Yesterday, I went back to the letterpress studio to print my latest project: Phi (the golden ratio) to the myriadth place, printed with golden ink — a blend of glow-in-the-dark and gold, mixed, of course, in a golden ratio — set in a golden ratio text block on a golden ratio sheet of paper, with golden ratio margins around the text.
Premise:
Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change.
But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest to protect. This is intrinsic to philosophical work.
This inability to explain and protect — even to gain personal clarity on what is happening — prevents designers from securing the conditions needed to do design’s most important work. And it impedes design’s expansive development into new fertile regions.
“What?” you might say at this point, “I don’t recall doing philosophy at work.”
Most have some notion of what a philosophy is. According to Wilfred Sellars, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Let us adopt this as our definition of philosophy, as thing, as noun.
But far fewer of us understand philosophizing as an activity. We understand it so little — or worse, misunderstand it so much — that we do not recognize what is happening when we find ourselves in a philosophical problem. We imagine that doing philosophy is like arguing or constructing a theory or indulging in abstract speculation. These, however, are merely using a philosophy to do thinking — to produce complex thought systems. Any designer knows, using a tool and making a tool are different matters.
Philosophy means immersing in a philosophical problem, of the form, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it “I don’t know my way about.” Which is to say it is not even yet a problem and what it lacks is precisely form. That is, it is an aporia, a perplexity, also known in the field of design as a wicked problem.
But simply naming it is not the same as knowing it. It locates it on a map, but it does not convey how it is to be in the place depicted on the map. It presents it objectively, in a comfortable third-person perspective. But philosophical problems a subjective crises, experienced from inside it, from the first-person. And this experience is not merely uncomfortable or ambiguous. They are often uncanny, unnerving, infuriating and excruciating. And not when the process is going wrong. They are this way precisely when they are going right.
But people hate this feeling. They feel hellish heat, and if they are in a position to do so, shut down the kitchen.
Design is hard to do because philosophy is hard to do, and we lack norms to help us discern healthy pain (like morning sickness, labor pains, growing pains) from unhealthy pain (infection, malnutrition, organ failure, death pangs). As soon as any pain happens, out comes the anesthesia, anti-anxiety medicine, quarantine, scalpels — whatever makes it go away. And as with many ill-chosen medical interventions, the pain is not alleviated; it is exchanged for some variety of numbness, and often some future health failure. It is not dealt with, head-on and directed toward recovery of health, much less growth and flourishing.
Promise:
By understanding the role philosophy does play and can play in design, design can escape the tyranny of misnorms (application of the wrong set of norms to a situation, which prevent the situation from developing toward improvement), and work more effectively in its current spheres of activity, and, better, expand this its domain to areas where other ways of working have failed to produce positive change, or even failed catastrophically and made matters worse.
Show me a calendar with each day bricked up solid with hour and half-hour meetings, and I will show you a vivisected soul. Our souls are made out of attention. That attention has scope, density and duration, and these grow together, shrink together, deteriorate together, shatter together. A person who shifts attention dozens of times a day, cannot maintain a self. That person will become a different self each week and a stranger to itself year over year, and it won’t even have time or presence to notice.
to notice.
To what may we compare infinitude? To what can we, within the all-inclusive exteriorless One, make comparison with One?
An analogy compares two like things, side by side. “This is like that, in this specific way.” It is metaphoric.
An anomalogy compares someness to Allness. “This is both of, but exceeded by This, in an inconceivably universal way.” It is vertiphoric. It is a species of symbol.
In earlier invocations of the “Pearls and Shells” anomalogy, the pearlescent element, nacre, insulated the subject from the object and environment, and allowed these not-self beings to peacefully neighbor or environ the self.
This individuating substance was imagined to be mind: We coat whatever realities we cannot incorporate into our own selfhood with intelligibility. Mind helps us cope with not-self, also known as alterity.
The earlier anomalogy goes like this: An oyster inhabits an existence suspended between two alterities. The first alterity, the outer alterity, is the all-encompassing ocean. The second alterity, inner alterities, is whatever particles from the ocean get inside the shell with the oyster. The oyster responds to both alterities the same way. It secretes its own selfhood, its mind-nacre, and coats the offending alterity, layer upon layer, until the alterity is smooth, lustrous and undisturbing. The particles are painted smooth and round and become pearls. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the oyster can live side by side with these irritants, because they are comprehended with nacre. The ocean, too — the dread source of all irritants and inexhaustibly teeming with existential dangers — is coated with layer upon layer of protective nacre. It is painted on all sides, repainted, innumerable times until it is thick, smooth and protective. The oyster coats the ocean with nacre, and the inner surface of the shell, the mother-of-pearl lining makes the ocean habitable for the oyster and its treasure-house of pearls.
The nacre substance is the same in both alterities, and its function is the same — insulation, protection, self-preservation. What differs is the topology — the situating curvature. Pearls are convex and are comprehended by the oyster. The shell is concave; it comprehends the oyster. Flip your shell inside-out — that is, evert it — and you will find yourself holding a pearl. Evert a pearl, and you will find yourself held within a shell, or rather, the shell will find you held within it.
Lately, I have noticed that my thinking has moved to a new standpoint.
The next invocation of “Pearls and Shells” goes like this: Perhaps the nacre with which we paint the defining boundaries between selfhood and otherhood is not mind, but something beyond mind that conditions and enables it. Perhaps nacre is the principle of “not” — nihilitude.
Nihilitude belongs to infinitude, and is inseparable from it. Nihilitude generates and sustains finitude within infinitude, without disturbing the all-inclusive purity of infinitude with even a trace of exclusion. Indeed, exclusion of nihilitude from infinitude would be an abhorrent exclusion.
Perhaps nihilitude is the substance the ocean self-secretes into itself in order to allow a spark of itself to be an oyster, liberated to be not-the-whole-ocean, through imprisonment within a mother-of-pearl vault. The vault fills with ten-thousand pearls, each of which, touched by the oyster’s tender midas flesh, is counted among its pearly hoard.
As behind, so beyond. And so thrice-present between.
I object to the idea that absolute truth is objective.
I refuse to be subjected to this unacceptable and arbitrary constraint!
I am vexed by the unconscious prejudice  that knowledge is a system of defined convex entities locally and causally connected with one another, like words in a sentence, or parts in a machine.
I will not cave on this point!
(I’m a granddad. Suffer and like it.)
In our time, and in all times like this one, nihilism is in the air.
I do not only mean that nihilism is in the news or in art, or in the nihilistic blending of news and art. Each time some lost youth commits a politically-charged murder, but their ideology cannot be pinned down because — let’s be real — these young pale criminals are barely able to think, much muster the integrity to believe anything whole-heartedly or whole-mindedly, which is the crux of the problem! — and it appears they are caught in the nowhere between the extremist poles of the horseshoe. where the only possible point of agreement is hatred of this world, whatever has produced such a world of which they are both product and victim (and, of course, inevitably whatever hydra head of Jew-hatred is in fashion, whether anti-Pharisee, antisemite, anti-Elders Cabal, anti-Zionist).
Such amorphous hatred craves an object upon which it may condense and have form — a thing to vent itself upon, and justifications for the venting and its object. A universal loathing — ressentiment — precedes all ideological justification. But the theories, the alleged causes, the expressions, the abuse are only stations on the way to fully embodying the nihilistic impulse in consummating acts of annihilation.
The ideologies, manifestos, memes and suicide notes are not the logic behind such murders. They are the final sputters of failing language on the way to the ultimate expression of nihilism: murder.
But again, the nihilism in the air is not only, or even primarily, the topic of nihilism or nihilism as diagnosis.
Rather, nihilism in the air is the rebreathed bad breath we draw into our lungs wherever a critical mass of people at some time or place is meaning-starved.
I have been in a great many corporate headquarters. In some, I was disturbed by an odor of fear. In others, I have choked on despair. We can also sometimes smell negativity (detect “bad vibes”) in retail spaces (especially big box stores and malls), cultural events, political demonstrations, places of worship, and, let us not forget! — schools. Anywhere that people of similar disposition gather, the air carries a spirit, a breath of some kind, most noticeable to outsiders.
People who breathe fumes of fear, despair, disregard, contempt, absurdity — if they are not of the kind who actively exhale that kind of air — are enervated by it, and gradually, passively lose their taste for life. They lose hope. They stop caring about the future because they cannot even feel the possibility of future meaning. They do only what they are forced to do, by others or by themselves through that internalized slavery we call “self-discipline”. And they do not much mind the idea of the world being destroyed, if it spares them the wearying prospect of being at work tomorrow. They might even siphon a little energy from counter-nihilists who hate the order in which they are trapped. “The enemy of my enemy” might not be my friend — in fact, the enemy might despise passive complicity even more than their active enemies — but from a safe distance and through a shielding screen, the destruction of my own oppressors (by potentially worse ones) emits heat, noise, flashing, vengeance, pity-fodder and moralistic escapism.
And the products and services of such unhappiness is the same kind. If these brand emanations are not energetically negative, they are energetically nil — that half-pointless, half-phony charade we call “corporate”. Abandon all hope, employees and vendors who enter here, physical or metaphorical. And consumers of their productive output beware.
All this together — the strip-mining of human souls to extract depleted psychic resources — a world overflowing with unlovable and meaningless consumer products, supported by listless, robotic, over-scripted services — education optimized for life in these conditions, in schools that epitomize these conditions and suck life, hope and enthusiasm out of children and replace it with meaning-depleting ideological mechanics — entertainment-news media whose message is inattentive, flitting and spastic consumption — produce conditions ideal for active annihilation — righteous violence, vengeance, martyrdom of self and others to causes that justify it. We know victory by the enemies of our enemies will be even worse than what we have, but at least we can indulge a moment of schadenfreude watching our despised tormentor suffer and perish a few moments before it is our own turn.
Here we are.
But this can be reversed. Or rather, eversed. And the passage is precisely where we least expect it: nihilo.
And our best access is, believe it or not, design. Not the kind of servile and domesticated corporate consultant “design” optimized to meet or exceed the expectations of C-suite sociopaths and their demoralized drones — but rather design which challenges the hegemony of technik.
 “You want cheap zen?” — Topological “one hand clapping” = the seam in a mobius strip where one surface joins its reverse, or the plane where a klein bottle is simultaneously inner and outer, the ambinity space where the shame of loving cheap beauty (for example of a yin-yang) and shame of that love blend into plasma, the stuff of transgressed taboo, hypercharged cringe.
And we want to center the marginal, normalize abnormality, establish revolutionary overthrow of the establishment? We want to flatten parallax, so the one-eyed man can be king of irony? Â We have deflated counterculture of its spirit — its ambinity — and pumped this precious quality into normality…!
We paint icons of iconoclastic saints rebreaking the same shattered taboos, and we glow with comfy self-satisfaction as we receive pats on the head for being transgressors against orthodoxy. We piously recite critical thoughts without ever questioning our pieties. HR loves our rebellious ideas, our tattoo, the passions and adventures and quirks we dutifully list when we do a round of introductions. And art! It is so important to be creative.
We could not face the shame and fear and disorientation of being otherwise.
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.
And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.
Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?
It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).
Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.
An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.
Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.
Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.
But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.
Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.
But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.
These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.
This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.
Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.
Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.
Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.
…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…
I’ve probably said this a zillion times, but it is worth repeating: Myriad is a pretty way to express indeterminate magnitude — uncountably many. Originally, myriad meant ten-thousand, and in pre-digital times ten-thousand was, for all practical purposes, uncountable. Computers have since blown out the limits of countability. We need something much larger, now. For this purpose, I like “zillion” quite a bit. Zillion is technically a fictional number, which pushes it beyond the limits of quantity into a quality of uncountability, and which gives it an attractive goofiness and some substantial functional advantages over myriad.
The widespread use of infinity as a quantity is, metaphysically speaking, incorrect. Infinity is beyond the domain of quantity.
What most people mean when they say “infinite” is indeterminate. But because within their particular enworldment there is no need for metaphysical infinite, it makes no internal difference.
It does, however, close off all thought that might lead beyond this understanding. But that is actually a feature, not a bug.
In third grade, when I was chain-reading every Oz book in the Morrison Elementary Library, I learned that the land of Oz was protected by the Deadly Desert. Set foot on it, you yourself dissolve into sand. Later I learned that Hades is moated by obliviating rivers, each annihilating some aspect of selfhood. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell observed a universal pattern in myths and fairy tales of thresholds at the start and end of the hero’s journey that dissolves and reconstitutes the hero.
The hero’s journey, Campbell’s meta-myth, sheds important light on what these stories are really about: transformational experiences. They involve leaving this world, entering a new world, the hero undergoing ordeals and overcoming profound challenges that fundamentally and inwardly change the hero, and then the hero returning to this world with new insights and gifts for the people still on this side of reality.
Soul and place are intimately connected, and this is because enworldment dissolves the subject-object dichotomy. A new enworldment always entails a reborn subject, and a new subject always reenworlds itself.
But this is not a painless change. “Leaving this world” is always a kind of death and an entry into something inconceivable. Nietzsche said it beautifully, “only where there are graves are there resurrections.”
A rebirth event cannot happen within an enworldment, as a simple change of opinion or moral outlook or life trajectory. They happen across enworldments — in traversal of nihilitude that dissolves self and world together.
Rebirth is preceded by death — nihilitude — and, before that, dread, which is the existential response to intuited nihilitude, by no means limited to death. But if we confront dread and plunge into oblivion, we reemerge on the other side, in the next enworldment… ex nihilo.
Is this myriad vs infinity distinction just is a pedantic hair-split? Yes! And perhaps life as you know it depends on this remaining so. Note the note of unease behind the annyance and boredom. Also, have you checked Instagram today?
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Below is one — perhaps idiosyncratic — common sense account of the Olamot, presented from the first-person:
Common sense of Assiyah: each of our senses gives us the world in some sensory mode — a world with reality understood to transcend each of our senses and all our senses, but gains reliability through sensory testimony. What we see and touch is assumed to be real. What we see, but cannot touch is assumed to be a hallucination.
Common sense of Yetzirah: each of us is given the world in a specific way, but our own way shares much in common with others of our community, and this commonality — this consensus understanding — is our most reliable access to the reality of the world. What all of us understand together is assumed to be real. What only one of us understands is idiosyncratic, less real, possibly delusional. What other communities take as common sense, but which are clearly false or nonsensical, might be delusional groupthink.
Common sense of Beriah: from moment to moment, age to age, the common sense of solitary persons and the common sense of communities changes, and testifies to different experiences and understandings. Reality and truth clearly can be given quite differently to different people in different places in different times. What is common across them, and how can they differ? The commonalities and differences are always given to the threefold present, according to what can and cannot be received in this particular I-here-now. All this is what existentialism (and its myriad siblings) pursues, and in response it receives ciphers, interminable questions, aporias, shocks, terrors, ecstasies. Light, dark, rippling oblivion.
Common sense of Atzilut: our various attempts to account for the givenness of the real points to a reality beyond questions and answers, beyond defined objects and defining subjects, beyond sense, within a commonality so all-inclusively common, so inescapably, so infinitely common, it is beyond comprehension.
One account of ztimtzum — today’s conception:
In the finite world, impurity is a matter of exclusion of inessentials.
But infinity is essentially absolute, unconditional inclusion.
When finite being attempts to approach the infinite, any exclusion from the infinite is an impurity.
Yet, finite being is somehow entirely of the infinite without itself being infinite.
Pure infinitude precludes exclusion.
We subsist finitely as impurities to the infinite.
Infinitude’s capacity for finitude depends on nihilitude, the principle of impurity — of self-exclusion from infinitude — within infinitude.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats the infinite ocean with accreting layers of protective oblivion, sheltering tender finitude from dissolution into what it is not, yet is. An infinitessimal universe-size spark.
Nihilitude is the nacre which coats each defined concept with the distinction “as opposed to”. A refracted spark filling heaven with stars, worlds, sun, moon, earth, oceans, lands, people.
Nihilitude defines finite against infinite, then defines finite against finite. Nihilitude’s self-exclusion everts the relationship between the finite-and-infinite, rendering it everything-or-nothing.
Nihilitude is creation. All creation is ex nihilo.
Nevertheless, infinitude continues to penetrate oblivion, leaving halo-traces at concentrated strike points. Infinitude crisscrosses each finite being as dimensions of time space and self. The intersection of this crossing is the threefold present.
Oblivion is something that creates apparent nothingness, and is therefore not an impurity at all, but which also makes apparent impurity possible, without defiling infinitude with exclusion. Tzimtzum.
Psychology is how a materialist copes with transcendence. Realities barely within the soul’s reach but well beyond its grasp — including the soul itself — are flipped inside-out, everted, into objects and stuffed inside each individual’s mind.
Everything-sized souls, everted, become minute, and are sealed inside the physical body — ghosts who haunt our physical frame.
And the membrane of nihilitude that insulates each self from infinitude, everts into a vacuum of interminable finitude, endless stacking of spaces, times, subjects.
When wind blows through this ghost, it disturbs our sense of reality, but we know that it originates in the unconscious and terminates in delusion. So it is for psychologists.
A painter is painting a picture of another painter in the act of painting. The painter plans to call this piece “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.
The second painter (like the first) is holding a palette in his left hand, a brush in his right, and is standing before a canvas, and upon the canvas is his painting-in-progress.
The essential difference between these two painters (besides, of course one being the painting subject, and the other being a painted object) is that the two artists paint using different palettes.
(Neither painter is color blind. Only their palettes are limited.)
The first painter’s palette has only two colors: red and white.
What makes the second painter so fascinating and infuriating to the first — and, in fact, the entire reason he wants to paint him — is the fact that the second painter paints only in blue and black. For the first painter, this difference is a crisis, and he hopes to resolve it by capturing that difference on canvas. This is why he is painting “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.
So the first painter sets out to capture this difference — of painting in blue and black — using his own palette of red and white.
And the painting is a success. By some poetic miracle, the first painter perfectly captures the essential difference. Or at least some artists believe so. The community of painters who paint in red and white, marvel at his success.
But the second painter sees in the portrait allegedly of him, only a reflection of the first painter — certainly not himself. And his view is shared by his peers who paint in blue and black.
And here I am — palette and brush in hand — painting this fable in black, white, red and blue, which is the palette of this fable-world.
And whoever hears this fable is cursed to paint this story and the telling of this story onto their own canvas with their own palette.
The end.