All posts by anomalogue

Hall of reflex

Philosophy

When we are shocked by the possibility that apparent truths we have always assumed to be necessary and absolute may be discretionary and relative we can fall into a reflexive assumption that — now that we finally have some freedom in how we understand — we should immediately exercise our new freedom and get to work re-understanding everything.

But who says? We might discover, for instance that the — singular supreme truth we were raised to believe is far from singular or supreme, but does it follow that we are now obligated to adopt an opposite or alternative one, or none of them?

We might discover that what seems self-evident to us falls apart under rigorous scrutiny, but does it follow that we must automatically reject all intuitive self-evidence, and believe exclusively in the testimony of rigor?

We might find that the origins and accounts of moral norms we were taught to obey and fear are not only spurious, but groundless, or grounded in things we despise. Are we not only allowed but obligated to reject them on these grounds?

Behind all these reactions is a faith in something very few of us have detected, questioned, or even know how to confront.

But, say we do detect, question and confront it — are we obligated to abandon it now that we can…?

Dollars-for-drugery

Design

A healthy organization is not primarily fueled by money. The same is true of a healthy economy. To the degree an economy runs exclusively on money, it is an unhappy, unwholesome economy.

This is not meant to suggest that money is not important. Money helps provide artificial motivation when organic and intrinsic motivations are insufficient to make action happen. Organic and intrinsic motivations include things like inspiration, curiosity, enjoyment of skillful action, camaraderie, reciprocity in mutual generosity, desire to help, sense of duty, habit, momentum, friendly competition, joy of progress, satisfaction of reaching goals, etc. It is the motivations of play.

Think of money like promises in a marriage. Promises are absolutely necessary to keep a marriage alive, but if a marriage is nothing but forcing oneself to fulfill promises — to do things one would very much prefer not to do — after a point, that marriage is in trouble.

But when most or all of the motivation in an organization comes from money, the organization can be said to run on artificial motivation. Too much of this, and an organization will begin to feel artificial, in the pejorative sense of “unnatural”. That icky, lifeless, meaningless, unlovable feeling we call “corporate” is the result of an organization relying on money to generate service. A corporation can hire professional meaning-makers — “creatives” — to apply a veneer of meaning, play or style to the outer surface of such an organization, but such attempts are skin deep and fool nobody.

A dollars-for-drudgery organization will feel dry, boring and neutral at best. At worst it will feel false, soulless, coercive, manipulative and threatening to anyone with an intact spirit.

The essential purpose of service design is to understand how to organize people with needs to give specific kinds of value and needs to receive specific kinds of value so that they can exchange value with one another in mutually beneficial ways. This kind of organization allows organizations to reduce their dependence on motivation by money to keep things running. Service design aspires to social orders animated by rich, dense, diverse value exchanges of function, meaning and belonging, substantiated by carefully formed material and nonmaterial artifacts.

The goal is to create living organizations that thrive through natural, organic intrinsic motivations, as opposed so socially engineered mechanisms that run on money and which are controlled by afar through monitoring and driven by greed for rewards and fear of punishments.

In this money-driven economy it is easy to use designers to find new ingenious ways to improve the social engineering of institutions. The modern designer’s skillset can certainly be harnessed to creating management systems of control and monitoring. But designers rarely enter the field of design to amass money, otherwise they would pursue something more lucrative, like management or engineering. And the value exchange in such an application of their skill will not work out for a designer who is a designer from the heart.

Kabbalistic exnihilism

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

Speaking in Kabbalist language, objective thought is confined to Assiyah.

Material and sensory objects are confined to Malkhut d’Assiyah; subjective objects to Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Gevurah and Chesed d’Assiyah; objective truth to Binah d’Assiyah; objectivity itself to Chokhmah d’Assiyah.

(Psychologism everts the relationship of subject and object. It is the futile attempt to grasp truths of Yetzirah in the inadequate terms of Assiyah. Psychologized religion is antireligion.)

Until one intuits the transcendent source of all the material and immaterial objects, one knows nothing of Yetzirah. Yetzirah can only be known by apperceptive participation in various modes of existence in Yetzirah. (This is the radical pluralism of hermeneutics.) Yetzirah is known solely by its fruits in Assiyah.

But the indirect experiencing of Yetzirah can open awareness to Beriyah — but only if we learn how nothingness works. It is natural to know nothing of nothingness.

Once we catch Beriyah in the act of creation ex nihilo, we become exnihilists.

Symbolic degradations

Esoterism

Symbolic experience is intensely intuitive — pre-cognitive.

What we do with these experiences, however, has everything to do with how we cognize. And that “cognitive how” is determined by how our intuitions are organized as organs in a spiritual organism.

Such spiritual organisms are souls, and the soul’s organic functioning is faith.

This organic faith-functioning of souls, though, is known solely by its fruits — the objects of faith: belief, language, action, style, preferences, etc.

Those unable to understand upwards from object mangle everything symbolic and try to make symbols signify downwards. Downward into literalism, into explicit beliefs, into physicality, into body — into irreversible downwardness.

The same thing that makes a “jihadist” make literal war on neighbors who seek peace — is the same thing that drives those seized by the upward call of Androgyne to instead lie down under the knife on an operating table — is the same thing that compelled human sacrifices — is the same thing that makes a psychologist imagine a world of suppressed, submerged subconscious beliefs as the wellspring of myth — is the same thing that makes charlatans use the celestial maps to navigate sewers and to conjure chaos from sacred order in order to sell mumbo jumbo to the gullible.

When an alchemist’s metaphysic knows only the lowest physicality he is cursed with the Midas touch, compulsively turning whatever gold he touches into cash.

Mechanocracy

Politics

If you accept James Burnham’s theory of managerialism, it is clear that AI is bringing that social order to an abrupt end. And changes in social order bring revolution.

We have a strange tendency, perhaps inherited by Marx, to omit questions of collective character from macrosocial analyses. It is almost as if we think the persons who constitute overclasses are interchangeable tokens. It’s just a quantitative difference ranging from zero power and total innocence to absolute power and absolute corruption.

I would say, though, that those who ascend by military prowess, those who ascend by risking and winning wild bets, those who ascend by forming interpersonal relationships, and those who ascend with pure engineering brainpower will form entirely different ruling classes who will dominate society very differently.

We are about to witness a return to genuine capitalism, after a hiatus we didn’t even realize had happened.

The means of production are being re-seized by a technological elite, who win, not by understanding people, but by rigorously excluding personal considerations. Theirs is an objectivity through elimination of subjectivity — or at least all subjectivity beyond their own hyper-technik subject.

These new technologies not only manufacture things, but information, analysis, insights, beliefs and souls. And they manufacture new technologies that invent technology-inventing technologies. And they manufacture weapon systems that no force of human warriors however large, skilled or brave can battle longer than a single afternoon.

Every age has its apocalypse. We have these apocalypses because each of us will die, and to our little selves, when we die the world dies with us. We feel it coming: nothingness.

We rummage in the dirt for what meanings mean.

2016, explained

Politics

I can’t believe I never posted this. I’ve been repeating it for years.

Who you voted for in 2016 is almost entirely a matter of who you hated more as a kid: the teacher’s pet, who took your name and made you stay in from recess, or the bully who atomic-super-wedgied you on the playground.

The Great Tetrad

Kabbalah

At the core of Kabbalah is a tetrad — a hierarchical tetrad, the tetrad — most compactly expressed in the Tetragrammaton — ???? — Yod – Hey (1) – Vav – Hey (2).

The Olamot, the four worlds — Atzilut (Emanation), Beriyah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), Assiyah (Actualization) — correspond to each of these letters, as does our own selfhood across these four worlds — the distinctive kind of subjective presence and participation in each of the worlds. One very important kind of participation — increasingly important as one ascends from the actualizing world of Assiyah toward Atzilut — is modes of understanding, exemplified in four modes of understanding scripture, the hermeneutic tetrad PaRDeS. These definitions come from Nissan Dovid Dubov’s Inward Bound:

  • Pshat – Simple interpretation corresponds to the world of Assiyah. (Hey 2)
  • Remez – Allusionary interpretation corresponds to the world of Yetzirah. (Vav)
  • Drush – Homiletical interpretation corresponds to the world of Beriah. (Hey 1)
  • Sod – Secret/mystical interpretation corresponds to the world of Atzilut. (Yod)

At this point, I’d call these modes, respectively: factual, literary, revelatory, transformative.

The reason these hermeneutic modes matter to me, apart from the simple fact that hermeneutics is intrinsically fascinating, is that these modes of understanding are, I believe, our best and most tangible access to what otherwise might seem grand abstract speculations on unknowable metaphysical ultimates.

We “know” Yetzirah and its relationship to Assiyah because we have understood truths belonging to each, in a manner suited to each. We know how to read literary fiction and lose ourselves in its imaginary, vividly populated, poetic space, while bodily seated in an actual chair in an actual room. And when we have turned our attention from our book, stood up and looked around actual places, we have experienced how the mood, tone and coloration of our book clings to the world around us. Two parts of ourselves are activated together, and sometimes this feels like a restoration of inner integrity.

If you understand the experience of the scenario I just described, imagine taking this kind of experience as indicative of realities that elude the comprehending grip of factual knowledge.

Try to entertain the possibility that the materialism most educated people take for granted is only one possible mode of understanding, optimized for predicting and controlling the behavior of physical matter — but that this mode of understanding comes with tradeoffs, namely a loss of meaning and purpose. The cost of a materialist metaphysic is nihilism.

A materialist will conceptualize my scenario (of the experience of being absorbed in reading) physically and biologically. It will be all about evolution, organisms, societies, economies, brains, neurons, paper, ink, molecules, atoms, quarks, energy, etc., and, in doing so, they will close off myriad incommensurable modes of understanding. These modes of understanding, however, are the very channels that open us to feeling our belonging in creation. No amount of fairness or justice, affordance of dignity, acknowledgment of our various self-classification in this or that social identity can do anything to replace this lost meaning. And indulging in carnal or political pleasures or passions, provides only temporary relief, and eventually none at all. Addictions all terminate this way.

Placing material reality, and political realities in broader contexts of reality and ways of knowing, and giving each its own full due validity — science works, and justice is good! — allows us to develop higher selves who open us to the source of all meaning.

If we do not do this, we will become increasingly capable of controlling material reality, but increasingly alienated from who we are or why we should care about anything. We will rely on stimulating animal rage in order to even feel our own selfhood through that thick numbness that engulfs us. This is why I am one of the increasing numbers who advocate a return to religion, though I believe that many, perhaps most, of the loudest religion advocates are as clueless about religion as those who despise and oppose religion.

So, again, we know the Olamot, who are the various levels of emanation of the Absolute / One / Ein Sof by how we, ourselves, are present in them, and we know our presence through our participation — most tangibly through how we understand and the contents of our understanding. Our participation across the Olamot activates and unites our selves — highest to lowest — together and within their source, bathing our lives and worlds with meaning and light. So we know reality, ourselves and our relationship to God (in God’s own hierarchical Allness — ???? ) — all together, inseparably.

So:

  • In Assiyah, Nefesh (vital soul) animates as the Pshat / factual mode of understanding. (Hey 2)
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach (spirit) animates as the Remez / allusionary (literary) mode of understanding. (Vav)
  • In Beriah, Neshema (breath of life) animates as the Drush / homiletic (revelatory) mode of understanding. (Hey 1)
  • In Atzilut, Chayah (living one) animates as the Sod / mystical (transformative) mode of understanding.

One more related idea… A mistake I have been making is confusing the Sefirah/Sefirot associated with each world for the world itself. Or worse, the idea of the Sefirah, for the Sefirah, for the world.

The kinds of ideas beings like ourselves can have, ideas that are defined conceptual objects, belong only to the world of Assiyah. Actual, physical objects are confined to Malkhut in Assiyah, and the rest are mental or emotional objects.

When we try to think worlds above Assiyah, the best we can do is contemplate mental objects that imperfectly correspond to and transmit meaning from being beyond objective knowledge.

So, it is by conceptual objects of the Sefirot that we begin to understand higher worlds. By Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed we can conceptually approximate and receive the superformal meanings of Yetzirah. By Binah, we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Beriyah. By Chokhmah we can conceptually approximate and receive the meaning of Assiyah. This is (I think) why we speak of Sefirot corresponding to or predominating among worlds.

In all of this, of course, I may very well be wrong, especially where I say, parenthetically, “I think”. I’m being cautious, where I am aware of a need for caution. I don’t know why I bother, though. Our deepest errors are never where we expect them.

All these understandings, of course, make me insanely happy, which always compels me to letterpress something beautiful and holy.

I’m thinking of a reference card, connecting the Tetragrammaton to the four Olamot, each linked to a Sefirot, to the levels of soul, to the hermeneutic modes of PaRDeS.

This is a first, rough, highly inadequate draft. I’m going to consult with a rabbi to ensure everything is correct, both the ideas and the Hebrew. And I’m going to work at improving and perfecting its beauty and clarity.

This is the deepest and fastest change in understanding I’ve experienced since 2011, when my world was inverted, razed and reconstituted by Bruno Latour.

I’m no longer a philosopher at all. I have great respect for objective knowing, even more for objective praxis, but both are positively dwarfed by my respect and love for what transcends objective truths and the realities we can know by objective means.

I’m no longer a philosopher. Perhaps I never was one. What I am is a Kabbalist, still novice.

Principle

Etymology, Kabbalah

The metaphysical use of the word principle has been unclear to me. So I went to etymonline and learned:

Principle – late 14c., “origin, source, beginning” (a sense now obsolete), also “rule of conduct; axiom, basic assumption; elemental aspect of a craft or discipline,” from Anglo-French principle, Old French principe “origin, cause, principle,” from Latin principium (plural principia) “a beginning, commencement, origin, first part,” in plural “foundation, elements,” from princeps (genitive principis) “first man, chief leader; ruler, sovereign,” noun use of adjective meaning “that takes first,” from primus “first” (see prime (adj.)) + root of capere “to take” (from PIE root *kap– “to grasp”).

primus “first” (see prime (adj.)) + root of capere “to take”.

Capere, again! The root of conception/conceive/concept, perception/perceive/percept, reception/receive____. . .

First-take, preceding all other taking.

Principle: receptivity precedes data.

We are given only what we can take.

Back to etymonline:

Kabbalah – “Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.”

Kabbalah is learning to take what may be given — and given only if we cultivate capacity to receive.

Obscurity ensues

Biography, Esoterism, Judaism

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

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

After 14 years of relative stability, I am changing again.

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

For now, expect relentless obscurity.

Kabbalistic reflections on Guenon

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Guenon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exnihilist light

Exnihilism

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing the absence of knowing

Biography, Design, Judaism, Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food tastes different to people who have experienced hunger.

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

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

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

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

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