All posts by anomalogue

Craft vs craftmanship

Design

Apparently the word “craft” is trending in the design world right now. I’ve been hearing it said around my own organization with suspicious frequency, always connected with building things that are well-built.

But when I hear how most designers — or at design consultants — talk about craft, what I hear is craftsmanship, which has less to do with the mode of making and more about the characteristics of the artifact.

I swear most people only say “craft” to avoid gendered language or awkwardly degendered language: “The craftsmanship… er, craftspersonship… uh… CRAFT on this deliverable is unacceptably imperfect!”

The distinction matters, though, and it is not academic hairsplitting, because it pertains to design practice on multiple levels.

By my understanding:

  • Craft describes qualities of how a thing is made.
  • Craftsmanship describes qualities of what has or is being made.

So what is this mode of making called craft? And how does it differ from other modes? Craft, as opposed to what, exactly?

Craft is material dialogue.

Craft — or at least good craft — is responsive to what is crafted. What is crafted responds to the crafter in sometimes surprising and inspiring ways. An aphorism: Craft is material dialogue.

Craft has several characteristics that differentiate it from other modes of making. Craft is:

  • Rapidly iterative. Rapidly means as close to real-time as possible. The longer the delays in the feedback loop, the harder it is to maintain craft.
  • Emergent. This means the looping feedback creates unpredictable qualitative changes to the crafted thing.
  • Responsive. This can be seen as a corollary of emergence. Because the craft generates emergent qualities that cannot be foreseen, the making cannot follow a set plan. The plan must change with the changing conditions the craft itself produces.
  • Reflexive. This means that the crafting changes not only the crafted artifact, but the maker as well. The changes might be a mix of theoretical understanding, or it might be purely intuitive, but at the deepest levels of craft it can be transformative.

So here are modes of making that are not craft, or modes that aspire to minimize the need for craft.

  • Planning
  • Specification
  • Implementation
  • Fabrication

Any process where the outcome is defined prior to the shaping of materials is not craft.

A plan, specification, implementation and fabrication can be said to have great craftsmanship if its construction is sound and flawless.

Today, though, I am seeing something very new in this 16-year-old idea.

Over the last eight years I’ve thought a lot about materials, and how important it is for designers to have a feel for them, if they are to effectively form them. In connection with this I’ve said the material of service design is organizations and, because organizations are so complex and heterogeneous, service problems are often far too large to fit inside any one person’s (or even team’s!) head — and that this is why service design collaborations involve a staggering number of people from many disciplines.

Somehow, though, I never put these two ideas together:

  • Craft is material dialogue.
  • The material of service design is organizations.

A craft of service design would be dialogue with organization as material, and this is incredibly hard. Real craft would require iterative rapid prototyping and testing with a representative cross section of the organization, with freedom to respond to emergent qualities of the service, which might transform the understanding the team has of the service problem itself.

Much of the time, what designers say they are designing is not in fact what they are crafting.

So a UX designer who says they are designing an experience, but lacks access to people who will use what they design, is not crafting an experience, because the experiential material is lacking. What they are crafting is a digital interface.

I’m thinking out loud, so bear with me.

A designer’s true material is the material available to them to craft.

Watch what a designer is touching and shaping, being surprised by, responding to, learning from, and changing them as a practitioner — and that is their true craft.

Ok, now I’ve said it messily. I’ll work on cleaning, compacting, simplifying it later. Because conceptual language is my craft.

And this, by the way, gives me an excuse for being so damn repetitive. These are iterations searching for emergence and profound, transformative shock.

Perplexity, again

Design, Ideas

Note: This post was originally written in July 6, 2010, but left in draft form. I was digging through my writing to see when I first defined craft as material dialogue, and this is the earliest form of the concept I can find. I’m publishing it now in raw form, so please excuse any typos or weird anachronistic outbursts.

When a situation we face is palpably problematic, but we do not know what to do with it, what we face is not yet a problem, but a pre-problem: a perplexity.

What does it mean, to “not know what to do with it”?

Obviously, part of the trouble is a lack of clear definition of the problem. We cannot explain what is wrong, or what needs solving, or what a resolution would look like. The whole problematic situation is just “wrong” and a resolution is imagined entirely negatively: the perplexity must go away.

But there is much more to a perplexity than inability to think or speak clearly about it. We resolve problematic situations all the time without thinking or speaking. We intuit our way through things, wordlessly, and usually with great success. (It might even be the case that we only think explicitly when our intuition fails us. See note below.)

When we fall into perplexity, our intuition is paralyzed. This is usually where we fall back on explicit thinking. We think about what we should do next. But in a perplexity, we find nothing in our intellectual repertoire to help us. But it doesn’t even end there.

The worst part of a perplexity comes when we grope for an approach to think about our situation and our intuition fails us again. Not only do we lack any sense of what to do; not only do we lack thoughts to help guide our action — we have no feel for how to go about thinking about it.

We do not understand how to understand the situation.

(Note on tacit action: This certainly appears to be the case with most tools we use. If you have to verbally recall how to use a piece of software — or any tool — in order to use it, the tool feels “unintuitive”. We want to be absorbed in dialogue with the artifact we are crafting (craft is dialogue between creator and creation), but the dominates the conversation with incessant interruptions. Dialogue can only happen when the medium of conversation is not itself a distraction. This is why people instinctively impose linguistic constraints around subjects they wish to make undiscussable.

Truth of religion

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Wheel

Regarding religion, here is what I know, limits and all:

Our finite minds are inadequate to the relative infinitude of reality.

Whatever objective truth we craft from the raw givenness of reality, it is irremediably selective and approximate.

Our focus of attention and involvement determines our subjective being, and this, in turn, determines the objects of our perception and conception we receive as given, and this determines our focus and involvement, and so on, in the reinforcing cycle of subjectivity and objectivity known as the hermeneutic circle, universally symbolized by the mandala.

We have some degree of choice with regard to our givens, but it is far from an arbitrary choice. It is mysteriously constrained, and the craft of theosophy instaurates truth within these constraints. These mysterious but real constraints and resistances vary from subject to subject and material to material, but they must be observed and answered to, and the degree of faithfulness to these constraints is the degree of truth in what we do and say and are.

Over time we materially reform our environments in ways that require us to renegotiate the truths we adopt and live by. Our truth comes out of alignment from our social reality, and we lose our capacity to make sense of the world around us, to interact with it effectively and to receive and appreciate its value. Our enworldment loses its What, How and Why, and to recover it we must redesign our enworldment, starting with theosophical craft.

Why start with theosophical craft? The core problem is loss of clear, effective, sacralizing truth. If we allow the deteriorated former-truth to select our focus and direct our efforts we will only deconstruct and reconstruct new structures by the logic that made everything broken in the first place. We’ll re-institute the worst of the old, while thinking we are overcoming it. We must revive first the judgment that will guide the rest of the work.

We court this judgment by pressing toward the nothingness that veils inexhaustible moreness, forever pregnant with inexhaustible shock, and enduring the ordeals of aporia.

None of this is speculative. I have lived this year many times. Naive nihilism has been shocked out of me.

But this should not be taken as disparaging speculation. Speculation is an indispensable and unavoidable design device. Upaya is the interface between finitude and infinitude. It reveals, conceals and imaginally masks the essential oblivion.

Designing for counterbalance

Philosophy, Wheel

In monotonously over-ordered times, a handful of heretics find inspiration in transgressive, dissolutive ideas, while the conformist majority continues to extend and enforce ever-increasing order, believing correctly that this trace of defiant resistance is the seed of anarchy.

In cacophonously under-ordered times the philosopher’s situation reverses with the conditions. Now the majority automatically stampedes over any and every order, toward the maximum dissolution, decay, and liberation in the purest chaos — while a dissenting few seek order. The latter pursues shelter from storms and buoyancy against floods. This is done not from love of order or hatred of disorder, but from loyalty to the mean.

Because our time is an anarchic, cacophonic time, I am inspired to design countervailing philosophies of order.

And here I will discredit myself, as if I had credit to lose, by invoking Nietzsche.

In excessively Apollinian times, a Dionysian philosophy restores tragic integrity; but in excessively Dionysian times, an Apollinian philosophy is in order. Loyalty to the mean: this explains why my bookshelves are filled with apparent opponents to my ideals. Our deepest loyalties eternally transcend every contemporary stance:

…the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.

So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.

Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.” Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher — if today there could be philosophers — would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility. …

The last thing this time needs is more deconstruction, more defamiliarization, more disorientation, more strangeness and estrangedness, more arbitrary fantasy, more liberation, more disorder — to pour yet more buckets of chaos into the chaos in which we are drowning. What is most needful in this time is to bail out our boat before it capsizes, submerges and merges with its watery ground.

Pragmatic design maxim

Design, Pragmatism

The pragmatic meaning of a designed thing is the set of behaviors that follow from its activation.

There are other meanings of a design, of course, but from the perspective of business viability this is the literal cash value of any designed thing.

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

When I called the second edition of my Kabbalah reference sheet a “one-page book” I mostly meant it as a joke. As so often happens, however, this silly irony has become serious. I am thinking of it now as a book, and its title has become The Well-Tempered Kabbalah. I am continuing to work on it. I’ve corrected the English transliterations and now they are entirely and strictly consistent.

But I am also evolving the deeper meanings of the chart, and it is changing some of my fundamental understandings of Kabbalah. I am leaving my older change log intact, because it is a record of a thought process, and I want to show my work. Today’s most important change is so important that I am making a new start, with a new change log.

The change that changes everything is relabeling the last column. It was labeled “givenness”, but now it is labeled “truth”. The headers are now “world”, “self”, “truth” which is not only far more true, but also looks and reads better.

Here is why this is necessary: Givenness is one thing, but conveying and sharing that givenness is quite another.

Today I realize clearly and sharply that the world itself is the givenness. That is all the world as a distinct “thing” is — a mode of givenness vis-a-vis our finite self, specifically in the givenness of asiyah. From the givenness of atzilut the worlds are indivisibly one. And the perspective of The Well-Tempered Kabbalah is very strictly the snake’s-eye view of realities that transcend it. So if any column should be labeled “givenness” it would be the first one.

Truth is how a self conveys this givenness to itself in prayer, meditation or study (or all three at once!) or across selves in teaching and learning, pursuing and sometimes achieving a harmonious fourfold ironic richness. Daat, the omitted quasi-sefirah, is present in The Well-Tempered Kabbalah as a conspicuous nothingness of faculty, and this is why the letters of the tetragrammaton are carefully lined up with the missing daat in Jacob’s ladder in each of the rows.

And this is why Derash is of Beriah. There is no way to convey the givenness of Beriah apart from redescribing the entirety of Asiyah. The kind of subject-transcendent and object-transcendent revelation is revealed ex nihilo by neshamah to ruach as a new capacity for formation. In subjective-objective terms the revelation is pure potential — a “revelability” or “creatability” or “instaurability”. It is pure gestell, in which new gestalts are spontaneously given to nefesh in Malchut in Asiyah.

This is why converts speak of reborn self in a transfigured world. The trans of the transfiguring is, first, a new capacity for figuration from neshamah, second, a subjective doing of new figuration by ruach, and, finally an objective experiencing of a new comprehensive articulate order of gestalt objects — which is the content of the conversion.

I have been trying to articulate this reality for decades now — a reality in which I’ve intuitively participated as a designer — and, miraculously, Kabbalah has symbolic language capable of doing this reality full justice.

Israel Sarug

Autobiography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

Israel Sarug is my kind of kabbalist. He is philosophically rigorous, but a factual trickster. To borrow from Werner Herzog, he cares little for the “truth of accountants” and will not allow factual trivia to obstruct his pursuit of learning or teaching. To borrow a related idea from another filmmaker, Jodorowsky, Sarug appears to belong to the long iffy line of “holy charlatans”, or to tone it back to archetypal semirespectability, the trickster tradition, driven to interweave factual, figurative and intellective truths, suspended in ironic tension.

On the whole, the spread of Lurianic Kabbalism was almost entirely due to the activity of another Kabbalist, Israel Sarug, who between 1592 and 1598 carried on a lively propaganda in the interests of the new school among the Kabbalists of Italy. He posed as one of Luria’s principal disciples, although it seems certain that he had no claim to this title and that all his knowledge of Lurianic doctrine was derived from those stolen copies of Vital’s writings which had come into his hands in Safed. A man of considerable intellectual originality, he conceived himself to have penetrated more deeply than Luria’s genuine pupils into the mysteries of the new doctrine. This fact probably explains why his missionary zeal led him to claim an authority which strictly speaking he did not possess. The deception passed unnoticed, and down to our own days Sarug has been treated both by adherents and opponents of Kabbalism as an authentic interpreter of Luria. The truth is that in certain essential points he gave an entirely new turn to Luria’s thought and enriched it by speculative ideas of his own with which I cannot deal in this context. They are to be found chiefly in his book Limmude Atsiluth [which I transliterate as “Atzilut”], “Doctrines on Emanation.” The essence of Sarug’s interpretation of Luria may be described as an attempt to provide a quasi-philosophical basis for Luria’s distinctly unphilosophical doctrine by injecting a species of Platonism into it, and the singular success his interpretation achieved was due in part to those elements of his teaching which were not genuinely Lurianic.

When I dug further into him, I found a paper called “God as a Printer: On the Theological Status of Printing in the Kabbalistic Tradition of Israel Sarug” by Eliezer Baumgarten.

Here is the abstract:

Recent decades have witnessed a broad scholarly discussion of the cultural influences of the printing press invention. The core of this revolved around the new technological influence on the concept of knowledge, its methods of dispersion, and on social changes that it engendered in the 16th century, when it became an affordable widespread technology. This article presents the way in which the spread of the printing press influenced conceptual paradigms of Kabbalists in general, and Lurianic Kabbalists from Sarug’s tradition in particular. These Kabbalists exchanged the traditional conception of creation as an act of writing, within the conception of the world as a written text, for conceptions of creation as a printing act and the world as a printed text. I show how the professional term ‘letterpress printing’ entered these Kabbalists’ descriptions of divine emanation, alongside their conceptualization of printing as a divine activity, as writing had been conceptualized previously.

Of course, as a letterpress fetishist, I adore this analogy, not least for its anomality.

A fascinating McLuhanian element to this story also appeals to me. I’m succumbing to a temptation to link this with the trickster angel of media and mediators, by whom truths are not only propagated, but configured.

Sarug could be called the Justin Sledge of the Gutenberg age, though it remains to be decided whether esoteric insight or something else is the message of the medium of streaming digital content. Many voracious consumers of digital esoteric content seem to me more like bus tourists in Yetzirah than emigres in higher orders, and whether they are seated to the right or left of the bus they more often become ex-patriotic illiberals than liberated expatriates. They are more individualist than individuated, more inclined to follow ideological trends than to loyalty to people or persons, more spiritually escapist than religiously responsible, more “not of this world” than “tikkun olam”… yet still so imprisoned within this sealed-off, air-conditioned sightseeing bus.

I’d have written a shorter book

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

The internet has misattributed to Mark Twain a quotation: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” I first heard and anchored on it as “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I hadn’t the time.” To my ear, it has a nicer waltzier swing.

Ironically, none of the sources of this quote managed to say it as parsimoniously as the internet rock-tumbled version. Presumably, they hadn’t the time.

My first book took 16 years to write, and was nine pages long. My forthcoming book on Kabbalah has taken another six years, and it will be one page long.

Nobody can accuse me of failing to write a shorter book because I hadn’t the time.

Service system development

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

The interface between business viability and design desirability is behaviors.

The success of every business initiative hinges on customer behaviors, and to a slightly lesser extent the behaviors of people on the front lines who serve those customers, and the behaviors of many others who support the front line.

Design specializes in what motivates those behaviors, which inhibits or redirects them, and what kinds of conditions encourage networks of behavior that produce favorable business outcomes.

The interface between operational feasibility and design “desirability” (I prefer “adoptable” or “joinable” or even “partakable”) is the shaping of the actual conditions that produce the behaviors. This, of course involves the production of the customer touchpoints designers shape. But in service design, internal touchpoints exist at every interface between people and the rest of the organization. Besides touchpoints, there are also organizational infrastructure that are not touchpoints in any conventional sense — policies, team structures, technologies, partnerships, etc. These enable or constrain conditions for behaviors, and these are carefully considered and, where appropriate, changed.

The interface between business viability and operational feasibility is the initial and ongoing investment to produce the conditions that will produce the behavioral return on investment.

The overlap of all three together is what I call the field of service system development, one third of which is service design, fluent in business viability and operational feasibility, but specializing in adoption/participation factors.

Pinhole gates

Philosophy

I have been concerned with the topology of eversion for a long time – long before I began my kabbalah studies, which was relatively recent. I’m old enough now that I experience as recent anything that has happened within the last ten years.

Traditional esoteric thought has viewed the various domains of thought in planar terms, arranged vertically in varying heights, across which beings climb upward or downward. The vocabulary of transcendence is erected upon this topology. Our spiritual understandings – linguistically, conceptually, imaginally – is saturated with height relations.

Eversion works with a related but different set of relations: inner versus outer; from versus toward; inside-out versus outside-in; content (contained) versus container. I consider subject versus object to belong to this same class. And as I deepen further in kabbalah, subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.

Since immersing in the four worlds, I’ve pondered the question of whether or where eversions occur (or become necessary) for understanding changing relations across worlds. For example, in understanding another subject – whether that subject is the subjectivity of another person or that of an academic subject does not much matter – we start with a set of third-person objective data (characteristics, behaviors, utterances, concepts, claims), engage some second-person alter-ego in dialogue, in order to loosen our own subjective objectivity of wherefores and therefores and to learn to hear – for ourselves – a different set of wherefores and therefores, of questions and responses, by which reality may be approached in a new subjective objectivity. In this process subject-object are eversed through the I-Thou aperture – the pinhole in the camera obscura of reality.

But where are the pinholes? There is certainly one between Assiyah and Yetzirah. Any strategic design researcher must cross through this narrow gate several times a year in order to understand our research subjects individually, then collectively, then together with our collaborators. This dialogical passing is synesis.

I referred to another pinhole earlier: “subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.” This is the pinhole between Yetzirah and Beriah.

But, in terms of the sefirot, does any sefirah serve as pinhole? Chokhmah is the obvious candidate, the zero-point from which Binah radiates and refracts.

I am tempted to take Malkhut-Keter as the collected intraworld transcendent light – the Malkhut Therefore of one world becomes the Keter Wherefore of the next.

Another possibility is looking at the topology dynamically, that is morphologically. Which “direction” is one going with respect to the One? Here it is difficult to avoid transcendence language. Ascent is everted descent, on the same ladder. Inhalation is everted exhalation in the same lungs.

For now, I have no conclusive answers, only new meditations to commence.

It is all very pretty.

Between wherefore and therefore

Chord, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Faith moves in the present, between wherefore and therefore.

“Wherefore…?”: Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief

“Therefore…?”: Pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

Each belief is engendered by an implicit wherefore before unfolding into explicit therefores.

Belief precedes speech and action, and is the fruit of faith. It is the rustling between whither and whence.

I originally formulated this idea using the model of the pragmatic maxim:

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the practical consequences that follow from it.

Thanks to C. S. Peirce for the pragmatic maxim:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Thanks to M. Tismisesky for bludgeoning Peirce’s verbosity into a two-word provocation:

And therefore…?

Thanks to H.-G. Gadamer for his “hermeneutic priority of the question”.

To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.

Scraps for the exnihilism file

Kabbalah, Philosophy

Every finite one is articulated from the infinite One by degrees of nihilitude. Nihilitude and finitude belong entirely to infinitude and are essential within infinite self-articulation. Before the beginning, there is a faint trace of indivisible difference. At the beginning, infinity and the possibility of finite being divide without exclusion. In the beginning, exclusive subjectivities separate from one another. Thereafter, everything is a sum of objects, and non-objects are nothing. Each degree layers nihilitude upon nihilitude.

Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief, and pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

The pragmatic consequence of a belief is its implicit “Therefore…?”

The hermeneutic presequence of a belief is its implicit “Wherefore…?” “and this answers what?”

Belief is prior to speech and action. Belief is the fruit of faith, a wherefore and therefore, a wither and whence of spirit, a rustling in the present.

The wherefore flows from Yetzirah; the therefore unfolds into Assiyah.

Sophists are so spiritually underdeveloped that they lack the capacity to conceive even the possibility of wisdom transcending their own. This is one of the most radical category mistakes, for wisdom is precisely active awareness of this possibility. Wisdom is wise most of all to how oblivion works and lives in ironic tension between certainty and certainty of disruptive, radical surprise ex nihilo.

Metacognitive incompetence entered the popular sphere as Dunning-Kruger.

But millennia before, Plato spoke of metasophical incompetence as double-ignorance — not knowing that one does not know. Socrates knew he did not know, and for this reason was the wisest man in Athens.

But every age has its sophists who know they know and, with the confidence and barbarous serenity of youth, dispense to all what everyone knows is wisdom: wisdom is confident, self-certain, calming, comforting, accepting. Who wouldn’t pay top dollar for such wisdom?

One fool’s dissenting wisdom:

The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…

The substance of oblivion, ignorance and the very possibility of surprise is shared with relevance, focus, discrimination and mortality. Nihilitude, and more nihilitude. Without nihilitude, we return to our source.

Well-tempered words

Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I used a musical metaphor yesterday, conceived mid-thought, and today I’m appreciating its aptness. I mentioned well-tempered vocabulary, making an analogy (or anomalogy) with tempered scales to which harpsichords, pianos and most other keyboard instruments are tuned.

I have been looking for just the right set of English translations of Hebrew words for the sefirot and olamot and related ideas. I am also bringing some decades-old ideas to this work. I am pursuing internal harmony within the traditional framework but also across tradition to my own personal understanding, which, being a product of my own limit-bound finitude, certainly contains the usual scotomata, oblivia and eye-beams. Nothing lines up perfectly, but by looking at whole and part together, hearing chord and harmony in each meaning, they can be gathered in approximate inter-perfection.

My hope is that this sincere attempt at harmonious assimilation will coax my reason upward to be graciously met and tempered by intellection in descent, and that any work I do in this spirit will effect the same for anyone who tries to play golden ball with these words and ideas.

Perfection in such translation work is impossible. There are always trade-offs, audible disharmonies, humilities. Perfection is our holy asymptote, and it is not ours to have. The best we can do is give ourselves to this infinite perfection and play our finite part within it, at our finite, imperfect best.

Gevurahless Chesed

Kabbalah, Letterpress

If Chesed is lovingkindness, Gevurah should be lovingseverity.

It is easy to see that Gevurah stripped of kindness is loveless judgment.

It is harder is to see that Chesed stripped of severity is equally loveless niceness.

Only together with Gevurah is Chesed love.

In Tiferet, this couple (and all couples) unite and inter-perfect in the beauty of balance.

Continue reading Gevurahless Chesed →

Kabbalah prints v.2

Kabbalah, Letterpress, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I need to print revised editions of both the dialectic sefirot (which seems more true and important to me by the day), and the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet, for a mix of boring and interesting reasons.

The boring reason is transliterative consistency. My earlier prints had some minor inconsistencies that are bothering me. Da’at, Tif’eret and Netsach have been changed to Daat, Tiferet and Netzach. Assiyah has been changed to Asiyah.

More interesting are some refinements in alternative translations translations of sefirot.

  • Gevurah changes from “power” to “severity”.
  • Chesed changes from “love” to “kindness”.
  • Netzach changes from “eternity” to “overcoming”.
  • Hod changes from “splendor” to “glory”.
  • Malkhut changes from “kingdom” to “sovereignty”.

These changes are all still traditional, but make a better-tempered whole.

Most exciting though are the changes in the four worlds chart.

First, I made two intensely satisfying improvements to the column labels:

  • “subject” is now “self”.
  • “understanding” is now “givenness”.

In the rows, I re-tuned some of the language:

  • In Atzilut, Chayah changes from “life-essence” to “source”, and its givenness remains “mystical”.
  • In Beriah, Neshamah changes from “divine breath” to “intellect”, and its givenness changes from “interpretive” to “intellective”.
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach remains “spirit”, and its givenness changes from “allusive” to “figurative”.
  • In Asiyah, Nefesh changes from “vital soul” to “soul” and its givenness remains “literal”.

I plan to print this new sheet and live with it for a week or two before committing to plates.

This is starting to feel very much my own intimate understanding within my tradition, and it is becoming more starkly beautiful to me with each revision.

Update August 19, 2023: I was considering “lovingkindness” for Chesed. There are good arguments for it. Viewed from approximate absoluteness, as emanated from Binah, Chesed is, in fact, complete lovingkindness, from which Gevurah develops its complementary severity. But viewed from below, which is the perspective of this sheet, Gevurah can be excluded from Chesed, which is then mere kindness — the loveless niceness of unconditional mercy and tolerance — always toward some at the expense of others.