All posts by anomalogue

Sacred and profane

Philosophy

The bits of reality that understand that they and all other bits of reality are finite participants in absolute infinitude — each its own center-point in the infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere —  seem almost essentially different from the finite bits of reality that mistake themselves for the absolute itself, by seeing validity in only one of the myriad possible truth-conceptions.

One of the better essentialisms, if one must be an essentialist is the distinction between sacred and profane.

The sacred is deeply, humbly, mystically pluralist. If one commits to a single truth, this is a methodological decision.

The profane, on the other hand, is philosophically omniscient, conceptually equipped to understand every relevant fact, though lacking capacity to contain all facts, because nobody can know everything.

*

If I could make one change to the world it would be to persuade all parents to adopt this as their scold of choice: “You are not the sole center of the universe.”

*

We have sacred and profane confused. Sacredness is oriented toward living relationship with what is not ourselves — not comprehension, belief or identity, which has much more to do with our own sequestered mental processes, however passionately we process our mental product.

But we feel heat from high-voltage mental short-circuits and mistake it for the warmth of care.

This encourages us to view the most profane, fevered theological fanatics for the most devoutly religious people, despite the fact that the object of their devotion is ideoidols — not any being who transcends their imaginations. Similarly, we allow ideological identity-mongers to enjoy exclusive rights to the virtue of empathy, though their intense feelings are bound up now with real living people that they know personally, but with their own mental images, their own logics, their own sociological theories, and most of all their own ethical status — and they fail to notice that they dehumanize not only their detested enemies, but those they imagine themselves to champion. Worshippers of imagined gods, defenders of make-believe people, riding into epic battles on the side of good against the forces of evil — dangerous sleepwalkers in philosophical Augmented Reality goggles, swinging real weapons in real rooms with real people in them…

Meanwhile, sacredness goes about its work respectfully and unobtrusively, learning, sharing, forming relationships and making modest accomplishments.

Inherent truth

Philosophy

Today, we are inclined to take Michelangelo’s notion of forms inhering within blocks of marble more as poetic expression than factual assertion: “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

Perhaps someday we will reach a point where, similarly, we will hear the notion of truth inhering within reality as poetic expression. At the time we will experience even the driest, most matter-of-fact assertions that reality bears an inherent truth as one kind of poetic stance, without any inclination to argue over whether it is true that fact is a poetic mode.

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.” – Jack Handey

The Collective Mental Disorder game

Philosophy

I don’t know why I do this. I just posted something thoughtful on Facebook to be ignored, snarked at or bufoonated upon.

From years of reading about mass misbehaviors (aka history) and living through a couple myself, I’ve come to the belief that whatever can go wrong in the mind of an individual can also go even more horribly wrong in the culture of a collectivity.

I enjoy the exercise of imagining every variety of mental disorder on a mass scale. I start with speculating what it would look like as a mass phenomenon from the outside, because that is easier. You can look for pattern matches using stuff you’ve picked up from History Channel or best seller historical fiction. That’s the warmup.

Then I try to imagine the same phenomenon from the inside as an unsuspecting participant, fully bought into the version of truth generated by the totalizing interpretive scheme and its logic. I’ve learned this in school as fact, see it reinforced wherever I look, and everyone around me agrees with it (or at least all decent people do). What is the world like from this standpoint, ordered within this perspective?

A few examples: What would mass delusion be like, experienced from the inside? What about mass narcissism? Mass OCD? Mass sociopathy? Would there be any hints of what was going on? How could I know? I’m guessing every hint would be handily explained away by the logic of the disorder, so how would would I and those around me logically neutralize every clue that we’d lost our collective mind?

I have a copy of the DSM on my shelf, and people sometimes ask why we we have it. I usually answer “bad taste in friends” or something along the lines of needing to diagnose my book hoarding problem — but I think I’m going to take it off my shelf and put it on my coffee table, so I can open it to a random place and play the Collective Mental Disorder game with visitors.

I recommend declining any invitations to my home until this whim blows over.

Co-marveling

Biography

Helen and I built our relationship on sharing experiences. It began with cooking together, then mountain biking, and then listening to music — and then marveling to music.

This is very different for me; I’ve always seen relationships in terms of conversation, and most importantly, exchange of ideas.

But from childhood to late adolescence, Helen absolutely refused to connect intellectually. I was forced to find some other mode of relating to her, and finding it changed everything for me. To share the experience of marveling — to have a similarly awestruck response to beauty — connects us to each other and to the world. It is communion.

Then, after pointing me to the world beyond language, Helen became obsessed with linguistics, and now her knowledge is so deep, intricate and technical it defies my comprehension.

*

Exchange of ideas remains my primary mode of relating to other people. But now, the ideas I’m most keen to exchange are ideas that affirm the reality and the importance of reality outside of what words capture — the realities to which we relate through art, through religion, through wordless interaction, through sharing nonverbal experiences, through the exchange of gifts.

*

Language itself can grow solipsistic if we don’t perpetually reintroduce it to what transcends language. Yes, language and reason is reality but in a very important sense it is also with reality. Reality involves but exceeds the word.

*

I am still reading Michael Fishbane’s Sacred Attunement. My current section is examining a passage from Genesis from four multiple hermeneutic modes, called Pardes:

And Jacob went out from Beer-sheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon the place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood beside him, and said: ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac. The land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.’ And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid, and said: ‘How full of awe is this place! this is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put under his head, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-el, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. — Genesis 28:10–19

For Jacob it was a space, marked with an anointed stone.

Why can’t it also be music?

Hounds of Love

Abbey Road

The Green Bus

Naive realized

Enworldment

Second-naturalness is naive realization.

We go from one state of naive realism to another, hopefully to a naive realism energized with a profound sense of irony and creative possibility. But, ironically, one we cannot help but take for real.

This state transcends postmodern knowingness. It commits, because it has overcome the silly idea that in the absence of a reigning Truth only anarchy is possible, and rather, has come to accept a more democratic ideal: respect for what realities say to us when we interact with them.

Authority has been broken, shattered, pulverized, atomized, subatomized and distributed to every corner of the universe, and now everything is due its respect.

Or so it seems to me, and I find it hard to believe otherwise.

The Click

Enworldment, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Myriad ways to experience the world are possible, and these ways of seeing the world correspond with particular orderings of intuitive activity.

*

Can you perceive this dancer to be spinning clockwise and then to be spinning counter-clockwise? Can you feel what kind of effort you are making? There may be inner-chatter associated with your effort, but if you pay close attention you’ll notice that the chatter is neither the effort itself, nor is it able to capture the effort in words. Something beyond language is happening.

*

When we look at an optical illusion and we perceive it first one way, then another — what is going on there? This is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon. There is an inner click, and our perception changes from one stable state to another.

When we read a text and we derive one meaning from it, but then later, another — is this really that different from the various gestalt modes of an optical illusion? And is the intellectual click that happens across the different readings really a linguistic phenomenon?

I would argue that both of these cases manifest a tacit shift in our intuitive order, which we experience most obviously as a change in experience of an intentional object (a visual field or a text) — but which also for the duration of the experience changes how it is to exist.

Like optical illusions, like texts with layered meanings, minds are multistable. And the various stabilities perceived or understood “out there” are actually the various stabilities “in here” doing the perceiving or conceiving in a particular mode of inner intuitive collaboration. This is what is at stake in all interpretation. We ourselves change in understanding. (A religious person might prefer saying it in different language: Our souls are transfigured by faith.)

Of course, we can also lose order. We can be of two minds on some matter, or we may be conflicted, confused or perplexed. These less-ordered or chaotic states also affect how it is to exist.

Confusion about what is going on in the world makes us feel confused in our own being. It is no accident that we say “I am confused” when we are unable to make sense of something.

*

To get our intuitive mess back in order when we say “I am confused” or to break an intuitive order that says “I am miserable” or “The world is a vale of misery” we cannot just operate directly on our intuitions. Intuitions just aren’t of a nature where we can manipulate them like objects. (((Intuitions are subjects, each a sand-sized jewel in Indra’s Net, each a divine spark that beyonds All in its own partial way.)))

I would also argue that operating directly on the conclusions our intuitive orders produces willful delusions. We cannot just decide that “I am clear” or “I am happy” or “The world is a vale of happiness” and spontaneously see things that way, any more than we can look at an optical illusion and just assert that we see it as the gestalt we haven’t gotten to click yet.

We must approach our intuitive orders indirectly, through various intentional objects, and do intuitive experiments, trying to entertain it in a multiplicity of ways, until a gestalt shift occurs that changes what we experience on the whole and in part. I call these gestalts synesis.

When the click happens and we truly understand a situation differently, experience it differently, reach different conclusions and find ourselves feeling and responding differently — this is metanoia.

Metanoia is often translated as repentance, which is not altogether wrong, but it misses the spirit of the change. It is not about penitential emotions that motivate us to do better. It is about re-understanding things in such a way that makes the non-desirability of our old way clear, and causes a new way of understanding, behaving and existing to emerge that is experienced as preferable to the earlier way.

*

When we try to change our lives, what we believe, how we behave, without making our intuitions click into a new order, we will speak and act in a way that is artificial. We must constantly micromanage ourselves, police ourselves, remain vigilant of ourselves. We must consciously “do the work” of enforcing the desired cognitions, conduct and speech, or our unconscious selves will horrify and shame us with its unwanted outputs.

If we change our lives through metanoia, the change is obviously different from what seemed natural to us before, but this new existence is second-natural. We spontaneously, intuitively (literally), effortlessly have a new and preferable outlook on things, and our souls somehow, mysteriously, feel better.

This year's winning illusion presents a simple shape rotating around a horizontal and vertical axis at the same time

Synesis and perplexity

Synesis

Learning is never just a passive transmission of truths from one mind to another. Learning is an integration of new knowledge into an existing body of knowledge.

All this knowledge, old and new, is held together with intuitive knowing — pre-verbal relating, responding or feeling — of various kinds. This intuitive holding-together is what is meant when we say we understand something. Behind every understanding is a complex coordination of intuitions — an intuitive concerting that makes sense of something. And behind that is intuitive holding-together of understandings that situates and relates each bit of knowledge within our overall sense of the world.

The Greeks, with staggering elegance, called understanding synesis.

Synesis means, simply, “bring together”. Synesis is a bringing together one’s own various intuitions, in order to bring together various ideas and perceptions into something understood, which is then brought together with the rest of one’s understandings, one’s holistic understanding of everything. And once something is understood by one person, it can then be taught to other persons, and then there is a fourth bringing together: shared understanding. So synesis brings together many diverse kinds of bringing together: intuitive, phenomenal, conceptual, social.

Sometimes people must come together to develop an understanding where understanding does not yet exist.

There is a problematic situation that is understood only partially, vaguely and inadequately — or that is understood in conflicting ways — or, far more rarely, is perplexing to everyone involved. Nobody can even agree on what the problem is, or what the questions are that need answering.

These problematic situations are uncannily challenging. The more the situation is examined and analyzed, the less clear it becomes. People begin to see and feel the contradictions in their own positions. Superficial and vague opinions fall apart and dissolve into incoherence.

The problematic situation becomes a full perplexity: a failure of understanding so total that articulating the problem or asking questions is impossible.

Perplexities generate intense anxiety. It is the anxiety we all felt as students struggling to understand a math problem, or trying to get the meaning of a poem or text passage we find opaque. It is the feeling we have when someone corners us and overwhelms us with details on topics we know nothing about, and they refuse to let us disengage. Perhaps you feel some anxiety right now.

In perplexity we are confronted with a demand to understand something that defies all understanding.

If we can avoid confronting a perplexity, we will. We will ignore it, or get by with a vague gist, or we will dismiss what perplexes us as nonsense, or as something for someone else to figure out, something that is not for us.

If we cannot ignore, evade or escape the perplexity, and are forced to confront and enter it, the anxiety can bloom into intense negative feelings. We might feel hostility toward the situation and the people involved in it, especially those who seem responsible for inflicting the anxiety. We might see them as hostile, aggressive, maybe even vicious, malicious or even evil. If we respond accordingly, we might be vicious, malicious or evil, ourselves, but with just cause, of course.

But the anxiety is not about any thing or person. Anxiety is something we go into, something we are in, something that grips us, and which then infuses everything around us, even our memories and prospects. It is like depression.

Referring to anxiety (or perplexity) as “something” is not exactly right. Anxiety is not really a thing. It is, in fact, an everything. It is our own self in a certain mode of existence, refracted through every particular of our existence.

When we in a state of perplexity we become anxiety, because anxiety is the experience of perplexity, and in it our enworldment, the world as it is for us, becomes anxious, on the whole and in detail.

Why does perplexity cause anxiety?

Generations of existentialists have taught us that anxiety is caused by nothingness, and most of all by our own eventual nothingness: death.

No being wants to die. Every synesis is also a being, and does not want to die.

Perplexity is synetic nothingness, in every dimension. It is the nothingness of shared understanding, social alienation. It is the nothingness of significance in a mass of incomprehensible data, chaos. It is the nothingness of our own intuitive coherence, nihilism, self-alienation. It is an ontological migraine. It is drowning in blindness and nullity. It is selfhood’s death, even when one knows the body will live on.

When perplexity happens, a synesis will need to come apart, essentially to die, so it can be brought back together in a form capable of making sense of what confronts it.

It is rare for one’s deepest synesis to be threatened in this way. But areas of understanding, even relatively minor subjects, say our understanding of an academic subject, or an understanding of another person’s subjectivity, or a problem we encounter at work, can throw us into crises.

When synesis is allowed to come apart and then is brought back together as a new synesis capable of ordering what was chaos, to conceive ideas that were inconceivable, to speak where speech was impossible, even to perceive what was imperceptible — and, further, is able to do so in a way that can be shared with other people who, before, were unable before to establish a shared understanding — something else happens, too — something unprovable, difficult to speak about, but absolutely palpable: more of one’s own self is brought together in the new understanding.

It as if silent, intuitive aspects of our inner selves — marginal, suppressed bits of potential within us — alienated spirits — are invited to participate in this new, more expansive understanding, and to become full citizens of ourselves.

We feel more whole, and we feel more connected to others, and to our own world, and to the greater reality. And, if we are open to it, we feel an embeddedness within a vast, incomprehensible reservoir of infinite potential, which exceeds, envelops, sustains and conceives reality.

Once we enter perplexity, how do we bring together a new synesis?

It is a how, and one that cannot be said or foreseen, only done through its own synesse. It is done using words, but much of it happens prior to language. It is done by groping, feeling, smelling, intuiting.

“Here I do not know how to move around.”

Methodic wisdom

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Star, Synesis, Wheel

Susan and I have been debating what wisdom is. We each felt the other’s view was incomplete. I thought her conception was overlapping too much with prudence; she thought mine reduced wisdom with mere open-mindedness. (Actually, she was right.) As we turned the question and viewed it from multiple angles, it became clear, as is so often the case, that it was a matter of emphasis. She was emphasizing exercise of foresight and consideration — awareness of implications beyond the immediate desires and compulsions. I was emphasizing readiness for thought-defying shock — awareness that our awareness is always partial and situated within a much vaster and weirder context, only the minutest speck of which we are conceptually prepared to understand or even perceive. We’re slowly converging on an agreement. Here’s my latest attempt, written primarily for Susan’s review:

Wisdom is an attitude of mind that considers ramifying implications that transcend the immediate concern, in time, in space and in subjectivity — especially those nonobvious implications that unfold only in careful consideration and those that unfold in ways inconceivable until they unfold in reality and which will be understood as inevitable only in retrospect. Wisdom expects to be surprised, because wisdom knows the limitations of thought, and leaves room for irruptions of reality and the epiphanies they bring.

If we accept this definition of wisdom, that would make design practice a methodical form of wisdom — an alternative to speculative-thought-and-talk decision-making.

Design method directs us to go to the reality we plan to change, and encourages us to interact with it directly, in order to encounter some of the implications and ramifications of our proposed changes — many of which we otherwise would never consider.

Design is methodic wisdom.

Chief among design’s considerations are the subjective ones — the interpretive and experiential consequences of deep, hidden differences in subjectivity that must be learned before they can even be conceived. (* see note below.)

Subjective learning of new conceptions is a rigorous exercise of hermeneutic, intellectual and emotional empathy (which I prefer calling synesis). It can sometimes radically redefine the designer’s understanding of the design problem, by revealing it in a new subjective light with new practical consequences — metanoia.

This metanoia — this new, consequential reconception — simultaneously reframes the problem and opens space for novel solutions. Problems and solutions, questions and answers, possibilities and actualities burst forth together with new conceptions. And because the new conception has been learned from real people and refer to real contexts, the newly conceived solutions are far more relevant and on-the-mark. I like to call design metanoia “precision inspiration”.

(* Note: The whole field of thought around conception is grossly misunderstood. Until a conception is learned, all ideas that require it are either inconceivable — submerged in intellectual blindness, neither perceivable nor imaginable — or misunderstood by another conception that comprehends it in a wrong sense, and commits category mistakes. If the originating conception of a set of ideas is finally acquired, the new conception spontaneously reorders the understandings, both on the whole and in part, and there is an epiphany. If the reconception is a very deep one, upon which many other conceptions are rooted, and these have wide-ranging pragmatic consequences, it can seem that everything has changed all at once. The scales seem to have fallen from one’s eyes, one feels reborn as a new person, and it feels and if the entire world has transfigured itself. Until one has experienced something like this, all language associated with this kind of event sounds like magical hocus-pocus — but this is only a misconception of what remains inconceivable. The consequences of this hocus-pocus are just the copious category mistakes of the believing fundamentalist and the unbelieving antifundamentalist.)

Soul-shaping

Geometric Meditations, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Politics, Spiral, Symbols and diagrams

 

A souls is a multistable dynamic intuitive system.

Insofar as it is a system that remains stable across changing conditions, a soul has a character, a personality of its own, enduring selfhood. To the degree a soul changes and adapts to conditions, a soul is responsive to the world.

At the extreme of selfhood is closed self, an intuitive system that no longer adapts or responds to the world, but instead uses the same intuitions the same way all the time. Only information it can comprehend is seriously entertained, and only conclusions that reinforce its workings are accepted. The soul maintains itself in a closed, circular state of autism.

At the extreme of responsiveness is the fragmentary self, an intuitive system that is so adaptive to its environment that it cannot find its own enduring selfhood within the changing configurations that its intuitions take as circumstances buffet it around. Its only hope for integrity come from the social environment. If the social environment gives it an identity and expects it to perform that identity, the soul responds obediently and then finds itself able to feel itself to be a self. But if the environment does not provide these reinforcements, the self is literally existentially threatened, and goes into a crisis. The soul has no internal means to maintain its own stable sense of self, and exists in a fragmentary state of borderline personality.

Under certain circumstances the closed selves and fragmentary selves can form an alliance. The closed selves adopt an ideology and ethical ruleset that, when performed, assigns stable identities to those who would otherwise live in fragmentary nothingness. The alliance requires strict adherence to roles and rules, and deviations from it, especially those which contradict the ideological conceptions and produce conditions that threaten its collective closed system, are treated as a collective existential threat. These alliances have low intolerance of stresses from beyond its ideological horizon, especially modes of conception incommensurable with the logic that holds its brittle system together.

When a person insists that selfhood is a superstructural artifact of social forces, that a person is reducible to the play of various identities, that social standpoints imprison us within limited understanding, beyond which there is blind belief in the testimony of others or disbelief and violence, this indicates participation in the closed alliance.

The overpowering need for selfhood in one particular conception, existentially threatened by rival theories or expressions of selfhood is the driving force behind all illiberalism.

*

Liberal democracy requires selves of a different shape, neither closed circles, nor open fragments, but a synthesis of the two, which I symbolize as a spiral — multistable dynamic intuitive system that is stable but is, to a degree, open to realities that challenge its integrity. It does this by cultivating a dynamic stability that can shapeshift in response to different challenges of its understanding — that is, it can entertain multiple understandings, but which is ordered by a deeper integrity that sees multiplicity of understanding as intrinsic to the human condition.

This deeper integrity goes by the name pluralism.

Pluralism’s unique mode of understanding, which conceives inconceivability in a manner conducive to actually conceiving inconceivable truths, and in this, to continually reaffirm its own pluralistic integrity.

Not all citizens of a liberal democracy must be pluralists, but enough must participate in political and cultural life to prevent a closed alliance to form, and for illiberalism to drive pluralism underground.

*

Hermeneutics is important in pluralism and in religion, because any deep act of understanding requires a soul to respond to a stable set of conceptions with a stability of its own, to re-form itself in an act of understanding. It must experiment with polysemic words and allow them to combine and crystalize in multiple ways, and then to respond selfully to these crystallization with its own intuitive order, and experience how it is to understand this text, this phenomenon, this design this way, and accordingly experience the world from this state.

Producing meaningful artifacts — whether objects, interactions, services, arguments, rituals, symbols — that order an understanding soul in a way that improves the experience of life is experience design at its profoundest level.

The pragmatic consequences of the Pragmatic Maxim

Philosophy, Pragmatism

The amazing thing about Pragmatism is how simple it is in its core. 

The entire Pragmatism philosophy in all its pluralistic blooming, buzzing varieties, as well as pragmatist approaches to myriad other disciplines — is just the working out of the practical consequences of this conception of meaning, encapsulated in 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.

These are holy words. 

Strange agents

Philosophy

Differences in how we interpret, think about and interact with the world are not matters of different vocabularies. On the contrary, divergent vocabularies are a matter of pre-verbal difference in interpretations and mental, emotional and practical responses.

Confusing things considerably, however, is the strange fact that adoption and use of new vocabularies can effect changes in our pre-verbal mental faculties. This how I explain our collective linguistic wrong turn, which, while not entirely fruitless has become barren. I’m turning my wheel sharply the other direction, and adopting a hard-nosed intuitivism, as painful as it is to make my language-mind admit it is not autonomous and self-contained, and that its facile answers are appealing more for being linguistically facile than for being real answers that truly account for life outside language.

I’ve been calling these strange agents intuitions.

Jealousy

Philosophy

I see jealousy as a painful but valuable form of perception. It is the detection of estrangement, real or possible, and the disruption it inflicts on the self.

There are at least three ways to avoid feeling jealousy, each a strategy against estranging disruption.

The first, most obvious one is that your relationships are on solid ground and are not currently at risk of estrangement.

A less obvious one is that your relationships are so impersonal that estrangement is the norm, and therefore not a threat. Incurable loneliness, emptiness, depression and irritability is the consequence. But these consequences of impersonality can become normal, too, and produces a worldview that experiences life itself as essentially impersonal and meaningless, just a play of social forces creating and animating social agents, who strive for power and mistake superstructural mental artifacts for souls.

The last one is that you and those with whom you relate are integrated within a social structure that keeps everyone in stable, fixed and familiar relationships with one another. Held in place and in shape within a complex network of interpersonal bonds and social associations, nobody is in danger of total estrangement. This stability, however, comes at the cost of personal freedom.

To encapsulate each cause in a word, defense against jealousy can come from intimacy, politics or culture.

 

Theology opposed to mundane life and art

Judaism, Philosophy

By Fishbane’s conception, what I do is not philosophy, but theology:

As with our lives in the natural world, theology is grounded in everyday reality — which includes both our normal experiences in time and space, and those caesural moments when something elemental breaks into consciousness. Moreover, as with the aesthetic imagination, theology is a symbolic form which takes our experiences in the natural world and reshapes them, so that their special qualities and depths may be brought to mind. We have noted that poetry in particular is a deliberate attempt to refocus our attention on daily happenings and their extraordinary dimensions or character. Theology tries to do this as well, but in an altogether unique and intensified manner.

I would put it this way. If in our ordinary experience caesural moments seem to happen against our will or expectation, and artwork tries, both willfully and expectantly, to create experiences of an elemental character, intentionally disrupting our normal habitude and common perceptions, theology tries to transform this perception of elementariness into a sustained way of life and thought. This does not mean living at some abnormal edge of experience, out of touch with our regular sense of things. It rather means taking a particular stand where the elemental and the everyday intersect. In ordinary life, the everyday is generally habitual, and when the elemental breaks through it overwhelms one totally; thus their crossing point is not so much an element of consciousness as the place of a radical opening of awareness. By contrast, the artwork tries to create a fabrication of the crossing point so that one may experience the sights and sounds of existence in a more primary way, and thus allow the elemental to cleanse our rudimentary perceptions for the sake of life. The artist therefore tries to jolt one into perceptions of the elemental so that it will challenge casual consciousness. Artwork is a response to ordinariness, and to the sealing of the abysses through routine mindlessness.

The ideal of theology is different. It tries to stand in the natural world where we live our everyday lives, and to experience all its happenings as points of crossing, where the elemental depths come to some phenomenal perception. Theology thus seeks to orient the self to a twofold dimension: to the numinous qualities of unsayable origin inhering in every moment of existence. So understood, all our worldly experiences are prismatic revelations of a deeper elementariness, the worldly shapes of primal forces received as sensations on our bodies and stimulations in our minds. It is thus through a wholly natural attitude toward the world that a deeper phenomenality is disclosed. A task of theology is therefore to attune the self to the unfolding occurrence of things in all their particularities and conjunctions, and help one remain steadfast at each new crossing point where raw elementariness, radically given, becomes human experience.

Theology is thus situated at the border of the known and unknown, of the manifest and the concealed. It is at this nexus that the self seeks God. For just here there is both a sense of happening and the excess of all happening, extending to the utmost depths of Being and beyond. Theology gathers the import of this awareness and attunes the heart to it, directing one’s attention beyond the perceived appearance of things to the intuited and imagined vastness of all existence, ever generated from the ultimate Source of all things (and actuality). This most primal Depth (beyond the Beyond of all conception), so infinitely disposing, is what we haltingly bring to mind by the word God. We thus gesture the thought-image of a supernal Font of Being; and with it also this more paradoxical, corollary notion: that if all existence is not God as such, it is also not other than God, Life of all life.

It was with such matters in mind that I spoke earlier of theology as a spiritual practice, whose principal task is to guide human thought and sensibility toward God. As the exercise of theological thinking unfolds, it directs the human spirit toward an increasingly focused awareness of God as the heart and breath of all existence, and tries to sustain that focus throughout the course of life. Put differently, theology seeks to cultivate an abiding consciousness of God’s informing presence in all the realities of existence, the infinite modalities of divine effectivity. Hence the world is both what we “take” it to be, in all the moments of ordinary experience, and what we must “untake” it to be, when we relate all things back to their ontological and primordial ground in God.

I have been trying for decades now to convince religious and mystical friends and acquaintances that my primary form of religious practice is thinking. This is inconceivable to many spiritual temperaments whose relationship to thought is different from mine. They conceive thought as something that stands apart from reality, and thinks about things, over and against. For such people, thinking as participation within reality is itself a remote idea that is hard to think about, and with such things we are often tempted to dismiss them as nonexistent. For someone whose existence is oriented to this mode of thinking, this kind of dismissal can feel personal, and when I was younger I did take spiritual anti-intellectualism, however benevolently intended, very personally, as the deepest inhospitality: “there is no room in my world for you, except as a deluded and arrogant fool.”

I’ve long since stopped trying to argue with inhospitality. The thoughts I love are ones who must be invited in and entertained as possible. They are not equipped with argumentative battering rams. They cannot debate their way into consideration. But when someone does invite these ideas into their souls, even as a guest whose stay is temporary, I feel grateful.

Fishbane also gives me a feeling of home. By giving voice to how I exist, proclaiming that this is a way to be — a good way — I feel enworlded with my own kind. I have a place here. I do not have to wander, homeless, seeking hospitality.

With a place of our own, a home, hospitality is something that we can give as well as receive.

Fishbane on metanoia

Judaism

Michael Fishbane describes metanoia beautifully and precisely:

…But then it may happen that the thoughtless ordinariness of daily life is jolted and gives way to a more elemental specificity. Suddenly something occurs that claims us with an overwhelming intensity, and floods our sensibilities without any accompanying thoughts of its human meaning. Rather, the sense of rupture is all, and it seems as if primordial energies have burst from the depths and ripped the veil normally stretched over things, concealing them in blandness. Such moments may occur within the bounds of nature, as with the uprush of some overwhelming vista or sound; they may happen in the human world, as with the unsettling impact of sudden death or love; or they may happen through the creations of culture, as with the capacity of certain compositions to propel us to the edge of sensibility. We then shudder before what is given to us from the fullness of phenomenal existence, manifesting mysteries of the surge of things at the core of world-being. Just here is an absolute “somethingness,” pulsing in elemental specificity—for we suddenly sense the raw plenitude of existence; but here too, simultaneously, it seems, is a revelation of primordial “nothingness,” yawning like an “inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber”—for we also sense that the event is in excess of human meaning. In time we come back to our normal selves, and when we do we more knowingly confirm this happening and ourselves as well, answering the ever-present question “Where are you?” with the confession “Here I am—just here.” On such occasions, consequent to the restabilization of consciousness, a renewed subjectivity is aroused in us (the “here I am”), together with an awakened sense of the great immensity in which we are suffused, now experienced at a particular time and place (the “just here”).

These experiences may fundamentally change our lives; for though the primal depths may close over, and we return to more regular experiences of the world, the “sense of depth” may remain in mind. And if so, one is infused by an awareness of a twofold dimension to reality—the pervasive superflux of existence that underlies our lives, and its more delimited nature on the existential surface of things. Along with this dual sensibility may come an awareness of our role in circumscribing the boundless and naming what exceeds all terms. This hyperconsciousness need not put us at odds with things, for we are also natural beings, and adapting ourselves to the world of nature is part of our acculturated naturalness. But by becoming aware of this matter, we realize that the world is not just there as “a world,” fixed and final (like some substantial datum waiting to be disclosed), but is rather a happening, ever coming into actuality through human inventiveness; and that the self, for its part, is not just “a self,” fixed in nature and proclivity, but a self-consciousness, ever attuned to itself and its worldly involvements. In this way the eruptive, caesural event is kept in mind by a new attentiveness to the contingency of experience, and an attunement to the deeper nature of worldly existence. As this double dimension of existence is infixed in consciousness (as a bimodal mentalité ), our subjectivity and life-world are transformed.

It is the particular poignancy of the caesural moment that changes us and may induce a new mindfulness. For though the initial experiences silenced human expression, the sense of being overwhelmed by the event may give way to a sense of being claimed by it in a fundamental way. It is just that more conceptual (or self-conscious) sensibility which marks the moment with axial significance and calls the person to change their life. This is therefore not only a cognitive insight, through the perception of primordial forces underlying experience; it also carries a value component, through an awakening to the contingency of existence and the command to respond. When the precipitating moment is an elemental event of nature, such as an earthquake or flood, or the cycles of birth and death, and even when the occasion is a historical fact, such as some monstrous evil of deed or neglect, the charged moment palpably calls to our elemental nature and conscience, directing us to: Remember, Do Something, or Have Sympathy; and to the extent that one can fix these revelations in one’s mind through rituals of action and recollection, their moral charge remains, and the claim is continuous and does not fade. How we collect such events in our personal lives, and how we keep them alive, determines the nature of our character; and how a culture does this through education and the selection of events for public recollection affects the moral shape of society.

Sketchy endeavor

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment

I want to lay out a basic vocabulary for my project of approaching philosophy as a design discipline.

*

This is a very sketchy endeavor.

I’m presenting even the philosophy that justifies and encourages approaching philosophy this way as itself something I designed.

This philosophy makes no claims to truth, only to being one good way to understand experience — one that I recommend.

I recommend it on pragmatist grounds, as something good to believe.

It is no accident that it is good to believe because it teaches dissatisfaction with anything that isn’t good to believe, and it practices what it preaches. It iteratively investigates, questions, instaurates possibilities, tries them on, evaluates and compares — and continues iterating until whatever it comes up with is experienced as good.

Good is evaluated in a designerly way. What is evaluated is not (only) the object we experience. More important is the subject of the experience — what the subject experiences as a result of interacting with the object of the design. Liz Sanders provided the essential definition of good design — a good interaction is experienced as useful, usable and desirable. It is experienced as useful if it helps a user accomplish something the user is trying to do. It is experienced as usable if it allows the user to accomplish what they are trying to do with minimal effort, confusion and distraction. It is experienced as desirable if it contributes value of its own (joy, meaning or sense of relationship) to the experience.

Notice the essential relativity of these characteristics. No object in itself can be said to be useful, usable or desirable. Neither can an experience be useful, usable or desirable. No, only when some subject interacts with some object, can that object be experienced as useful, usable or desirable.

*

With philosophy, things get super-weird, and this weirdness has been perplexing me for a long time. Extracting myself from the perplexity has been slow and arduous.

The weirdness hits at three points — the subject of the philosophy, the object meant to be experienced as good, and the medium of philosophy itself that somehow effects this good experience.

You could, of course, conceive the subject of philosophy the person thinking about the words that articulate the philosophy, or the ideas, arguments or claims taken as the content of it, or maybe the method or approach taken in the doing of the philosophy. Any of these conceptions would be much easier, and if simply providing a crisp, clear answer to the question, or if simply enjoying the process of conceiving an answer, these conceptions might be advisable.

My purpose, however is different. My entire conception and experience of existence has been changed by reading, thinking and struggling with philosophy. This conception and experience did not only change while I was focusing on philosophy. The change endured and transfigured absolutely everything, all at once, and in ways I have found incredibly difficult to communicate.

Somehow, because of words I’ve read, my conceptions have changed in a way that has changed my subjectivity — and in a way that preceded bypassed and often defied language. These changes have usually been for the better, and when they haven’t, I’ve struggled with these worse subjective states, wrestled free, or critiqued them to smithereens, until they lost their hold on me and yielded to better subjective states. Across these changes, I’ve tried to retain knowledge of what happened, and what it implies about subjectivity, conceptions, truth and the nature of reality beyond our truth.

I want to account for this extremely strange possibility of subjective change and try to understand how much the changes be undergone in an intentional manner, so that people can make similar changes to themselves and improve their experience of reality.

I am only interested in philosophy primarily for its capacity to produce clearer, more cohesive and expansive conceptions of existence that allow us to understand, experience and respond to our situations effectively without the need to explicitly intercept and interpret them (in other words, think about them spontaneously and second-naturally) and finally to find existence valuable and inspiring.

Somehow, through some miraculous iterative bootstrapping, this iterative construing, evaluating, criticizing, scrapping, restarting process developed into the glorious circular but expanding logic of designing glorious circular, expanding, spiraling logics.

*

Subjectivity is the totality of intuitions interacting within a psyche (or putting it in religious language, spirits interacting within a soul).

Subjectivities are multistable. They can stably self-organize in myriad ways as subjects, capable of effective response to various situations. Some of these subjects are acquired in study of academic subjects taught in school. The personal subject is the personality who modalizes these various acquired subjects and others, and remains a self throughout these modes. When we know another person, that person is learned more as a subject than as some object with known properties.

The goal of philosophy is producing a stable, dynamic, integration of intuitions.

Out of time. More later.