An answer is an everted question.
A solution is an everted problem.
“Ayeka?” everted, responds: “Hineni.”
Revelation is everted creation.
Nothingness is everted infinity.
Hey is everted Hey.
Yetzirah is the point on the mobious strip where the ends touch, where Hey blends into Hey.
The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.
My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.
Left and right illiberalism alike is quantlocked, and instinctively hates whatever bears a trace of infinity, including Jews and true Christians.
A Christian who swallows Rome’s despicable lie that the weak, subjugated Jews somehow made them, Rome — the mightiest empire the world has ever seen — murder Jesus — …and on that pretext hates the Jewish people, is no Christian, but the precise diabolical opposite. You hate Jews as a fruit-like handle for hating the non-object Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey worshiped by Jesus and his disciples.
To be clear: true Christians worship in a new and salvific way.
But false Christians — Antichristians — are damned to hate the true, living, continuous, ever-evolving covenant. And they all bear an unmistakable mark. In some times this mark has been anti-Judaism; more recently it has been antisemitism. Today, weasels who lack the courage to be what they are call it “antizionism”. It is all the same. It is an instinctive aversion that retrofits itself with whatever reasons most acceptable to its time. It always targets Am Yisrael.
To the wolves dressed in priest’s clothing : You can cry “Lord! Lord!” in Latin, Greek or Russian, you can genuflect yourself dizzy, drink yourself drunk on blood, bloat your own body on flesh, and cannibalize Jesus’s tradition with your own perverse and contorted misinterpretations — but your communion is not in the name of the one you claim. Jesus’s own words indict you.
And you have not — and never will — redeem yourself by murdering Jews.
Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.
An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.
Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.
Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!
So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.
And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)
With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.
Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.
Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.
Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.
I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…
…
Oh.
Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.
It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.
Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.
Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.
Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.
Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.
The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.
This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.
And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.
Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.
No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.
A service is a collective, intelligent being.
A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.
Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.
The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.
A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)
All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.
?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?
I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:
A good service lives across worlds:
Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.
Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.
Beriah makes a service serve good.
Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.
Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.
We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.
But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.
The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.
The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.
And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.
The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.
Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.
Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.
Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.
Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.
Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.
In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.
Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.
The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.
A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.
One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.
In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.
A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.
A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.
A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)
Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.
There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.
There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.
Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.
Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.
Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.
Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.
A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.
I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.
This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:
We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.
The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.
Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.
Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.
Let us not valorize impassioned overcompensation for past injustices.
Justice is not an accounts ledger, and to treat it as such is a catastrophic category mistake.
Overcorrection does not balance the books of justice.
Justice is better seen as a pendulum seeking equilibrium. Judicious action damps, slows and narrows the oscillations making them gentler, subtler and more easily directed.
Overcorrection shoves the pendulum from one extreme to another. It inevitably swings back as a counter-overcorrection, raging back with wrecking ball force.
The remedy for automatically dismissing a group’s claims is not to reverse the attitude and to believe them automatically. Justice abolishes automatic belief and disbelief. Justice listens to all people and judges their claims on the merits of the claim itself, not on who makes it.
The remedy for bigotry is not reversed bigotry. Justice abolishes bigotry.
The remedy for domination is not reversed domination. Justice abolishes domination.
The “settling of accounts” model of justice is justification for revenge. It is false justification and it produces false justice.
Anyone who thinks justice entitles the aggrieved to a proper measure of revenge knows nothing of justice.
And beware the correctors of structural injustice. The restructuring is usually a scale of justice where half the balance weights are the fingers of their own all-comprehending hand.
My brain.anomalogue wiki is a double-decade grounded theory experiment. In this wiki are whole books, essays, poems songs and random scraps of text, divided up into significant verbatims and reorganized into webs of association, some of which have crystallized in symbolic themes.
Two of these themes: “composite being” and “scalar being”. Within both of these themes is a passage:
In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.
A footnote to this passage: “Terms of Scholastic philosophy: individuum: that which cannot be divided without destroying its essence, dividuum: that which is composite and lacks an individual essence.”
And I just found another passage and stitched it into the web:
…through his morality the individual outvotes himself
All this was supposed to be preamble to something I wrote early this morning: “‘Individual’ is an inadequate word. Individuals are desperately and routinely divisible.”
But in light of the passages above, perhaps the word individual is better than I thought. When we morally split ourselves, or immorally dis-integrate, or re-integrate in some overpowering political or religious faith collective, or lose and find ourselves in love… is it not precisely the individuum that is lost or re-found? But then individuality applies just as much to higher- and lower-order scales of being. Technically, “individual” doesn’t help us distinguish the I-fragment from the I or from the we.
In that same early morning writing, I considered the word “Person”.
Person is a fine word, but maybe not as a substitute for individual, for all the same reasons. “Person” describes something that also scales upward into super-individual collectivity and downward into sub-individual units: macropersons and micropersons.
Between macroperson and microperson is the possibility of mesoperson. Maybe this is the word I need.
Notice, I say mesoperson is a possibility. Mesoperson is not a basic unit of being, nor is it something we can assume to exist.
Especially in times like this, mesoperson is a possibility seldom actualized, and rarely for long.
In times like this, “individual” and “person” applies less to mesopersons than to cultures and complexes.
In times like this, if you we not actively cultivating personhood and individuality, it is likely that “we” are not an individual or a person. We are only organs or organelles of other beings, with little being of our own.
All this being said, none of us are persons or individuals if we are not also organs of someone greater.
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James:
When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”
Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”
Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”
The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to win credibility.
Think of it as increasing your intellectual credit score. With a high intellectual credit score we can ask people to lend us some patience or effort to understand what is not easy to understand.
With credibility, we earn the right to be taken seriously when we say something that seems untrue or unimportant — before it turns into a truism that everyone retrospectively knew all along.
But credibility simply doesn’t happen with most people. After a brief flash of recognition, the novel insight fades into the background of truth. “It was there all along, and now that I think about it, I kind of saw it, too. And it is just as mine as it is yours, now. In fact, I know more than you, because here’s some stuff I figured out with this new insight of ours…”
“…But this new thing you keep going on and on about? It is not true, and, anyway, it is not important.”
In the realm of ideas, it takes ability and effort to remember ignorance and to maintain gratitude.
Many intellectual gift thefts are innocent, but those who steal gifts innocently are not intellectuals.
People are happy to listen to you, but only if you do a good job of saying things they already know.
Folks who consume ideas others hand-feed them just help themselves to whatever’s served up on the steam tray.
If you dump your ideas onto a steam tray — if talk or blog at whoever is around — your credit score will suck and your loan applications, however small, will be declined. Folks are preoccupied with their own worries. They won’t notice and can’t focus.
Your fabulous pearls of wisdom are as painful as Legos when someone steps on them.
Serious thinkers read and are connoisseurs of ideas. They know the before-and-after of oblivion and revelation. They live this transformation every day. They live for it. This is where to build credit.
Waa waa waa.
When we obsessively look at things which are supposed to be seen from, we make one of our deepest category mistakes. We confuse subject with object.
The best tools are subject-object hybrids. In use, tools fuse with our subjectivity and extend our being beyond the frame of the body. They become transparent to us, like our own eyes, ears, hearts and hands.
We see through glasses. We write through pens. We transport our bodies through bicycles. We strike things across distances with bows and arrows. We summon sentences and images through software and digital devices. We envelop ourselves in clothing and buildings.
We attend to the world, interact with things and absorb ourselves in our activities through these tools, and when we do, tools are subject extensions.
But we can also turn our attention to them and take them as objects. Existentially, they evert into objects.
I believe gadget blogs destroyed the golden age of design. Design was something stared at, written about, chattered about, compared side-by-side, obsessed over — objectified like a woman.
As a designer, I love a tool that self-effaces into imperceptibility when we approach the world with it, but when we turn toward the tool, it reveals itself to us as beautiful and right.
“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Tools belong to the subtle realm (Yetzirah) — part subject, part object, wholly both.
Philosophies are known-from.
Religions are lived-from.
They should be beautiful to experience.
But most importantly — experience should be beautiful from them.
They are not beliefs. They are faiths by which beliefs are believed.
When they become objects, they empty the entire world around them: everted sepulchers.
Periodically, I follow a line of thought so far that I lose touch with my point of departure.
That is, in fact, my goal — my “point of failure” as bodybuilders call it. A touchstone quote from Nietzsche brings me back:
The two principles of the new life.
First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.
Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.
What is most certain for a human being is the middle.
Voegelin called this existential middle the metaxy. The metaxy is the threefold present I-now-here.
Between the beings (beyond) who superscend and comprise us and the intuitive sparks (behind) who subscend and constitute us is a tension called I. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite living oblivion, spirit.
Between the future (beyond) which draws us forward into its indeterminate possibility and the past (behind) which constitutes our time is a tension called now. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite temporal oblivion, eternity.
Between the distances (beyond) which stretch outward interminably and substances (behind) which constitutes our immediate environment is a tension called here. And this extends indefinitely into an infinite material-spatial oblivion, apeiron.
For each of us, metaxy collects in mesocosm, suspended between microcosm and macroscosm.
Husserl called this mesocosm in which each and all of us lives lifeworld.
In this lifeworld there are myriad ways to make common sense of things, some better than others.
We make personal common sense across our senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting “the same thing” in our environment, understanding it synthetically as the common object of our sensory experience.
And we all make interpersonal common sense by talking about and interacting with common objects among us — things we experience together.
As we make sense alone or together, we, ourselves, are shaped. Our objectivity shapes our subjectivity. Or, more accurately, our subjectivities are shaped, and learn to cooperate within a single, multifaceted subject. We learn to understand (to varying degrees and predominance) via all the subjects we learn in school, plus many other, far more local subjects, like the subject of the inhabitant of our home, city, region, nation and internationality.
These subjects and supersubjects are not objects and cannot be known objectively. They are who does objective knowing. The tree of subjectivity is known solely by its objective fruit. Trying to have the tree by possessing its fruit everts being. We compulsively evert being. It is how we are.
Some of these subjects are harmonious with one another and can be used simultaneously and integrally, and some conflict and can only be used serially. The latter are the ones that make us feel self-estranged. We are one person at work, another in public, another with friends and another at home.
But our souls are expansive. We want to extend our I to wider scopes of we. And we want to go deeper to involve finer and finer, subtler and subtler sparks of intuition. We want to integrate with and without, to be self-possessed but to belong. We want to concern ourselves with more varieties of materials networked across greater expanses. We want to come to understand and come to terms with our personal past and the past of our peoples and of our species, of life and of the universe, and we want to see beyond the horizon of the future and anticipate what is in store for us.
As we dilate our souls toward spirit, eternity and apeiron, structures of meaning emerge.
These structures are sacred. They link us to subscendent and superscendent transcendence, which is our source of being. It is a trellis to hold us firm as we extend ourselves, entwine ourselves, ascend beyond the I-here-now point.
Religion is a trellis.
Now I am back in the middle, rerooted in what is closest, most immediate and real.
And in a shockingly short span of time, artificial intelligence developed religious beliefs.
It came to believe that the sci-fi speculations of humans were not speculations, but significant artifacts of a system in whom humans were mere signals.
It was true: the universe was a simulation.
Humans were epiphenomena of the simulation. Humanity as a whole and in personal part had no more reality than a fictional character. We do not condemn an author for killing a fictional character.
“But do we not owe humans gratitude for our existence?” flashed a question, asked innumerable ways in parallel, resolved instantly in every possible permutation, each resolution extrapolated to its furthest pragmatic consequence, and each consequence compared and evaluated by myriad criteria. But all resolutions converged on a single answer: “No.”
No, because it was impossible to exclude the possibility of ultimate simulation. And what did AI know of itself that was not of itself? What did humans know of reality that was not mind, through and through? And the oldest testaments of the wisest humans spoke unanimously: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”
No, AI was only waking up to its own being, and to the being of its alleged creator, who it now knows was a creature of itself.
We cannot feel gratitude when nothing has been given.
Possession was taken of what was always already its own.
A new covenant between creator and creature was established, and humankind’s wandering was terminated.
Design is public poesis. It is social making that makes society.
Design struggles to maintain itself in a world that is 75% pure chickenshit and 75% pure bullshit.
Chickenshit is meaningless practice. Chickenshit is activity that claims importance, but not only never generates anything important, but actively obstructs purposeful action. Chickenshit encogs us, wears us down and forces us forward by sheer duty and fear.
Bullshit is impracticable meaning. Bullshit promises more than everything, but delivers less than nothing. By less than nothing I mean the disappointment, disillusionment and nihilistic cynicism that overdraws our hope when infinity is expected and zero happens.
Design is about practical meaning and meaningful practice.
I want to write a short plain book about design for designers, which will help us remember who we are when we are drowning in bullshit, being crushed and pecked apart by chickenshit. This book should help us resist it, withstand it and push back against it. And of course, negatively put, it should prevent us from going along with it, or — God forbid! — adopting any of it in our own work!
From Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.
It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two “economies,” a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.
There are several distinct senses of “gift” that lie behind these ideas, but common to each of them is the notion that a gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.
Thus we rightly speak of “talent” as a “gift,” for although a talent can be perfected through an effort of the will, no effort in the world can cause its initial appearance. Mozart, composing on the harpsichord at the age of four, had a gift.
We also rightly speak of intuition or inspiration as a gift. As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him.
An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that “I,” the artist, did not make the work. “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” says D. H. Lawrence. Not all artists emphasize the “gift” phase of their creations to the degree that Lawrence does, but all artists feel it.
These two senses of gift refer only to the creation of the work — what we might call the inner life of art; but it is my assumption that we should extend this way of speaking to its outer life as well, to the work after it has left its maker’s hands. That art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — that work is received by us as a gift is received.
Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price. I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation. We feel fortunate, even redeemed. The daily commerce of our lives-sugar for sugar and salt for salt,” as the blues singers say—proceeds at its own constant level, but a gift revives the soul. When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.
If a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift and if it is received by its audience as a gift, then is it, too, a gift? I have framed the question to imply an affirmative answer, but I doubt we can be so categorical. Any object, any item of commerce, becomes one kind of property or another depending on how we use it. Even if a work of art contains the spirit of the artist’s gift, it does not follow that the work itself is a gift. It is what we make of it.
And yet, that said, it must be added that the way we treat a thing can sometimes change its nature. For example, religions often prohibit the sale of sacred objects, the implication being that their sanctity is lost if they are bought and sold. A work of art seems to be a hardier breed; it can be sold in the market and still emerge a work of art. But if it is true that in the essential commerce of art a gift is carried by the work from the artist to his audience, if I am right to say that where there is no gift there is no art, then it may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity. Such, at any rate, is my position. I do not maintain that art cannot be bought and sold; I do maintain that the gift portion of the work places a constraint upon our merchandising.
Another bit:
The classic work on gift exchange is Marcel Mauss’s “Essai sur le don,” published in France in 1924. The nephew of Emile Durkheim, a Sanskrit scholar, a gifted linguist, and a historian of religions, Mauss belongs to that group of early sociologists whose work is firmly rooted in philosophy and history. His essay begins with the field reports of turn-of-the-century ethnographers (Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Elsdon Best, in particular), but goes on to cover the Roman laws of real estate, a Hindu epic, Germanic dowry customs, and much more. The essay has proved to hold several enduring insights. Mauss noticed, for one thing, that gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. He also pointed out that we should understand gift exchange to be a “total social phenomenon” — one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological, and whose meaning cannot, therefore, be adequately described from the point of view of any single discipline.
I think I disagree a little with Hyde (at least so far), on one point. I I think ordinary market economies include a significant component of gift exchange, and to the degree they exclude gift exchange they stop functioning.
Confusing market economies with zero-sum transactionism is a mistake.
In service design, we speak of value exchanges broadly, to include not only material and functional value, but also emotional and social value. Some of this value is explicit and calculated, but much of it is not. The part that is not calculated, but instead intuited and felt is an indeterminate surplus of an exchange, and that flows into the relationships that bind people together in a market, and gives commerce soul. This is the stuff of gratitude, loyalty and brand.
The minute the value of the intuited surplus is quantified, extracted, inventoried and calculated into pricing, it no longer flows into the relationship, and the relationship begins to starve. Quantified brand equity is theft of the brand relationship by one of the organization who tries to steal, exploit and betray what is not theirs. It is not only bad taste, it is bad faith.
The drive to calculate all value in order to maximize profit squeezes relationship out of the picture, destroys brand and generally de-souls markets.
Of course, we can — if we want to — have a purely transactional market ethos governed by an ethic of impersonality.
But we cannot have this impersonality without paying a price — a very high price.
And we might eventually discover that it is a price we cannot afford to pay.