What is religion? My definition is very broad: Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually, practically and morally.
All posts by anomalogue
Mikvah
Today is my mikvah.
Sometime around 10:45-11:15am EST other Jews will know me as a fellow Jew.
I cannot explain why this matters so much to me, but it does. And I understand why many people cannot understand how much this matters to me or why it matters, but I hope those who love me can respect where their understanding fails.
Rosenzweig and the philosopher-hybrid
I get the same feeling reading Rosenzweig as I do reading Levinas: I begin to feel a little like a paraphrasing popularizer, or vulgarizer.
In a little over a day from now I hope I’ll just feel like a fellow Jewish philosopher attempting, yet again, to say the same impossible-to-say truth both these Jewish philosophers are attempting to say.
*
One thing I love about Rosenzweig is that he seems to understand and respond to the same thing that matters so much to me in Nietzsche’s thought.
He says this about Nietzsche: “Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again — not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher. What he philosophized has by now become almost a matter of indifference. … But none of those who now feel the urge to philosophize can any longer by-pass the man himself, who transformed himself in the transformation of his mental images…”
There have been countless philosophers wrote their philosophies in verse or poetic language, or who have philosophized while trying to live saintly lives. Many philosophers have philosophized about poets and poetry, or saints and saintliness. There have even been some philosophers who have philosophized poetically about poetry or lived a saintly life philosophizing about saintliness. But strangely, none of these things conveys what a philosopher-poet or philosopher-saint does. With this in mind, I’ve been developing a another philosopher-hybrid ideal: philosopher-designer. This is not a well-designed presentation of philosophy, a philosophy about design, or a well-designed presentation of philosophy about design… but something else that feels enormously important (if not for the world, at least for me) and profoundly Jewish (if not for all Jews, at least for me).
Church name
I’m going to see if I can talk one of my Catholic friends into starting a church and naming it “Our Lady of Perpetual Shock”.
Turtles
This I know: We can only love where dread can and might irrupt.
This I hope: Where dread irrupts, we can love.
*
Beyond my everything-sized soul there is a braided ring of dread, love and nothingness,
Beyond that ring, perhaps there is nothing but more dread, love and nothingness.
Ah sahib, turtles — all the way down.
Hiddennesses
A solved problem.
A defined problem believed to have a solution.
A defined problem whose solution may be impossible.
A defined problem believed to have no possible solution.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty believed to contain a definable problem.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty which might contain a definable problem.
An undefined but acknowledged felt difficulty believed to be essential to existence.
An unacknowledged felt difficulty.
An unfelt difficulty: a non-problem.
A solved problem?
Light: unobstructed perception.
Shadow: darkness in light, obstructed perceiving.
Darkness: obstructed perception, nonperception in perception.
Blindness in darkness: obvious obscurity, perceived nonperception.
Blindness in light: nonobvious obscurity, blindspots, unperceived nonperception.
Light: unobstructed perception?
V’ahavta
Some entities cannot be comprehended, only known-toward. This is a kind of knowing, but it only appears such if we allow knowing to be more than the conceptual grasping of objective comprehension.
This doesn’t mean that objective comprehension is a bad thing, especially when we realize the importance of objectively comprehending the fact that objective comprehension is only one of myriad ways to know, and that it is an inappropriate form of knowing when it comes to those entities that ought to be known-toward.
*
Knowing-toward is the intellectual stance we take toward transcendent realities. We comprehend things about them. We comprehend in various ways, to varying degrees of adequacy, the experiences we have of these realities, but these experiences are only phenomenal radiance from incomprehensible sources who transcend us.
I like to think of transcendence in three directions or dimensions, that of time, space and awareness. Each dimension extends as far as I can conceive everything in principle, and tapers off into the blindness of inconceivable realities whose existence is mysterious but impossible to doubt. We know toward these directions. We can sort of imagine particularities within them, but we are never right. We imagine people we might meet, but we cannot imagine the exact beloved personality who will change what life means to us. We imagine the future, but only as we can know it as we are now, not as we might learn to know later when the most important and unimaginable events befall us. And try as we might (and we should), we cannot know life as our ancestors knew it. We think about things, but not the impact the things that will matter most to us, including, and not at all limited to our own malfunctioning bodies. We think about places, but whatever we imagine will not be the place we see as we face our last dimming moments of life. Reality streams off into nothingness in every direction, and we will know it better if we know it as streaming, and allow it to be what it is.
I like to think of transcendence in three directions or dimensions, not because these three dimensions exist in some absolute, unchanging, eternally true manner that transcends my thought, but because when I discipline my thinking to interpret experience in this manner, I can maintain myself as a finite being embedded in an infinite reality as a participant. I am able to remind myself to use my objective comprehension to think- and be-toward reality what I am not. With this framework, I can stop trying to conquer reality, to strip it of everything but its essential truth and imprisoning the essential truth inside my own head, which is a philosopher’s vice I must battle constantly. The only truths that one can stuff in a cranium are objective ones, and that’s why objectivity is so popular. We want to own our knowledge, not use it to relate to unpossessable realities. I want to own the world if not the universe, but I console myself by giving myself little maps, compasses, trinkets, and pictures which indulge my need to own things.
*
“God”, Heaven and Afterlife are the artifacts of comprehending objectivity what/who can only be known-toward.
People reduced to types, or roles, or uses, or categories — people reduced to objects — are the artifacts of comprehending objectivity what/who can only be known-toward.
The most important elements of our existence are precisely what we are most tempted to stuff into our heads and make our own property.
What is most important in our experience? What we love. Love reduced to comprehension annihilates love in mere lust.
Love is being-toward, being-toward with our whole being: being-toward all our hearts, being-toward all our souls, being-toward with all our strength.
Adonai Echad
Even an ordinary human mind is multiple. We weigh different values against each other, we find ourselves torn in decision, we try on multiple perspectives, we feel the pull of different people’s influences on our thinking, we anticipate divergent futures branching from each notion. “We”, each of us. “We”, all of us. Both, always.
When we look out onto the world, it glows with blended lights and hums with polyphonous voices.
*
It is paradoxical that we think of the purest light as white light, because that is precisely the least pure light. Normally, when we speak of purity we think of it in terms of removal of what does not belong. But with white light, no color of light can be excluded or strained out, or the purity of the white light is lost.
Infinity is analogous to white light, but to an extreme that defies comprehension. Infinity includes all, without exception. I would say that infinity excludes nothing, but it doesn’t. Nothing is also a part of infinity — and maybe the most important part with respect to finite human experience with infinity! Most of the time when we say “infinity” what we mean is actually “myriad”: uncountably many of something. But to speak of an entity as such is already to define it against something else (removing it from its infinite ground in order to set it against what it isn’t), in order to count it among other entities defined as the same kind of entity. Even generalizing all entities as something as general as “entities” defines entities against non-entity, thus truncating infinity at myriad. With respect to infinity, every removal corrupts the delicate omniclusion what is intended when “infinity” is said.
Of course, we can never positively mean “infinity”, or even “myriad” when we say these words, because avoiding exclusion is impossible. Try listing every object in existence, and you’ll forget to include a color, or quality, or concept, or number, or formula, or mood or some moment in time or perhaps the feeling experienced by some child who lived in what is now known as Bulgaria in the year 978 CE when smelling fresh-cut wood. Then consider the fact that each mention of an entity produces a new entity: that particular mention.
This does not mean “infinity” is a useless word or notion. It only means when speaking of infinity we maintain awareness of its inexhaustibility. We cannot know infinity (or myriad) — we can only know toward them. However far we go toward, we will never arrive. We cannot comprehend infinity, we can only invite it into our souls, a little bit at a time.
*
Back to our own strangely multiple minds. I is one, but it is not a simple or atomic one. It is a one that is divided and one that can become more unified and feel more simple and one-like. Even a human mind taken from its social context and isolated is pluralistic. A single human mind can be conflicted or harmonious. A single human mind can exclude or persecute parts of its self, or even deny membership in I. But this alienated part of I, this sub-I, can be redeemed and brought back into the self’s fold.
For this reason, I believe I can say that God is distributed, and that each point of distribution is radiant, and still say “Adonai Echad.”
One of these distributed radiant points of God is you, so please shine favorably on me, with pure, hospitable, all-inviting light.
Zoolander startup
The hyper-accellerated software release cycles of the 2010s will be seen as the analogue of the hyper-miniaturized mobile phone designs of the early 2000s: a dubious goal pursued to an absurd extreme.
Scholem
I need to read about Gershom Scholem‘s life. Scholem, along with his best friend, Walter Benjamin, could be a Northwest Passage from Judaism into those aspects of Nietzsche which remain as compelling to me today as when they blew me to pieces in 2003. I can feel Nietzsche’s perspective(s) inside Scholem’s driest historical accounts. I fully expect to read another of one of those Nietzsche encounters, similar to Jung’s, which stimulated his beautiful but bonkers Red Book.
Luria-Latour
The book I have been reading for the last thirty or so mornings has been Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. I am currently reading the chapter on Isaac Luria, and it is sparking insights and connections with other things I’ve read, in particular with Bruno Latour’s philosophy of irreductionism.
Before I start quoting passages, I confess that I am doing what I always do: connecting mystical intuition of beyondness with mundane experiences of alterity (otherness) — including the experience of scientific inquiry on its outer edges — that region Thomas Kuhn famously labeled “crisis”, the phase of inquiry where the material, the symbolic, the logical/mathematical, the sociological, the psychological, the factual and the intuitive domains we ordinarily keep carefully compartmentalized blend together and interact unnervingly and chaotically. Boundaries redraw themselves and the terrain itself shifts with the lines. Smooth, solid ground of certainty becomes turbulent water which threatens to swallow and drown. New kinds of reality leap out of nowhere, revealing the fact that nothingness was concealing very real realities which had been staring directly into our eyes as we stared through them at objects we preferred seeing because we knew how to know them.
But I’ll let you judge for yourself whether I am abusing mysticism by shoehorning mystical answers into philosophical (philosophy of science) questions. Rather than pick through Scholem’s scholarly exposition in an attempt to summarize it all, I will instead quote from the overview of Luria’s life from Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah:
…Luria wrote hardly anything. When asked by one of his disciples why he did not compose a book, Luria is reported to have said: “It is impossible, because all things are interrelated. I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received? How can I set it down in a book?” We know of Luria’s teachings from his disciples’ writings, especially those of Hayyim Vital.
Luria pondered the question of beginnings. How did the process of emanation start? If Ein Sof [Divine Infinite] pervaded all space, how was there room for anything other than God to come into being? Elaborating on earlier formulations, Luria taught that the first divine act was not emanation, but withdrawal. Ein Sof withdrew its presence “from itself to itself,” withdrawing in all directions away from one point at the center of its infinity, as it were, thereby creating a vacuum. This vacuum served as the site of creation. According to some versions of Luria’s teaching, the purpose of the withdrawal was cathartic: to make room for the elimination of harsh judgment from Ein Sof.
Into the vacuum Ein Sof emanated a ray of light, channeled through vessels. At first, everything went smoothly; but as the emanation proceeded, some of the vessels could not withstand the power of the light, and they shattered. Most of the light returned to its infinite source, but the rest fell as sparks, along with the shards of the vessels. Eventually, these sparks became trapped in material existence. The human task is to liberate, or raise, these sparks, to restore them to divinity. This process of tikkun (repair or mending) is accomplished through living a life of holiness. All human actions either promote or impede tikkun, thus hastening or delaying the arrival of the Messiah. In a sense, the Messiah is fashioned by our ethical and spiritual activity. Luria’s teaching resonates with one of Franz Kafka’s paradoxical sayings: “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival.”
In particular I see a profound connecting between idea of divine sparks distributed throughout the world and the notion of forces and forms of resistance described in this gorgeous passage from Bruno Latour’s one purely philosophical work, Irreductions, included as an appendix to his sociological classic The Pasteurization of France.
…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.
One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.
One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.
So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.
No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …
This text follows one path, however bizarre the consequences and contrary to custom. What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge of what a force is? What happens when we do not know how their way of relating to one another is changing? What happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to reduce everything?
When I view religion in this light, I start feeling incredibly pious and my theological doubts evaporate into panentheistic certainty, or at least a blessed doubt-failure.
A panentheological outburst
A disorderly spew of thoughts on the theory and practice of panentheism…
*
According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, panentheism is “the belief or doctrine that God is greater than the universe and includes and interpenetrates it.”
*
How do you live toward being who contains you entirely and who exceeds you infinitely?
How do you relate to fellow beings who, like you, are finite organs of this infinitude?
When I say fellow beings this is not limited to fellow humans, nor even to fellow life, nor even to all being as we experience and understand it at any single moment.
The operative word is toward.
A proposed goal of religion: the attempt to live fully toward what is not only me, not only us, but toward what infinitely exceeds any and all of us. It is the practice of panentheistic relationship with reality on the whole and in every part.
*
Jesus of Nazareth presented the Shema and Leviticus 19:18 as
two facets of a single highest moral principle:
a twofold commandment to
simultaneously,
inseparably,
irreducibly
a) love God with all my being — all my heart, all my soul and all my strength,
and
1) love my neighbor as myself.
This is a miraculously elegant and condensed crystallization of Judaism’s red thread as I experience it. It is the principle of participation in panentheistic life, beginning with our fellow human beings.
*
Panentheism means relating out, beyond, toward reality that exceeds the bounds my own being. Where are the bounds of my being? The bounds of my being are the contours of reality as I know it — the outer and inner limits of my own universe-sized soul — a soul overlapping and entangled with myriad fellow-souls. Every one of us is another instance of everything, each with a different size, density and topology.
Beyond these limits, intermingled with the being of those around us, is twofold surprise: compelling love and repelling dread.
*
According to my own peculiar panentheology, many of us have misconceived the terms of transcendence. To see transcendence as “climbing above” the sphere of mundane reality into a sphere of supernatural being attracts us toward exoticism, magic and thaumatolatrous religion.
It is far better to conceive transcendence as climbing beyond the sphere of reality as we conceive it it into spheres of reality as it can be known if we are willing to allow reality to be more than we know how to conceive. But why wouldn’t we allow reality to be more than what we know how to conceive? Because of the repulsion of dread — as much as we are drawn toward what is beyond us, we are repelled by intense anxiety of inconceivability. Beyondness fascinates, but it hurts.
(A maladjustment to the pull-push of love and dread, by the way, is at the heart of abusive relationships. When I “objectify” what I intuit as painfully more than I can possess in order to make it mine, I abuse an other as something that is no more what I’ve made of them, my idea of who they are or ought to be. Fundamentalism can be seen as an abusive relationship with the entirety of reality.)
This “more than we yet know” must every time be a new particular finitude — much as scientists forever expand their detailed theories, knowing they are fallible, but loving their knowledge no less for that fact. Beyond whatever comprehensive knowledge of reality we develop, inexhaustibly more reality and knowledge exists.
It is crucially important to resist the overwhelming urge to imprison potential particularities of “inexhaustibly more” inside our own souls by encapsulating “unknown” in the general category “mystery” idolized by so many mystics. The fact that the inexhaustible cannot be exhausted is no reason to stop accepting its abundance of particularities.
Bodies and categories
If an individual elects to be part of a political body, then that individual shares responsibility for those who act on behalf of that body. It is fair to hold people responsible for what their political bodies do.
But if you classify a person as belonging to some category of person, and on that basis hold that person responsible for the actions of others who (according to you) also belong to that category, you are committing a grave sin against liberalism.
The line between belonging to a political body and being assigned to a category is a blurry and crooked one. No simple formulas exist to sharpen it. The line is not traced along the boundaries explicit declarations of membership: people are often cagy or deluded about the political significance of their actions. But neither are the lines those gridded out by ideology: every theorist has his correct schema.
The lines must be surveyed case by case through dialogue between the disputants.
Naivety
A successful philosophy leaves naivety in its wake.
Jewish red thread
A part of my autobiography that I had to compress into two lines was my experience with Jewish thinkers. Judaism only became a serious interest for me following my very strange experience of intensive study of Nietzsche starting in 2002 and extending to around 2006. During this time under Nietzsche’s influence I excavated the assumptions at the foundation of my understanding of the world.
Nietzsche was absolutely insightful on many points, but rarely as right as his here: If you want to get at the assumptions that matter, the most important thing to dig up is the ground beneath the warning signs that say “Do not dig here.” Those signs mark the pay dirt of self-transformation — at least if you begin with morality. (I believe this qualification is another insight of equal value to the first. Questioning values you do not actually hold — values which you have not internalized, that you do not live and that are not the the stand-point and vanishing-point of your perspective — is lazy nihilism or cynicism and it will do nothing or worse.)
From the Preface of Daybreak.
At that time I undertook something not everyone may undertake: I descended into the depths, I tunneled into the foundations, I commenced an investigation and digging out of an ancient faith, one upon which we philosophers have for a couple of millennia been accustomed to build as if upon the firmest of all foundations — and have continued to do so even though every building hitherto erected on them has fallen down: I commenced to undermine our faith in morality.
Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to — obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been — is that not — immoral? — But morality does not merely have at its command every kind of means of frightening off critical hands and torture-instruments: its security reposes far more in a certain art of enchantment it has at its disposal — it knows how to ‘inspire’.
But despite what so many people say about Nietzsche, his goal is not at all to live an amoral and unprincipled existence. It is to reform one’s own relationship with morality. I believe his purpose is to re-establish one’s own values on realities that are less speculative and vastly more immediate, motivating and durable.
Nietzsche did a bang-up job with the demolition and ground clearing of my worldview. But it was a chain of Jewish thinkers who help me piece my soul back together, and to reassemble it toward a reality not confined to my own mind. And that realism most of all included the belief in the sacred reality of other minds.
Somewhere I made a list of the names of the Jewish thinkers who helped me, and I plan to expound on each, but for now I will just list some of them.
- Richard J. Bernstein
- Martin Buber
- Hannah Arendt
- Walter Benjamin
- Emmanuel Levinas
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
I was especially interested in the fact that whether the thinkers were religious or secular there was a distinct commonality among them, and I felt that this commonality connected with me in a vitally important way. It might have been an inheritance from lost Jewish ancestors, or maybe it was transmitted to me via Christianity, but the total experience of reading these thinkers made me want to enter and participate in the Jewish tradition.
My 500-word spiritual autobiography
As part of my conversion process I’ve been asked to write a 500-word spiritual autobiography, and to pick out a Hebrew name. I thought I would choose Israel or Yisrael, but then I found Nachshon, and it is perfect for me.
Reading back over my own autobiography, I feel a need to thank and apologize to everyone who has known me too much, especially my poor Mom.
Here’s the final version, 72 words over the limit, but OKed by my rabbi.
I was born into a religious vacuum. The worldview I inherited had no space for religion. My first memory of religion is my 4-year-old self sitting on the potty asking my mother what God is. Her answer: “God is love.” I became an atheist.
Once I could read I gorged on mythology and Mark Twain. This antithetical pair of threads drawn from my earliest reading — a strand of constellated meanings twisted around a nasty strand of critique — has run through my life and connected my various interests and activities.
When I was ten my family moved to a town with a Unitarian Universalist fellowship. I was made to attend Sunday services. I’d rant all the way home. According to adolescent me, UU was vapid! insular! a parody religion! a detox program for religion addicts! But when I charged UUism with hypocrisy, it backfired: attacking UUism with UU values, I internalized them, and infected myself with faith in reason, tolerance, self-criticism, pluralism, and dialogue.
My atheism ended after I met my future wife, Susan. She crushed me in an argument on the foundations of my morality, which resulted in 1) self-demotion to agnosticism and 2) love.
Before we were married, Susan joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. I went with her to liturgies, and that was my first exposure to Judeo-Christian scripture. I tried to get inside the perspective but I was unable to connect with the doctrines or practices. My wife and two daughters were enmeshed in a community who regarded me as blind, ignorant and possibly wicked. My devout agnosticism appeared to most people in my life as a blotch of nothing to be disregarded. I think this is why I embraced Vipassana meditation. I appreciated its focus on practice and its deemphasis of doctrine, and it dignified my outlook with a name. Plus, it made me nicer, and the insights gained in meditation have helped me understand mysticism.
Late 1999 we moved to Atlanta. I stopped meditating, got consumed with work and became depressed. I learned a lot from this. Coming out of it I re-centered my thinking on lived experience, rather than abstract ideas.
Then I was transferred to Toronto. I started reading Nietzsche — initially to understand the “slave morality” in my workplace, but it was soon obvious the critique applied to me. I interrogated my moral, philosophical, and religious conceptions until they dissolved. What remained was a new and odd mode of thinking. I found myself unable to convey what I was learning without resorting to symbols and metaphors. Religious writing now made immediate sense to me. My agnosticism became irrelevant. It was exhilarating but painfully isolating.
The urgent need to explain — and later, to exit — this state of mind, and to reintegrate with humanity drove me into phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, and eventually to Judaism. I kept noticing that Jewish thinkers like Richard J. Bernstein and Martin Buber were especially, distinctively helpful. The values I kept finding in Jewish thinking resonated — especially around the religious significance of intersubjectivity. As I continued, I came to see Judaism at the root of everything I care about — the values contracted from my childhood harangues. I felt room in the pluralism of Judaism for religious life as I know it. I am a contrarian, but that doesn’t mean I do not need a home; it just means I can’t live most places. Coming here, I feel home.
Overcoming ressentiment
I’ve been thinking a lot about ressentiment lately. It saturates the news, art, conversations, nearly everything. Or so my eyes tell me.
*
What is ressentiment? It is not as some (including me) an exact synonym of resentment, but a distinct flavor of resentment. I had been blurring them into synonymity, but the differences are important enough that I intend to start using the terms more precisely. According to Wikipedia,
Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.
So my understanding is that ressentiment blames others not only for specific grievances but for one’s own existential state — how one is and how one habitually feels about life. I view it as both analogous and connected to Heidegger’s beautiful distinction between fear and angst. Fear has an object. Angst might seem to have an object, but in fact angst belongs to the subject. Remove the object of fear and the fear dissipates. Remove the object of angst and the angst must find another object. Resentments can be resolved by addressing the object of resentment. Ressentiment is insatiable.
The Dhammapada gets this right:
The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased.
The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified.
Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.
Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully. (I included this last stanza for the Heideggerians.)
Another problem: Ressentiment generates an aggressive ugliness that radiates and discolors everything and everyone around it. Sadly this ugliness is not confined to the eye of the beholder, but somehow reflects into the eyes of those beheld, which leads directly to the next point.
Ressentiment is counterproductive. The objects (the alleged causes) of ressentiment are only agitated and energized when approached with ressentiment. Resentment breeds resentment, and the infection spreads and intensifies. In combatting ressentiment it is necessary to cultivate lightness, cheer and buoyancy, and to resist succumbing to ressentiment’s natural darkness, dourness and deadweight. (Does this smell like Nietzsche to you? That is because it is Nietzsche. It is the cornerstone of his moral vision.)
All this should make it clear why I’ve recommitted to rooting out ressentiment in my own soul. Unfortunately, I have accumulated a great deal of it over the last decade. It will take some work to clean myself out. One key element of this effort has been to limit my exposure to other people’s ressentiment, especially those two antithetical ressentiment philosophies which have seemed into the mainstream from the fringes, and which have become the substance of popular politics. Staying away from social media has helped a lot.
Shells and pearls
This is a series of rewritten, streamlined posts on the theme of shells and pearls, which I’m considering incorporating into my pamphlet. I’ll link to the originals. If you have time to compare, let me know if you think anything was lost in the chipping, sanding and polishing.
Announcing an exciting new vocabulary acquisition: evert. I have needed this word many times, but I’ve had to resort to flipping, reversing, inverting, turning things inside-out.
Evert – verb [ with obj. ] – Turn (a structure or organ) outward or inside out: (as adj. everted) : the characteristic facial appearance of full, often everted lips. DERIVATIVES:
eversible (adj.), eversion (n.). ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense ‘upset, overthrow’): from Latin evertere, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + vertere ‘to turn.’With this wonderful new word I can say things like this:
“An oyster coats the ocean with an inner-shell made of mother-of-pearl lined. Anything from the outside that gets inside is coated, too. A pearl is an everted oyster shell, and an everted pearl is a shell’s inner lining. Outside the shell is ocean, inside the pearl is ocean. Between inner-shell and outer-pearl is delicate oyster-flesh, which ceaselessly coats everything it is not with mother-of-pearl. It is as if this flesh cannot stand anything that does not have a smooth, continuous and lustrous surface. We could call the flesh’s Other — that which requires coating — father-of-pearl.”
Minds secrete knowing like mother-of-pearl, coating irritant reality with lustrous likeness.
You are absurd. You defy comprehension.
That is, you defy my way of understanding. I cannot continue to understand my world as I understand it and understand you.
That is, you do not fit inside my soul.
I am faced with the most fundamental moral choice: Do I break open my soul? or do I bury you in mother-of-pearl?
(A meditation on Levinas’s use of the term “exception” in Otherwise Than Being.)
We make category mistakes when attempting to understand metaphysics, conceiving what must be exceived.
Positive metaphysics are objectionable, in the most etymologically literal way, when they try to conceptualize what can only be exceptualized, to objectify that to which we are subject, to comprehend what comprehends — in order to achieve certainty about what is radically surprising.
In my own religious life, this category mistake is made tacitly at the practical and moral level, and then, consequentially, explicitly and consciously. Just as the retinas of our eyes see things upside-down, our mind’s eye sees things inside-out. We naturally confuse insidedness and outsidedness. By this view, human nature is less perverse than it is everse.
*
Imagine, with as much topological precision as you can muster, expulsion from Eden as belonging-at-home flipped inside-out.
That galut in the pit of your gut: everted Eden?
*
A garden is an everted fruit, and a fruit, an everted garden.
The nacre inner lining of a shell is an everted pearl, and a pearl, an everted nacre lining.
The exception is the everted conception, and the conception, the everted exception.
The earliest mention of pearls from this blog was posted on December 14, 2008.
Pearls are inside-out oyster shells. Or are oyster shells inside-out pearls?
The oyster coats its world with layers of iridescent calcium. With the same substance it protects itself from the dangers concaving in from the outside and the irritants convexing it from the inside.
The earliest use of this mother-of-pearl metaphor I can find in my stuff was posted on another blog platform in December, 2006. (Again this has been edited. In my opinion, the original was uglier and more opaque. I’ll post it in the comments.)
Transcendence, non-understandings, misunderstandings
An unresolved understanding becomes a live question — an existential irritant. To ease the pain of non-understanding, the question is coated with an answer, like a pearl. Such answers re-explain away ideas which were never offered as explanations. What ought to be known internally and poetically is known about externally and factually.
Any surprise that the mezuzah I placed on the doorpost of my library is encased in mother-of-pearl?
Hanging the mezuzah inspired me to clean up my office! It’s nice to be in here, again.
Memories of oblivion
I’ve been asked to write a 500 word spiritual autobiographical essay, and this has me thinking about my experiences with Vipassana meditation. I only have room for a line or two on meditation in the essay, so I’m venting my verbosity into this post.
For me, the most surprising aspect of meditation was that “I” did not control my thoughts. Thinking would think, and something corresponding to “me” had emerged from this process.
Sometimes, if I managed to settle my mind down I could hear the stream of babble from which thoughts pop into my head. It sounded something like a murmuring crowd from another country. Some of the murmur was also visual, but all of it was a piece. Occasionally some random bit of murmur would spark recognition of some word. A word would sometimes spark a notion, and the notions would sometimes collect into an idea. An idea would occur, and then some stretch of time later — seconds, minutes or even multiple quarter-hours — it would come to my attention that “I” had stopped meditating… except there was no I who did the stopping. The I who had been posted there to do the meditating had gone non-existent, yet something had continued without it (recording memories) and something resumed my I-activities (my I-ing) once awareness came back. Part of that I-ing was gluing together all those memories to create the illusion that I had been there.
Consciousness is anything but continuous. It would be more accurate to say that consciousness is an effervescence of back-story and anticipation.
Or maybe it would be most accurate of all to say that I am a lousy meditator.
Meditation is only one of my go-to sources for insights into the workings of nothingness. Ocular migraines are another rich source.
I’ve been trying to write a prayer to my migraine wisdom. I think it might still suck in that way psychedelic stuff always sucks, but here it is:
You move from everything to everything, flashing across expanses of nullity.
Landing, standing on firm ground of unruly particularity, blindness still clings to your heels. The shadow you cast is perfect: nothing there, nothing missing.
Then you leave, again, closing time behind you with a seal of oblivion. Wherever you go, after you depart you will always have been there, and will never have been absent.
Only those who move with you can detect your before or after, so I am attempting to trace your movements.
As we travel, please help me skim the churning chrome, and to not sink in it and drown. Please help me slip through scotomas and not collide with their nonexistence. Please face me forward, and guard my eyes from looking right or left, toward light or toward darkness, or glancing backwards into entangling comforts lurking in the familiar dappled shade.
Lead me to where my doubt fails.
Maybe I could call my kind of migraine o(ra)cular migraines. My migraines have taught me to notice the signs of blindness, which is the closest we can get to seeing blindness, which is not the cheap psychedelic paradox it might seem to be. You can detect blindness, but only indirectly and longitudinally, comparing moments with varying capacities to perceive (in the case of migraines) or capacities to conceive (in the case of Vipassana). But to do this, it is crucially important to not map these strange experiences to our old familiar distinctions. We will explain them away, extinguish them, sink them back into blindness, like how we forget our inconceivable dreams by crushing them into plotlines. The goal is to develop new distinctions that permit more kinds of reality to exist to us.
*
Maybe I should set myself the goal of reinventing the psychedelic aesthetic, in a more substantial and durable mode?
Bonus: a portrait of me with migraine.
Nachshon
I think Nachshon will have to be my Hebrew name.
Legend has it that Nachshon waded into the Red Sea, all the way up to his nose, before Moses parted the waters. If you (as I do) read water as symbolizing unfiltered, undifferentiated, unarticulated, unsettled, primordial chaos and the process of understanding as a dividing, navigating, moving process this is a highly charged-up symbol. Also in this story Nachshon demonstrates the admirable quality of “going first” — a Jewish virtue I want to cultivate.
I love the etymology, too. Hebrewname.org says that Nachshon means “snakebird”. A synthesis of the highest-flying and lowest-crawling animal, who can float on the surface of the water! That is symbolically irresistible. The snakebird is the magenta (a hybrid of the two opposite extremes of the spectrum, the highest and lowest visible frequencies) of the animal kingdom. In fact, now I have to draw a magenta snakebird.
Another site associates the name with snakes and heretical practices like divination and reading omens, and given my own mildly heretical tendencies, that’s not entirely unappealing.
Then there’s a connection to “stormy sea waves” which I just wrote about last week.
Plus, the name has a letter shin right in the middle, and I love the way that letter looks.
Just look: Nachshon is a good-looking, good-sounding word. Where do I get one of these patches?
Too many perfect connections.
Nachshon.