All posts by anomalogue

Syllabus Listicalis

Judaism, Philosophy

Today, I feel a need to make an arbitrary list of consequential reconceptions. These are some of the core ideas I want to put in one of the several pamphlets I have planned. I’ve named two of them: Geometric Parables and The Ten-Thousand Everythings. Maybe this is the start of a third pamphlet, Syllabus Listicalis.

  • Blindness is like rippling mercury that nullifies sight with glare and camouflage. The equation of blindness with darkness is profoundly misleading. Anyone who expects blindness to be highlighted with shadows is blind to blindness and consequently to sight. The disperception of blindness sees precisely where it doesn’t.
  • A soul is an everything among myriad everythings. It is natural to imagine a person’s soul as a body-shaped ghost, but this is an intellectually and morally corrupting confusion. Souls are better imagined as radiating into the world from a person’s physical being. The soul’s radiance continues to travel after it leaves its source and it illuminates those aspects of the world the soul finds important. Everywhere I look I see the souls of people I love: this is the root of my compulsion to give gifts. I could continue on to the subject of immortality, but let’s not.
  • Objectivity is a type of subjectivity. The idea that subjectivity is a distorted reflection of some all-encompassing objective world has catastrophic consequences. The best way to understand a person’s subjectivity is to examine its objectivity. When we speak of human “subjects” and school “subjects”, in both cases we ought to mean the word “subject” in the same sense.
  • Transcendence is entirely about the relationship between I and Other. This idea that transcendence refers to a supernatural reality behind or beyond the mundane world, is an elaborate failure to recognize otherness beyond one’s own I. Many, if not most — (and possibly all!) — notions of magic are the splatterings of souls on the walls of solipsism.
  • Tacit knowledge is not articulated, it articulates. Everything explicit, everything formed, emerges from implicit being. That which is least sayable is not passive silence, but an active capacity to say. Here speech is a metaphor for all making, all poiesis.
  • Love and dread together signal transcendence. Only dread reveals the reality of the beloved. These are not “choices”, they must be taken together, always.
  • Love is not only a matter of heart, but also of soul and of might — not separately, but always all at once. Love is done with the entirety of our being. To love God is to love the entirety of reality with the entirety of one’s being.
  • Pluralism means that even when we avoid being wrong, we are never as right as we hope.
  • Religion does not have to be conceived as it often is: the activity of an individual communing with God. Religion can, and in fact must be, broadened to comprise the continuous struggle of finite beings to relate vitally to infinite being without suppressing its infinitude. By this definition, sciences are religious activity and fundamentalisms are anti-religion.

Update on my “LEF” political model

Politics

Since my last update on my “newish political model” I have continued trying it out on different political positions and playing with new ways to conceive the various dimensions, and I’ve developed a slightly new (and, I think, improved) way of thinking about it. The difference is in the way I am thinking about the Fraternity dimension.

If you remember my descriptions of Liberty and Equality, you might want to skip to Fraternity.

Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how individuals are to think, feel and act?

+) an individual alone determines individual being;

-) the collectivity determines individual being;

0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.

What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.

And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?

+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;

-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;

0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.

What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.

And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Fraternity (membership in political order ): essentially universal membership versus essentially exclusive obligation.

+) membership in a universal political order is automatically extended to all of humanity;

-) membership in a particular political order is restricted to a group defined by involuntary essential characteristics ;

0) at the center potential membership in a particular political order is universal, and actual membership is entirely voluntary (and not defined by essential characteristics).

 

Illiberal delusions of depth

Politics

In general, the social sciences teach us more about societies of social scientists than it does society in general.

*

Show me an example of political or sociological “realism” — a claim of inalterable facts — and I’ll show you an ideologue with an investment in society being some particular way. It might even be the key to an intellectual’s soul.

*

Once the foundations of liberalism erode away, and public opinion starts asking hard questions of public truths grown complacent through luxuriation in universal acceptance, the truth of liberal values are anything but self-evident. They epitomize vapid conventionality, and all-too-conveniently, most of the people who continue to uphold them do so through inertia and timidity.

In times like these it almost requires a radical’s personality to excavate the layers of pious dust and quotidian debris that settle over generally accepted moral facts and to burrow into the ground where the wellsprings of liberal morality still flow clear. It turns out, these apparent self-evident (that is, long unexamined) moral principles, such as the ultimate value of the individual, the importance of free speech, thought and action, the exercise of reason, and above all, pluralism are not in the least self-evident once they are flooded in long-suppressed illiberal light and tag-team interrogated by left-wing and the right-wing inquisitors.

Fact is, liberalism was never the natural and inevitable state of society once tyrants are removed from the scene, but rather humankind’s hardest-won accomplishment. But the belief that liberalism exists with mere removal of impediments has led to the neglect of liberal education, and especially a self-aware philosophical explanation of morality.

Instead, the last several generation were rigorously trained to emote on demand: to sympathize as intensely as possible at sacred signifiers of its tribe (generally of categories of people) and to produce anger in equal amounts at the tribe’s categorical enemies, who are those who fail to produce the requisite emotions at key symbolic stimuli. Every tribe can produce its own elaborate supporting theories, including its own homegrown theories on why the other tribe’s theories are nonsensical and the result of nefarious influences.

And bystanders who decided to spare themselves all indoctrination and believe themselves independent observers fared no better. In fending off miseducation, they fend off necessary education as well, and fall into ideological traps they are ill-prepared to detect or to escape once they learn whatever “the truth” their habitual reading conceptually habituates them to understand.

At this point I am interested neither in expounding nor defending my views for people who are by nature or second-nature unsympathetic to liberalism. Instead, I plan to continue my private project of exposing the wellsprings of liberalism to those who have already learned to love them. And I do mean learn to love, because love of liberalism is either learned or latent, never accessible to naive or misled minds.

But it is true: as a liberal I do owe my fellow-citizens an account. But I do not owe it on their philosophical terms or their schedule. These are the things you learn when you work at education, which is another word for allowing learning to change you.

Mark Lilla on the trajectory of ideologies

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: “Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.”

Mark Lilla on political thought today

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind (2nd edition): “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life. This, it seems to me, is the most significant development since The Reckless Mind was published [on September 9, 2001], and the first thing we need to understand about the present.”

I cannot wait to read Lilla’s latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, due August 15, 2017.

Muffled by novelty

Biography

If you wish to say something truly novel, you’ll need to choose between 1) stating it in familiar terms so that people misunderstand what you say and at best accept a banal misunderstanding as true, or 2) to state it in unfamiliar terms so that people at least understand that they do not understand, but at the cost that they will regard you as confused, pedantically technical, impractically abstract or a charlatan.

Only those who stay very close to established truth get listened to as a peer — a peer who has something valid to impart.

Those who stray too far from established truth are shunned and silenced by being despised or exalted or, by some weird combination of the two, diagnosed as clinically eccentric.

 

Schemas and coinages

Philosophy

One advantage of being a schematic thinker is the technique exposes gaps in our vocabularies, conceptual spaces deprived of language that create intellectual blindspots (schemoscotomas?) for those whose thought is primarily verbal.

In encountering these wordless conceptual spaces my approach has been to find close matches or to resort to descriptive language to indicate what I mean. Today I’m thinking a better approach would be to simply invent words to fill in these spaces. This is likely to change the tone and substance of my work.

Some time ago my friend Jokin told me a beautiful Basque saying: “What has a name is real.” I believe that we need to invest some badly needed ideas with the reality of language, and I think it is the task of philosophy to do so.

More to come.

 

Whys

Philosophy

Is it a coincidence that “why” in the plural sounds like “wise”? Yes. Actually it is a coincidence. So I will force the connection myself. Wisdom is closely related to the capacity to reason from the logic of multiple moral purposes, the awareness that more purpose-logics exist that we can imagine, and the virtue to recognize when we are encountering an (as yet) unimaginable other-why.

Thou shalt transcend

Philosophy

The moral imperative that I feel most intensely is to acknowledge, respond to and relate to realities who are not myself, and to value most of all those real others who want to return my acknowledgment, to respond back and to form a relationship with me — or at least to some degree. 

My difficulty is in the ethics of “to some degree”: how does one relate to an other who prefers to reduce some or all of one’s own reality to that of their own self? That is, they prefer their belief of you to the reality of you? That is, they do not share your transcendence ethic? Or are hostile to your transcendence ethic? Clearly, we cannot treat those who approach us as mere idea the same way as those who approach us as transcendent realities of our own, but that does not mean we should respond to them as they respond to us.

This is a digression, though. The main point I wanted to document is this: I believe the moral requirement to acknowledge, respond to and relate oneself to the reality of transcendence, however it approaches us (which is generally more burdensome than magical), is absolute. I hang my belief in God on this simple but all-pervasive faith: I cannot not believe we are commanded to transcend. 

This faith is compatible with many forms of atheism, actually, though I prefer to interpret God into my understanding. It is incompatible with all denominations of Fundamentalism, which I do not accept as religion, and in fact reject as anti-religion, being as it is the attempt to reduce transcendence to mere idea, factual “faith” and “belief”, leaving the “believer” hostile to what stands outside their faith, that is, whatever reality transcends what they can grip with their mind’s little fingers. 

Meditation on V’ahavta

Judaism, Philosophy

While I traveled the last two weeks I finished memorizing the V’ahavta.

V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

You shall love Adonai your God
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your might.

*

For the purposes of this meditation, morality will be defined as immediate valuing: discerning (or mis-discerning) what is good or bad, or both at once, or neither. It is not the same as ethical codification, or deliberation over what is right, or even the resolve to submit to what is good. It is value as we have it, as “experienced”.

*

With our being — with our moral heart, with our knowing soul and with our active might — we live within our world, a finite portion of God.

With all our being — all our heart, all our soul and all our might — we love beyond our world toward God, a finite speck of whom is each of us.

The beyondness, toward which our finite being exists in relation with God’s infinitude, extends from immediate presence of self, time and cosmos into inconceivable nothingness of Spirit, Eternity and Apeiron, which are dimensions of One: Echad.

(These dimensions might not be the only or even best way to conceive extensions toward infinity from immediate presence, but they are the ones most natural to me, personally, in this place, time and state of existence.)

With all our being entails more than simple feeling or simple knowing or simple doing, or even each of the three in turn. With all our being means simultaneously valuing knowingly and actively, knowing actively and valuingly, and acting feelingly and knowingly.

And loving with all our being means preferring a beloved beyondness more than preserving the particular being with which we presently love, our own self. It means allowing love to change who our self is, in response to loving a beloved.

This change of love, in every case, draws us toward the nothingness of infinitude despite our anxiety, into it despite our dread, across it despite our despair, and to the other side where love is consummated and prepared for the next traversal.

Anyone who cannot face being changed for love by love, who understands God to be found where bliss points and away from dread, will confuse God with the being of one’s own existence, not the One toward which love draws more than dread repels.

*

The misinterpretation of experience toward God is the corruption of religion in this time, and maybe all times.

What is religion? Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually (soul), practically (might) and morally (heart).

It is not a merely physical reality that is, nor a merely spiritual reality who lives, nor a mere story unfolding, but all of these, and others we might one day come to experience and others no finite being can experience. God comes to us as constancy, as fate, as shock, as longing — as the destiny of going-toward-God-despite — as insistence wrestling with existence.

*

I’m shocked I can say a public prayer and mean it, albeit in my own way, but in a public made up of individuals who are all expected to say things in one’s own way. In Judaism (at least Reform Judaism), saying words in unison does not mean saying them unanimously. It is a perfect resolution of my need to be who I am in my way, but to do so without being isolated.

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.
Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va-ed.
V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

This is my understanding from the last decade, finally translated into my native Hebrew.

What is religion?

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

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.

Mikvah

Biography, Judaism

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

Judaism, Philosophy

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).

 

Turtles

Philosophy

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

Biography, Philosophy

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

Judaism

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

Judaism

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.