden Rule is our most reliable method for approaching the Absolute. If we take the faiths of others around us seriously, and exchange teaching and learning with our fellows, we increase our actual certainty through improvement of our own faith and the faith we share with those around us.

These are things I cannot currently doubt. And, more, I believe in my heart that we must not pretend to doubt them, or even make an effort to overcome belief in them. I will not trample on them with boots of any kind, whether muddy boots of cynicism, shiny jackboots of ideology, or antigravity boots of alienated skepticism.

Plotinian summary

Metaphysics

Plotinus: Every soul actually does see outwardly to a self the size of a body, and every soul potentially can see inwardly to a self the size of the cosmos. A soul who sees both inwardly and outwardly together, intuits its root in inconceivable nothingness beyond cosmos, body and being.

Trees

Biography

Last week we had to cut down the water oak in our front yard. It was unbearable hearing and feeling it come down, limb by limb, part by part, thud after thud after thud.

Water oaks in cities last only about fifty to sixty years. I keep wondering if this tree was exactly my age. It is is strange to remember that twenty years ago, shortly after we moved in, when my friend Blondeau scaled this tree and hung a swing from its main bough, it was only a little over thirty years old. It was not an old tree, then.

Susan and I are coping with the loss by focusing on the tree we will plant in its place. We considered many varieties until we remembered the first story from Richard Powers’s The Overstory, which revolved around the devastation of the American Chestnut in the first half of the twentieth century.

This weekend we went to the Ace in Decatur to look at trees. On our way home we passed what we thought looked like a chestnut tree. We saw nuts on the sidewalk. We circled the block and pulled over to investigate. It turned out to be a Chinese Chestnut. We picked up a handful of nuts and took them home, where we cooked and ate them. They were tiny heavenly potatoes.

We are now obsessing over planting a Dunstan Chestnut. I would love to find a two-and-a-half year old sapling.

Contemplation

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

A passage from Plotinus reminded me of another passage from Brothers Karamazov:

The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it — why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.

There are a good many “contemplatives” among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.

From Plotinus, who might very well have inspired the above passage:

If [nature] were asked why she creates, she would reply — if, that is, she were willing to listen to the questioner and to speak — “You should not have questioned me, but understood in silence, just as I myself keep silent, for I am not accustomed to talk. What is there to understand? That what comes into being is the object of my silent contemplation, and that the product of my contemplation comes into being in a natural way. I myself was born of such contemplation; this is why I have a natural love for contemplation. My contemplation engenders the product of my contemplation, just as geometers draw figures by contemplating. I, however, do not draw anything, but I contemplate, and the lines of bodies come into existence, as if they were issuing forth from me.”

(This is an English translation of Hadot’s French translation.)

Etymonline’s entry on contemplation:

contemplation(n.) —

c. 1200, contemplacioun, “religious musing,” from Old French contemplation and directly from Latin contemplationem (nominative contemplatio) “act of looking at,” noun of action from past-participle stem of contemplari “to gaze attentively, observe; consider, contemplate,” originally “to mark out a space for observation” (as an augur does), from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + templum “area for the taking of auguries” (see temple (n.1)).

It is attested from late 14c. as “reflection, thinking, thought, act of holding an idea continuously before the mind.” The meaning “act of looking attentively at anything” is from late 15c.

In cogitation the thought or attention flits aimlessly about the subject.

In meditation it circles round it, that is, it views it systematically, from all sides, gaining perspective.

In contemplation it radiates from a centre, that is, as light from the sun it reaches out in an infinite number of ways to things that are related to or dependent on it. [Ezra Pound, 1909, recalling in his own words ideas from Richard of St. Victor, 12c., “De praeparatione animi ad contemplationem“]

Perhaps to con-temple something is precisely to refrain from com-prehending it.

The last passage in Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah is taken from the Sefer Bahir

Whoever delves into mysticism cannot help but stumble, as it is written: “This stumbling block is in your hand.” You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

This recalled a passage from Aryeh Kaplan’s Inner Space:

The Kabbalists teach that this is the concept of God’s most sacred name, theTetragrammaton, YHVH. The Tetragrammaton consists of four letters Yod, Heh, Vav and Heh. These four letters have a very special significance.

The Tetragrammaton is related to the past, present, and future tense of the Hebrew word “to be.” In Hebrew, “was” is Hayah, “is” is Hoveh and “will be” is Yihyeh. Therefore, when one reads the Tetragrammaton, one should have in mind that God “was, is and will be” all at the same instant.’ This indicates that God is utterly transcendental, and higher than the dimension of time. God exists in a realm where time does not exist. At the same time, the Tetragram

At the same time, the Tetragrammaton denotes that God is Mehaveh, “the One who brings all existence into being. It is in this sense that the Tetragrammaton refers to God’s causal relationship with His creation. He is the source of all being and existence and His essence permeates creation.

We can understand this on the basis of an ancient Kabbalistic teaching which states that the four letters of the Name contain the mystery of Charity. According to this teaching, the first letter Yod can be likened to a coin. The letter Yod is small and simple like a coin.

The second letter, Heh, represents the hand that gives the coin. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also represents a number. Since Heh is the fifth letter of the alphabet, it has a numerical value of five. The “five” of Heh alludes to the five fingers of the hand.

The third letter, Vav (t), which has the form of an arm, denotes reaching out and giving. Furthermore, in Hebrew, the word Vav means a “hook,” and thus Vav has the connotation of connection. Indeed, in Hebrew, the word for the conjunction “and” is represented by the letter Vav prefixed to a word.

Finally, the fourth letter, the final Heh (n), is the hand of the beggar who receives the coin.

And every mention of the together-grasping comprehending mind always recalls Kosho Uchiyama’s beautifully titled Opening the Hand of Thought:

I use the expression “opening the hand of thought” to explain as graphically as possible the connection between human beings and the process of thinking. I am using “thinking” in a broad sense, including emotions, preferences, and all sense perceptions, as well as conceptual thoughts. Thinking means to be grasping or holding on to something with our brain’s conceptual “fist.” But if we open this fist, if we don’t conceive the thought, what is in our mental hand falls away. Our universal self, jiko, also includes that which lets go. Sleeping at night is a natural expression of your life with the hand of your thinking mind wide open. Nodding off while you are awake is something else entirely, from the perspective of the self. While you are awake, opening the hand of thought isn’t dozing or thinking, it is the fine line between them where you really are right now.

The self of Western psychology is the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” But actually, we are, whether we think so or not, and behind the conscious self your life continues even when you are unconscious or unaware. And precisely because of that we are alive with a life that includes our thinking self. In fact, it is because we have this actual ongoing life that the thought can occur that we are only our thoughts. So our true or whole self is not just an abstract self made of thoughts. Our whole self is the force or quality of life that enables conscious thought to arise, and it includes that personal, conscious self, but it also includes the force that functions beyond any conscious thought.

The whole or universal self is the force that functions to make the heart continue beating and the lungs continue breathing, and it is also the source of what is referred to as the subconscious.

This inclusive self is at heart the creative power of life. It is related to what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls the creative power of God.

That power — what is immediately alive and also what is created — that is self too. If you want to use God as your referent, it is crucial to receive God as pure creative power, as being fresh and alive and working in and through yourself: no matter what I do or think, God is in all things and is working through me.

Whatever is alive — that is jiko, or universal self. All of this — thoughts and feelings, the and desires, the subconscious and the beating heart, the effort that enables other lives to function and the creative power of life itself — is what I mean by the “self.” Saying “whole” or “true” or “universal” self is a way to try to include all the actual reality of life, and what I am saying here is that the actual reality of life is not something separate from the actual reality of your own life.

Poetizing Poesis

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

This morning I read Graham Holston-Barbeque’s “Poetizing Poesis: Concatenating the Impenetrably Imagistic and the Impenetrably Technical by Use of Colons in every Title of Every Scholarly Paper from the Nineteen Eighties to the Present”.

It is by far the most compelling argument for Post-Colonism I have read.

Leadership and respect

Politics

Natural leaders are talented at giving and receiving respect.

No self-respecting person accepts a leader who does not respect them.

If you disrespect until respect is “earned”, you have not yet earned the right to lead.

Exchange of respect is everything. It should not be rare.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Em-dashes

Biography

For the record, I have been overusing em-dashes for over two decades. I picked it up from Nietzsche, whose abuse of em-dashes would makeChatGPT blush.

But now every jackass out there has hopped on the em-dash shaming bandwagon, side-eyeing every em-dash and insinuating if the suspicious em-dash wasn’t AI generated it is probably an attempt to look smart by imitating AI moves.

Well, I refuse to stop. I also refuse to stop using en-dashes with a space on each side instead of a proper em-dash. I know the rule — and I reject that rule. I have my own  typographic taste and that personal taste is what I obey, not the anonymous dictates of style guides

And while I’m making defiant declarations: I will continue proudly enjoying kale as I have since college when I bought it for fifty cents a bunch.

I can’t help it if lemming herds occasionally stampede across my land. And I’m not abandoning perfectly fine property just because it gets a little trampled. Fads come and go, but I, for one, know what I like.

Beyond contemporary mysticism

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Contemporary mysticism, like all contemporary popular thought, reserves all conceptual clarity and precision for material reality alone. Mysticism is a misty, nebulous remainder, hovering above and glowing behind material reality — an opalescent swirl of vague hopes, of insinuated meaning, of faint underwritings of morality.

I have chosen to distribute my own clarity and precision more broadly — across infraformal material, formal psychic, and supraformal spiritual realities. This choice is informed both by my everyday experiences working among humans and nonhumans as a designer, and by my mornings spent reflecting on these experiences and on my past reflections — integrating, clarifying, iterating.

We all need this expanded clarity, but we cannot even articulate the need, precisely because of our truncated clarity. We have optimized our understandings to account for physical phenomena, but we wave away the immediate matters at the heart of our lives — love, beauty, meaning, relatedness, belonging — as someday-to-be-explained epiphenomena.

We placed the particle at the center of our persons, and set these human matters in orbit around it. And now we must do the most complex calculations of epicycles within epicycles before we can calculate why our families matter to us more than life itself.

Last night Jack asked for the musical instrument “you blow into”. I didn’t know what he meant. Each wrong guess made him more visibly desperate. So we went to the instrument box and started rummaging. We found a pitch pipe tuner, and he was able to say that “it is like that.”. When we found the harmonica, his relief was instant and total. It was obvious, though, that most of his pain and subsequent relief had more to do with his need to communicate than with his need for the harmonica. The two needs were bound up together and compounded exponentially.

When a toddler begins to melt down we sometimes say “use your words.” This does two things. First, it teaches them to begin with communicating their needs before expressing their frustration. But second, the very act of communicating calms and stabilizes them.

Imagine a world where adults feel inexpressible frustration at having their most fundamental human needs unmet, but are, at the same time, unable to articulate their needs and account for why those needs matter.

A toddler with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs throws himself to the floor and screams and kicks and demands Froot Loops. An adult with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs riots in the streets and makes political demands.

We must rethink our metaphysics. At the very least, our civilizational survival depends upon it.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Good metaphysics

Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I prefer to build out my mysticism, as well as my scientific understandings, from everyday given reality, which Husserl called the lifeworld.

When we proceed this way, carefully preserving the links between what we experience directly in the lifeworld, toward what we gradually recognize as not-yet-known, possibly unknowable in principle, and (at the very least) inexhaustibly re-knowable, we develop an understanding of planes of reality beyond the world of intuitive effective action and the world(s) of constructible-destructible truth(s).

Let those with the sensibilities to conceive what this means make sense of it.

Some folks want to take these transcendent truths (metaphysics) that seem for all the world to explain manifest truth (the lifeworld) and treat them as an adequate substitute for it. “We are in the lifeworld, but not of it.” (The scientistic metaphysicians are just as bad as any other in their need to escape the reality of life. “What do I care what happens in this paltry here and now, to me and my loved ones, as long as the youuuuuuniverse keeps cranking out novelties?”)

Others (correctly) see in this kind of metaphysicry a lame attempt to escape the lifeworld, and (incorrectly) dismiss all metaphysics as escapism.

Good metaphysics never sever these worlds from one another. The ladder stands firmly on the earth and penetrates the roof of heaven, so that truth may circulate between.

If we practice good metaphysics, resisting the impulse to chop the ladder at the knee or neck, our lifeworld transforms. Reality is given to us differently. This is what is meant by revelation. Revelation is not a secret message about reality whispered into a guru’s ear; it is a disclosure of reality to our common sensibility.

I fear I will never transcend Nietzsche.