The Whyless philosophy

Design, Philosophy, Trefoil

It all really just keeps coming back to Liz Sanders, doesn’t it?

Our working philosophies are color-blind to meaning.

Our philosophy has What and How receptors, but lacks receptors for Why.

Through this Whyless philosophy we look at something that is useful and usable and otherwise functionally valuable, and are unable to distinguish it from something desirable. It’s the same dull blue-gray color, whether we are drawn to it for mysterious reasons or because it is more convenient, effective, efficient or reliable.

We cannot help thinking that Why is another What-How function. We ask “why?”, expecting an in-order-to. Why isn’t like that. Why doesn’t ask, because it knows. It intuits value spontaneously, directly. It is like perceiving a color.

I have actually had designers say: “If it is useful and usable, doesn’t that make it desirable?”

I think we know better. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Notice, I dont say that we are color blind to meaning, only that our philosophies are.

This means that we can intuit meaning, but when we try to talk about it, or think about it, or account for it, or justify it we find ourselves unable to do justice to our experience. And many of us are in the habit of invalidating these things we cannot talk about.

Years ago my friend Jokin told me a Basque saying “what has a name is real.” The corollary to that is “what lacks a name is unreal.” One of my job functions as a philosopher is to find concepts and language to do justice to our experiences so they can have names and the dignity of reality.

I can do this job because, for whatever reason, I refuse to deny any of my experiences reality, just because my philosophy is inadequate to it. My inclination is to take these experiences seriously and explore them to see what they’re all about. In some ways, I love philosophy because I am more independent from and less dependent on my philosophy, so I can tinker with it, without becoming too horribly schizophrenic for prolonged periods of time. Instead, I become moderately schizophrenic in short bursts, maybe most of the time.

And our meaning-blind philosophy has a way of disposing of unreal experiences. We relegate them to an unreal domain we call “subjectivity.” That is a fantastic place to put it because this same philosophy has no idea whatsoever how subjectivity works, nor how it relates to objectivity. Subjectivity is a realm of pure mistake, distortion and arbitrariness that interferes with our ability to perceive the objective world, which is more or less the exact eversion of what subjectivity is.

These strange analytical problem-solving design disciplines I keep drifting into — first UX design, then strategic design, then service design — all seem to attract practitioners with meaning-blindness. Back in the day, UX was overflowing with project managers, who saw the work as a conceptual closet organizing endeavor, and cognitive scientists, who thought the job was a matter of schema-matching between a user’s understanding and navigation structures.

It seems I’m always fighting for desirability as an irreducible element of design against people who don’t even seem aware that it is core to their job.

But I find design to be pure drudgery if desirability is not a part of it. Or, I guess I could say that only desirability makes design desirable for me.

And people wonder why our lives are so meaningless. Or they don’t wonder, but rather explain it away with one of the prefab diagnoses the Whyless philosophy provides nihilist malcontents.

When our organizations, our services, our products, our spaces are designed only for function, what do we expect to happen?

The service design industry has responded to AI disruption by zigging directly into radical Whylessness.

I am zagging.

Service system engineering

Design

If service design becomes alienated from the pluralism at the root of all design praxis, it devolves into social engineering — the construction of systems assembled from nonhuman and dehumanized, choiceless human components.

Service design is only design to the degree that it maintains awareness of the humanity and freedom of the service actors who participate in the social systems we develop, and serves precisely this humanity, this freedom in participation.

Designers are designers only when they are tacking between multiple first-person perspectives:

  • Their own first-person design perspective which combines pluralism and craft
  • The perspectives of their clients and stakeholders
  • The perspectives of the service actors who will eventually participate in the service system they are designing

The tricky part of this is that client and stakeholder perspectives are rarely pluralistic, and these are the people with whom service designers collaborate. Paradoxically, if designers empathize too strongly and for too long with their client collaborators, and become too fluent in their language and too reliant on their key concepts, they can lose touch with their design perspective.

They can “go native” in the corporate world, and adopt as their own primary perspective that of management, technology and technocrats. And from that perspective, the perspectives and experiences of service actors will lose importance, and become secondary to behaviors.

This is the first factor in service design’s collective alienation from design.

A second factor compounds the first: where services are seriously broken at a fundamental, functional level, functional fixes are sufficient. A service designer can employ the engineering aspects of our discipline and dispense with the design part, and just by fixing the most egregious malfunction, still provide enormous value.

Service design is one of the few fields that approach organizational operations comprehensively and systematically. We have methods in our toolbox that can effectively fix this kind of breakdown. Service designers are a pretty good fit for solving operation systems problems.

But a more mature service systems field would, like every other mature design discipline, provide designers with an engineering counterpart. This kind of system repair work would be done by a “service systems engineer”.

It is only because this role does not yet exist that service designers do it. But this work can be done perfectly well by non-designers with sufficient training. Identifying operational malfunctions (“pain points”), assessing the behavioral responses to the pain, estimating the business impact of these behaviors, helping organizations prioritize and sequence a repair backlog, and establishing long-term detection-and-repair practices — these are all management and/or system engineering functions. They are colossally important. But they are not design. Calling them “design” just because designers are currently doing it suggests someone might have already fully lost touch with what design essentially is and does.

But there is a third factor, that compounds the already-compounded problem.

Most of the demand for “service design” right now is precisely service systems engineering work.

Service design is still relatively new, and has not yet had time to impact the general quality level of services, like, for instance UX has. Atrocious services are still pretty common, and in some fields where service matters most — healthcare, insurance, telecoms all come to mind — atrocious service is the norm.

It is precisely these fields which hire service designers. They’re all in various stages of emergency. Their roofs are caving in and their toilets are geysering. They’re the ones who call service designers, because they’re the ones with the tools needed to repair these problems.

In deeply broken industries, the advantage goes to the least broken organization. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Competition is relative function versus malfunction.

It is comparable in some ways to the early days of computers, when people got the best functioning one, or the cheapest one, and had no expectations that a computer might be delightful to use, reflect their sensibilities, become something a normal (non-engineer) person could become attached to. At that point in the evolution of the computer industry design was secondary, especially the design of what was on the computer screens.

It is only when functionality becomes table stakes that design comes into its own as design. Everything can be assumed to work, so which option resonates with me as a person. What strikes me as compelling, meaningful and represents or expresses in some unsayable way, who I am and what I care about?

It’s sort of a Maslow’s hierarchy sort of thing:

  1. Does anyone have a use for it?
  2. Does it work at all?
  3. Does it work well? Is it reliable and efficient?
  4. Can people figure out how to use it?
  5. Can people use it easily?
  6. Do people who need it, like it enough to choose it over alternatives?
  7. Do people feel emotionally compelled by it?
  8. Do people value it and want it to be a part of their life?

Design only becomes important somewhere between 4 and 5, and grows more and more indispensable from there.

But service design still operates mainly in the 1-4 range.

Meanwhile, the service designers who excel in the engineering aspects of the discipline are dominating the field and gradually turning it into an engineering consulting profession.

Designers who care about human perspectives, experiences, motivations — what makes people care about things and connect with them — are far less valuable, and will remain so until the field grows up more and the field of competition advances beyond “are we pissing people off?”

But (at least from where I’m standing) the field of service design appears to be optimizing for its engineering and management functions and allowing design to atrophy. The field might even be selecting for non-designers. Indeed, I see vanishingly few virtues of design in the work done by service designers. Outputs are extraordinarily complex and lack all simple, let alone meaningful or inspiring gestalt. They are oriented far more around elimination of flaws and gaps than the presence of positive connection. The whole discipline is dry and technical. The only remaining trace of design left in any of it is better visual production and decoration of deliverables.

Material, medium, form, object

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I’m thinking through the relationship between the essential elements of a design discipline — those things that define any design discipline.

First, though, I want to define design in general against disciplines, with particular emphasis on engineering and art, two domains into which design often blurs. Of course, it is an obnoxious fool’s errand to insist on technical precision in everyday speech, so please take these definitions as intended, as artificial sharpening done for the sake of precise understanding.

Design is the development of systems in which free-willed people participate as essential parts of that system. By free-willed, I mean they can (to some degree) choose whether and how to participate. A designed system is not complete until free-willed people are participating in it. As I have said zillions of times before, this is why design research is part of all design work. A system without free-willed people participating in it is still only an engineered sub-component.

Engineering is the development of systems without free-willed participants. Whatever the materials used in the system, whether concrete or logic, the components behave choicelessly. Often we engineer when we should design. We use various governing techniques to remove choice, so people become engineerable components in our social engineering projects. Or we exclude people from our problem framing, and focus solely on whatever thing we are making, presumably for them, but not in reference to them. Or we make assumptions or speculations that people will behave as we expect and hope. But the engineered thing is viewed as separate from the people who will eventually come along (or not) and try it (or reject it) and adopt it (or abandon it). Design never considers its thing apart from the people interacting with it.

Art is the development of a thing primarily in relation to the artist, and only secondarily to other people. In design, the people for whom the thing is being designed are primary and the designer is present only as a semi-reliable proxy. Some art is more systematic than other art. The essential difference is that art can (and arguably should) be made without involvement of people who will eventually participate in it by experiencing it. Gadamer argues that an artwork is never complete without its audience (and that is where I picked up this line of thought). But while the artwork is being made, the artist is the audience who completes it. While a design is being made, only representative people for whom the designwork is being made are suitable.

The most important difference between design and both art and engineering is that the latter can be done without involvement of other people who might eventually encounter what is being made, where design cannot. Design succeeds or fails by the choices of the free-willed people who are intended to participate in it.

When design becomes stylistic self-expression, it slides into art. When design becomes systems-development and problem-solving and loses touch with the free volition of human participants experiencing these systems from inside, it slides into engineering.

Now, let us establish terms, grounded in some accessible examples. Material, medium, formation, object.

Water is a material that can become a medium for a wave. The wave formation moves through it, by it, as it. A wave can keep moving beyond water, as long as some other material serves as a medium. People playing on the shore can be that material, and this is what happens when we enjoy being tossed by waves. We become a wave medium. So the wave is not essentially water, but the essence of a wave necessarily involves some mediating material. When we look from a distance, at water being moved by a wave formation we see an object: water formed into a wave.

Now, let’s get flaky. Setting aside whether this is real or true, what is meant when someone claims to be a spirit medium? It means that they as a person has become a material (like the water) through which a spirit moves or acts or speaks. The spirit moves, acts or speaks through the medium, by the medium, as the medium (for as long as the medium is serving as a medium). But the spirit does not stop with the medium. It keeps moving. It moves, acts and speaks to the people who witness the mediation, and extend the spiritual motion if they are willing to be moved and perhaps reformed or transformed by what they witness.

Design involves a variety of materials, some physical, like water, and some mental (mind-like), like our spirit medium example. Some of the forms conveyed or transmitted through media is mechanical force of the kind engineers harness, and some of the forms are ideational, emotional, symbolic (like the forms inherent in television or social media content) and some is behavioral, a mixture of physical and mental, ranging from mostly physical, unconscious reflexes to fully deliberate volitions (imitation or fashion trends among people).

The most complex material designers have learned to shape is the densely hybrid material known as organization.

This is the material the discipline of service design shapes.

Of course, organizations can be decomposed into a vast variety of materials, but this only complicates and confuses matters.

A fanciful analogy: Imagine a choreographer, who works with the material of human bodies in motion, who decides to chart, not only the movements of his dancer’s limbs, but the entire physiology, internal and external, of each dancer. He is not wrong that these materials move with the body, but this additional data overwhelms and obscures his orchestrated bodies-in-motion problem without adding much or anything of value, and demonstrates not thoroughness but shallowness of understanding of the essence of the choreographer’s craft. Indeed, compulsive thoroughness is symptomatic of lack of depth of understanding, and is a kind of compensation. When the intellect cannot penetrate deeper or saturate into what it seeks to know, it splatters, spreads out or piles up upon the surface of the matter. Ironically, this dense breadth is misnomically called “going into depth” but depth is precisely what it lacks. Depth abstracts precisely the simple essence of a matter, and allows the concrete details around it to logically crystallize around it. A dancer’s internal organs will take care of themselves if the choreographer focuses on dance movements.

So, the material of service design is organizations.

What is its medium, and what forms are conveyed via this medium?

The medium is behaviors — more specifically interactions between service actors, some of which are human and many of which are not (thank you, Bruno Latour!), across interfaces of myriad types. Currently, service design is still drowning in philosophical debt from its origination in customer experience design (a customer-centered flavor of HCD) that it focuses its attention on customer touch-points, but this only a subset of the many interfaces by which a service is woven together. Service design is drowning in philosophical debt from building itself out from a CX philosophy, and endlessly hacking and patching its methods on this inadequate, monocentric philosophical platform. (And tragically, because service design is becoming a handmaiden to journey management, which is also customer-centered in its logic, and the technological platforms being used as journey management infrastructure follows this logic, it looks more likely that service design will regress than progress.)

Now we have the material of service design, which is organizations.

And we have the medium, which is interactions via interfaces.

What is the form conveyed through this medium? Value exchanges! Each interaction directly or indirectly moves value among actors. This movement is what animates services and organizations (in two senses of the word: setting them in motion and ensouling them).

And, finally, what is the object service design produces? A network of brand relationships, each a perception of the organization, experienced as a boundary object. Brands are so much more complex than most people have the philosophical capacity to understand.

Let’s try this framework out on UX for a moment. Material: digital technology. Medium: human-computer interactions. Form: experience (of momentary value exchange!). Object: Digital thing (product, app, website, game, etc.)

A managerial cannot distinguish the form (experience) from the object, because they are exclusively objective, meaning they have access only to one objectivity (aka subject). So when they say they are building an experience, they are referring to the artifact they are coding. And they can build it just fine without involvement of people. And if the experience they build has usability problems, no problem. The experience was “instrumented” and the problems can be caught and corrected. So the experience is always improving.

But the experience actual people have — the experience designers are concerned with — does not improve. Because when they open their app to use it, they never know what to expect. It is constantly changing. They are constantly required to relearn it. And half of what they use has not been properly tested. They themselves are the usability test. Which means they are constantly subjected to usability problems of various kinds.

If you look at it this way — again, the way designers see it — it is not hard to see that this is an atrocious experience, however much the product itself improves. But managerials don’t look at it this way. They see only things, not people experiencing things over time.

A service designer sees it even more clearly. Product managers are backstage actors who shape the delivery of a service, which is the management of an experience of a digital product over a long span of time. And these services are profoundly broken because on the whole the field of product management is oblivious to the fact they are not managing a product, but service actors — custodians of a long customer experience that needs even more management than their product does.

I do sometimes bridle at service designer games which reduce every product to services, but here it sheds very useful light on the true nature of product management.

And that light becomes glaring when we look at product managers the same way we look at frontline service actors, for example, call center agents. The worst customer experience problems we find in call centers often originate in poorly conceived scorecards, that put agents’ and customers’ goals at odds with one another. The agents are evaluated by how much they can upsell and cross sell, or how quickly they can resolve a call. They are misaligned with what customers need, which is focused help achieving their own goal of getting help, or buying something inexpensive that fits their modest needs. Likewise, product managers are often evaluated by their productivity, that is how frequently and how much they are able to improve (aka change) their products. But if users need a reliable, steady tool that they can learn once and keep using, these changes harm the experience of the product, which, to say it again, is not the awesomeness of the digital thing frozen at some point in its development. Far from it.

A few ideas that emerged organically in this post that I want to catalogue for future development.

    The concept of philosophical debt. Think of this as the compounding accumulation of theories, practices and general praxis upon a misconceived point of departure, which requires eventual change of paradigm, and the discarding of many core tools and methods (redescription of Kuhn, for managerials)
    The idea of nonhuman service actors as service actors, an idea lifted directly from Latour, who always saw social orders constituted of nonhuman actors as well as human ones. Service design will probably have to catch up with Latour now, with AI agents functioning more like human actors than tech platforms.
    Design discipline defined by material, medium, form, object. It seems to me these have been smeared together, and it has caused quite a bit of methodological confusion. Most super-clever managerials are eager to avoid the inefficiency of involving service actors directly in design practices and lack philosophical capacity to grasp why this is disastrous.
    “Managerials” as a pejorative, for managers of people, products, journeys who take engineering approaches to design problems. Because they are unable to understand pluralistically in a variety of first-person terms about human interactions with each other and with nonhuman actors — they think from the one first-person perspective that dominates corporate life, a technicic objectivity that renders everything an object that behaves in quantifiable ways, and may be made, through engineering approaches, to behave differently. Whatever a managerial touches becomes social engineering. I think James Burnham influenced this coinage.

Knitbone manifesto

Design, Star

Part 1: The Hidden Costs of Carrot and Stick Management

Most organizations, as mechanically efficient as they aspire to be, motivate people very wastefully.

Instead of understanding people’s natural intrinsic motivations — their sources of meaning, fulfillment, inspiration, resilience and endurance — they rely on artificial extrinsic motivations. These positive and negative external motivations are often referred to as “carrots and sticks”.

No organization can entirely dispense with external motivations, for the simple fact that many employees are largely externally motivated. But some are not, and when employees who are internally motivated cannot find an outlet for them, and are managed as if they must be externally motivated, bad things happen, which we will discuss.

Let us call the habitual overuse of external motivations “carrot and stick management”.

Instead of creating conditions where people have opportunities to do the kind of work they feel called to do, carrot and stick management prefers bribes, blackmail and psychological manipulation to extract behaviors from their human resources.

Here are some downsides to carrot and stick management:

First, there is the expense of the carrots and sticks themselves. When work is a labor of love, people naturally work tirelessly just for the reward of doing it. When work is a labor of getting paid and not suffering consequences of noncompliance, pay must increase accordingly. Penalizing noncompliance also is not cheap; it requires documented processes. Carrot and stick management squanders cash on artificial motivations required to make folks do what they don’t want to do because natural motivations are lacking.

Second, carrot and stick requires considerable bureaucratic overhead, which is costly to create and maintain. In order to properly reward the desired behaviors and to correct or punish undesirable ones, managers must monitor those behaviors. They must build expensive technologies, establish reporting processes and enforce compliance, because these are dull activities people avoid if they can. Carrot and stick management squanders money and time on artificial motivation technologies and processes.

Third, carrot and stick management wastes an organization’s deepest and best resources — passions that, if channeled into the work, could infuse energy and vibrancy into the organization. Instead these passions are channeled into evenings, weekends, vacations and hopes for a better career elsewhere, where they are valued. The organization, instead of benefitting from these gifts, is resented for rejecting, undermining and obstructing them. And people are left feeling coerced, dehumanized, devalued and unfulfilled, which, for obvious reasons, is corrosive to an organization’s culture and contributes to turnover. Carrot and stick management squanders employees’ and partners’ morale, energy and desire to give.

Finally, demoralized people are demoralizing to interact with. Even if they stay at a job they don’t like and try with all their might to hide their feelings or numbness, they’ll behave in a spiritless, artificial and slightly phony, scripted way. They feel “corporate” in the worst sense of the word, and even the most perfectly executed corporateness is impossible to like. Brands that feel corporate do not inspire positive feelings or personal connection, and undermine brand relationship. Carrot and stick management squanders brand equity.

Part 2: Lessons of the Knitbone

Knitbone is the folk name for the comfrey plant (Symphytum officinale), a plant prized for a great many useful properties.

Traditionally, it has been used medicinally, especially to make poultices which help a wounded body heal itself. A knitbone poultice applied to a broken bone helps it knit itself back together. When my wife gave birth to our first daughter, our midwife prepared a poultice from knitbone we grew in our own back yard garden to help her recover.

But the knitbone used in the poultice had been planted for an entirely different purpose. We planted it in order to improve the soil in our herb garden.

The leaves of the knitbone are extraordinarily rich in minerals, and when they shed and fall onto the ground, they enrich the soil. They create a sort of fertile poultice for the plants around it. A knitbone ripples rings of vitality into all neighboring plants, which is why gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Why does the knitbone have this effect on living things? The secret is its roots. When a knitbone is planted, it drops a taproot into the ground, which burrows into the earth, deeper and deeper, sometimes ten feet or more into layers of earth otherwise unreachable, drawing obscure, buried resources up to the sunny surface, where they can be accessed by other plants, animals and human healers.

Part 3: Restart with Whys

My essential service is understanding other people’s driving Why — those natural intrinsic motivations that give a person a sense of fulfillment and life purpose.

Before we can understand what a driving Why is we need to understand what it means to ask a why question.

Because most of us suffer a kind of philosophical color-blindness. Just as the retina of a color-blind person is missing a color receptor, our vision of work is missing a whole category of understanding.

We lack a Why receptor. We have only What and How receptors.

So when we ask Why, we perceive only a What-How answer. We expect an in-order-to response.

Why do you go to work? In order to get paid. Why do you need to get paid? In order to pay my bills and build savings. Why do you need to pay your bills? Why do you need to save money?

Of course, most of what we normally do all day is stuff we do in order to do other stuff, in order to… in order to…

And that is fine, as long as one condition is met: the in-order-to chain is grounded in something that is done for its own sake. It is done for no other reason except its own value.

Here there is no in-order-to. The answer to Why is “I cannot say why.” It is what I do. It is what gives my life purpose. I do it because I love it.

This is what the question Why seeks, and the response cannot be given in language. It is given in feeling and action. Words, at best indicate it, but when they are expected to give that Why, the meaning is lost entirely.

But if a person’s chain of in-order-to is plugged into Why it is all charged with significance. A person feels motivated to do x in order to do y, and z when the connection with Why is felt.

Further, an organization where Why is felt by enough people also enjoys a purposeful culture. Meaning is in the air and infuses the work, even for people who are largely externally motivated. The activities, expressions and outputs of internally motivated people enrich the soil of the organization, and the culture of the organization is nourishing.

People are not motivated by the slogans or mission statements or strategies or justifications of strategies. They are motivated by the energy, the sense of purpose, of importance, the atmosphere of intrinsic motivation.

To achieve this, it is of the highest importance for organizations to start accounting for their stores of intrinsic motivations, and ensure they aren’t wasting or blocking them.

It must understand where these driving Whys may naturally be designed into its operations, so they drive the organization in the direction it is trying to go. And so these driving Whys animate its interactions with customers, who feel and appreciate its charismatic sincerity.

It also must understand where people need these gifts from others — where someone who needs to be needed in a particular way — who wants to give their essential service — can serve another person who needs it. Whether this happens externally — for example when a customer who needs technical assistance is helped by someone who feels personal fulfillment using their expertise — or internally — for example a junior employee is mentored by a senior leader who wants to share her hard-earned wisdom — an internal exchange of value is a win-win.

These win-win points are the energy generators in an organization. This is where the organization provides opportunities for people to give what they need to give, and receive what they need to receive. This is where people feel gratitude and loyalty to one another and to the organization that mediated the exchange.

The choreography of these win-win value exchanges, and all the other value exchanges that power the human interactions that constitute the organization is the very heart of the work service design does.

Service design shapes, as its material, everything that makes up an organization, so it can mediate value exchanges among those who participate in it, whether receiving its products and services (as a customer) or delivering or supporting it. Whatever various materials are used, what sets the whole system in motion — what animates it and gives it vitality — is the exchange of value.

The material of service design is organizations; its medium is exchange of value, and the most vivifying value, the lifeblood that makes the system a living organic system and not a soulless mechanical system, is the driving Whys, the essential services that come from people who have found purpose serving within the organization.

Ratshit

Shit theory

My sister said that ratshit was missing from my taxonomy. I agreed there was some sort of gap, but I didn’t know what ratshit would be.

But then I was complaining to my friend Fish about the overeagerness of left and center-left Jews to keep the peace with progressivist antizionists. They are caught between loyalty to the Jewish people and to their political tribe. So they compromise by vocally hating Netanyahu and blaming him entirely for the rise in animosity toward Israel and Jews, instead of blaming their own political tribe for tolerating extremists, and blaming themselves for normalizing and legitimizing it by being token Jews who also hate Netanyahu and the allegedly horrible things he has made Israel do.

Fish said “They’re Judenrat.” The judenrat were all those rabbis and Jewish community leaders who, before and during the Holocaust, thought that cooperating with the Nazis might soften the abuse and reduce the danger, at least for themselves and maybe their own community.

Judenrat. Juden… rat! Ratshit!

But ratshit isn’t only for or about Jews.

Any nervous non-loyal coward can puke ratshit to try to win tolerance or even approval despite who they really are. During the moral panics of the early 2020, most of the identity renunciation we witnessed, which at first glance might look like bullshit, was actually ratshit. Because that shit was not meant to inspire anyone. It was meant to deflect hostility to someone else, usually someone not paying enough attention who slips up and attracts attention.

Ratshit — cowardly nonsense — the equivocal, half-true, semi-sincere things semi-loyal people say and leave unsaid when they think knuckling under and selling out their own people will appease the people who despise them.

Devekut

Kabbalah

Scholem, from Major Trends:

Nothing seems to me to express better this sense of the distance between God and man, than the Hebrew term which in our literature is generally used for what is otherwise called unio mystica. I mean the word devekuth, which signifies “adhesion,” or “being joined,” viz., to God. This is regarded as the ultimate goal of religious perfection. Devekuth can be estasy, but its meaning is far more comprehensive. It is a perpetual being-with-God, an intimate union and conformity of the human and the divine will.

Yes, except for the word “distance”. One cannot have distance from infinity. And for a panentheist, this is everything.

If we understand the panentheism and infinitude we must understand also that there cannot be any question of belonging to the infinite One. The necessarily all-inclusive infinite One necessarily includes each of us, whether we intuit or acknowledge it or not. We cannot avoid this metaphysical belonging.

The only real questions concern our own finite understanding of and relationship to the infinite One: First, do we recognize our metaphysical situation — that we are situated within and belong to the Infinite One, who transcends but includes us? Can we suprehend the comprehending, incomprehensible truth that our own finite notion of “infinity” is necessarily bounded by nihilitude, which bestows upon us one-within-One identity — belonging to, but absolutely not identical to One’s own infinitude, of which at best we can participate?

This is why Jewish mystics, for as long as they live, teach and write, pursue devekut, not unio mystica.

Devekut is angelic, willing participation in the all-inclusive infinite One.

Note: A while back I finally understood that there is absolute truth, but that truth cannot be comprehended objectively. It is everted objectivity, which, when finite is subjective, but if infinite, is something a friend of mine calls “superjective” (not in a Whiteheadian sense). Absolute truth is that by which finite truths not only pragmatically work, but harmonize with devekut, and transmit divine light of our one-within-Oneness.

Another note:

In comprehension the given is a What.

In apprehension the given is a That.

In suprehendsion the given is a Whom.

In comprehension, we can reach out and grip some of reality; the hand of thought closes around an objective truth.

In apprehension, our reach exceeds our grasp; our fingertips touch something real, but we cannot close the hand of thought around any objective truth. The mysterious resistance makes us feel apprehensive. It is a perplexity, an aporia.

In suprehension, we intuit the reality that we cannot grip a reality in whose grip we are gripped. We cannot comprehend comprehension. No subject is an object of thought. And the superjective is itself the ground of our own thinking, the Being of our own being, the One in whom we are one.

Another note: I have been contemplating letterpress printing another hermetic tract, and? in the spirit of my own designerly kabbalah, receiving it as a design brief for some more accessible, less sacred books.

These prenatal books have had a kaleidoscope of shifting titles, including “Enworldment”, “Exnihilist Manifesto”, “Everso”, “The Ten-Thousand Everythings”, “Pearls and Shells”, “Second-Natural”, “Philosophy of Design of Philosophy” and “Hermetic Design”.

Today, writing about one and One and one-within-One, the ironic prankster in me — (who, in the most solemn moments, not only refuses to exercise quiet pious resoect, but goes into full-on boy-in-a-pew mode, and gets even louder, sillier and more fidgety) — suggests that the correct form for my esoteric tract might not actually be a chapbook, but rather a label on a castile soap bottle.

I really might do this.

Nihilitude:

Dilute! Dilute! Ok!

Another note on “Creation redescription”

Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Another note on “Creation redescription”:

Start with a blank sheet of paper.

Draw lines across the paper, from one side to the other, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. This is division without separation.

Cut the paper along all the lines, but keep the pieces touching like pieces of a puzzle. This is separation without exclusion.

Now remove one section of paper from the others. This is exclusion.

On that removed section of paper, draw horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

Cut the paper into bits. Arrange them how you like. If you wish, you can make little duplicates of the cut bits. If you wish you can exclude what doesn’t fit, and remove them from the other scraps, because they are irrelevant.

We can if, we wish, take all the original cut up bits, including those we removed and reconstruct the section like a puzzle. We can restore the section to a state of defined finitude.

We can, if we wish, continue by placing that restored section back with the others, and restore the paper. Imagine a great puzzle made of pieces which are themselves little puzzles.

Alternatively, we can keep our little construction made of cut up bits of the removed section of paper. We can say one of the bits is the ultimate bit and forget all the others. Or we can say the section of paper is not a section of anything, but the whole sheet of paper.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Letterpress magic trick

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Star, Symbols and diagrams

As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil.

Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness.

I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion object in a blind spot demonstration, which exemplifies nihilitude (a present nothing which leaves nothing missing, showing very clearly how blindness is the furthest thing from darkness.) It is by nihilitude that the Trickster tricks, so I cannot imagine a better vanishing-appearing figure than Mercury, the trickster angel, for this vanishing act transpiring on my little magic paper strip.

Instructions.

  1. Orient the strip so the asterisk is on the left, and the Mercury sigil is on the right.
  2. Hold the strip arm’s length from your face.
  3. Close your left eye, and keep your right eye open.
  4. Focus your eye on the asterisk, while focusing your attention on the sigil.
  5. Maintaining this dual focus, slowly move the strip closer and closer to your open right eye.
  6. Notice when the sigil is no longer there, absent, while leaving no trace of absence.
  7. Say: “Nihilitude: Nothing is present so nothing is missing.”
  8. Remember that all but the tiniest sliver of reality is submerged in nihilitude. (“Exnihilated”)
  9. Thank God for the shelter of nihilitude, which is the precious gift of moral existence.
  10. Seal it with “Amen.”

There comes a perilous point in a person’s life when the decision can no longer be evaded or postponed:

Either seem sane, or be sane.

Creation redescription

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

From Absolute One

…

Pure Infinitude to Articulate Infinitude (through definitude, divine Withness)

Articulate Infinitude to Defined Finitude (through nihilitude, divine Orness)

Defined Finitude to Formational Beings (through finitude, divine Notness)

Formational Beings to Material Actualization (through combination, divine Andness)

…

From Unformed Matter,

Inarticulate, undefined, unformed, at one with

Absolute One

The passage above is not translation. It describes in pure English what I have been shown in Hebrew.

+0(

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Postperennialism

Autobiography, Esoterism, Religion

Perennialism (also known as Traditionalism and Sophia Perennis) compares traditional religions to paths up a mountain. At the foot of the mountain, the paths are separated by many miles. They converge with altitude, and eventually they meet at the summit. The lower divergent understandings of the tradition are exoteric. The higher, convergent understandings are esoteric. The higher the esoteric understanding, the more one understands the depths of one’s own tradition and its transcendent unity with the others.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, so this one summit with universally valid paths to it from diverse points of departure resonates. It harmonizes with both U’s of my childhood brainwashing and with the tolerance gospel it preached. But Perennialism provides a depth, seriousness and respect for religiosity that I felt was lacking among the UUs I’ve known, and leftists in general, including religious leftists.

But Perennialism also had some ideas that I found hard to accept. One, I believe, was an artifact of Islam, which claimed that no new traditions were possible after Mohammad. According to Guenon and Schuon, Mohammad was the last prophet who founded what was necessarily the last valid tradition, an idea I reject for multiple reasons. Another is an eschatology of the Fall, which accounts for why no new traditions are possible. Another is that only strict enduring adherence to a traditional religion is a path to esoteric realization. And I dislike the authoritarian politics that normally follow from these beliefs.

Today I realized that what I reject is Perennialism’s exoteric doctrine. The eschatology, historiosophy and practical prescriptions are not essential or even necessary extensions to the esoteric doctrine, and I do not find them to have the same overwhelming persuasive force. I do not reject any of them entirely, and I might find them more persuasive later. But from where I stand, these ideas seem like a connecting belt across converging but as-yet-unconverged exoteric paths, not to be confused with the convergence at the crown.

Shit index

Shit theory

So here we are. Shit theory’s growing taxonomy is up to eight shits:

  • Chickenshit — “tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.”
  • Bullshit — “meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.”
  • Horseshit — “malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question ‘who can we blame for this shitshow?’”
  • Birdshit — “meta nonsense — the little condescending golden turds of pseudowisdom dropped from above by high-flying assholes, soaring on the conceit that abstract theorizing somehow raises us above the stubborn concreteness of the human condition..”
  • Dogshit — “incompetent nonsense — the result of nondesigners who think they are designers trying to design and bungling it, and then repeating the bungling as rapidly and randomly as possible.”
  • Apeshit — “weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile.”
  • Batshit — “crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane”
  • Ratshit — “cowardly nonsense —  the equivocal, half-true, semi-sincere things semi-loyal people say and leave unsaid when they think knuckling under and selling out their own people will appease the people who despise them.”

What else is there, even? Catshit? I don’t even know if they’re needed. I think this might be a complete list. If so shit studies reached its apex within 72 hours of its founding. That’s a pretty squat shitheap, given the overwhelming quantity of shit out there.

Batshit

Philosophy, Shit theory

Another extremely important shit species that deserves analysis is batshit.

When someone believes things beyond belief, and believes them elaborately, intricately, extravagantly and urgently, we call that person batshit crazy.

Often, these beyond-belief beliefs are literally about the beyond. They are speculative. But the speculation has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer obviously speculation about reality. The speculations have detached and become a standalone batshit world, which feels way more real and interesting than whatever that other world was.

Batshit is sometimes confused with bullshit, because batshit is nonsense that never touches ground and has no practical effectiveness. But unlike bullshit, batshit is believed, intensely and sincerely. And while both bullshit and batshit fail to translate ideas into effective practices, bullshit never tries, whereas batshit ideas lead directly to batshit practices.

And it is also easy to confuse batshit with birdshit, in that it flies around in the sky. But where birdshit flies into the sky to get a better, loftier, critical look at the ground in order to shit all over it, batshit is trying to fly further than the sky, and the batshit produced in the effort is innocent byproduct, forgotten as soon as it falls into that nowhere known as solid ground.

“Batshit” is crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane” people.

Apeshit

Shit theory

I mentioned apeshit in passing in an earlier shit theory installment. But it deserves its own definition.

When we human primates get really super-fucking angry, something horrible and funny happens to us. We lose access to the newfangled lobes of our hypertrophied brains, we begin to resemble our animal kingdom relatives.

We do what they do. We grab whatever is closest at hand and fling at whoever has infuriated us. We go apeshit.

Shit studies scholars call whatever is flung in this state apeshit. Whatever kind of shit it started out as, once it is picked up and hurled, it is now classified as apeshit.

“Apeshit” is weaponized nonsense — any lump of ideas picked up and hurled as a projectile. The point of it is not truth, or ideas, or anything resembling communication. It is pure animal speech act.

Apeshit is not about content. Blunt force impact is the message. It is about impact, and a disgusting, degrading mess to clean up.