Category Archives: Philosophy

Know thyselves

Enworldment, Etymology, Existentialism, Philosophy

“Know thyself,” Apollo commands.

Okay. But how? And which “thyself”? — for there is more than one. Two roads diverge before us: the path of self-consciousness and the path of self-awareness

Most take the path of self-consciousness, which tries to know the self objectively. One’s self is taken as an object of knowledge. We call it “reflecting on ourselves”. We look into the mirror, and we are absorbed in the image we see there. We identify with it.

But we can also take the path of self-awareness, and take ourselves as subject, the subjectivity to whom objective data is given, including our objective third-person self.

But self-awareness includes an insight that we are given only what we know how to take, and that changing our way of taking  can change our givens.

We can experiment with our taking (our receptivity) and see how observing from various angles or focusing on various aspects changes our objectivity. Or we can experiment with our conceptivity by asking different questions about what seems objectively true to us. Or we can experiment with our selfhood by participating in new realities, physical and/or otherwise.

What we take “self” to mean makes all the difference in who we are, and who we may become.

Etymological cheat sheet:

Conceive = together-take

Data = given

 

Untried ideas

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Politics

The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.

The problem of idle thought has nothing at all to do with virtues of industriousness or vices of laziness. The problem with idle thought is that such thoughts are not only untried and likely untrue, but that a great many of them are untriable and cannot even be said to be truth or false, because they are nonsense. They create what Richard Rorty called “theoretical hallucinations”.

This invites a comparison with drugs. We can use drugs for therapeutic purposes. We can also use them ritualistically. And we can use them experimentally. But all too easily what begins with therapeutic, ritual or experimental use lapses into mere recreational use, and from there to recreational abuse and addiction.

People who have zero occasion to put thoughts they consume or think up to practical trial — except to sell or resell them to other, equally idle thought consumers — can become a lot like recreational drug abusers, who maybe deal on the side to fund their all-consuming hobby. The drugs or ideas are for nothing but themselves. A life organized around procurement, consumption and traffic of such intoxicants begins to serve nothing but perpetual intoxication.

Rereading Richard Rorty, I’m realizing I am in a similar situation as when I read Christian scripture. The ideas are amazing and meant to be employed in practice.

But many of the most fervent fans of both of these luminaries just like feeling intoxicated by the ideas. They use them recreationally, but never put them to work in the real world. They’ll memorize words and quote them chapter and verse, but the ideas are their play toys, not their life equipment.

Back in 2016, the smarter regions of the proggosphere lost their collective minds over the uncanny prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. They neatly carved this quote out of its context.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. …members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What is rarely included was even more insightful prescient explanations of how a thoroughly decadent, idle and alienated cultural left would cause this to happen.

If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party — namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals — Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me.

The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super­-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere — to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.

Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated — and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.

The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements.

And then Rorty continues on.

These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”

In its Foucauldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot “… confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.” Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued… that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman’s civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists-the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the daylit cheerfulness ofWhitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete-for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.

If you buy into this dark, fundamentalist deformation of progressive politics (which I call “progressivism”, similar to “Islamism” and “Christianism” as names for fundamentalist deformations of the religions they pervert) it probably makes perfect sense to you that the occult forces of racism must be coercively exorcised from every institution via “antiracism training”. Doing so might not even seem to be a political act, but a purely ethical one.

One Rortyist (a Rortian can be fundamentalist, too!) appealed to history. His claim was that because the historical fact of racism is indisputable, that the need to respond to this fact is, by extension, also indisputable. So, because the effects of history continue on to the present (which is entirely plausible),  all the disparities progressivists observe and compulsively measure can be attributed to the effects of this history (less plausible), that this effect is concentrated primarily in the institutions where the disparities are seen (institutional racism, which is the furthest thing from indisputable), that progressivists have an effective remedy for this problem (in the form of “antiracist” harassment of employees, which is flat implausible) and that therefore employers have a moral right to use their power to subject employees to cultural political harassment. All this is contrary to liberalism and to Rorty’s ideals, in much the same way that political Christianism is directly contrary to Jesus’s teachings and example.

But back to the original point I was making: “The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.”

What I am saying here is an old thought I’ve been hammering again and again.

John Dewey called his brand of Pragmatism “instrumentalism”. According to instrumentalism, we should understand ideas not primarily as representations of reality, but as tools for responding to reality. A idea that helps us respond effectively in a wide variety of practical challenges can be called true. One that malfunctions can be called false.

I’ve called my praxis, “design instrumentalism“. I think we should evaluate our ideas exactly as designers evaluate their outputs: by Liz Sander’s brilliant framework of useful, usable and desirable. An idea that  gives us a feeling of clarity and reinforces our sense of moral rightness, but which cannot be applied to practical problems lacks usefulness, and in all likelihood, usability beyond clear talk.

Such appealing but  impractical theories are at best, art.

Art is only useful when we take it for what it is — something we experience but do not take literally.

Art that is taken literally and confused with reality is delusional or even psychotic.

The anti-bias bias

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

It is a certain kind of person who is preoccupied with cognitive bias.

It is a kind of person who seems to have a taste for explicit, formal procedures. It is a kind of person who seems to operate via verbal self-instruction. It is a kind of person who always asks for very detailed clarifications on how things ought to be done, and needs every contingency to be planned out. It is the kind of person who shows up to a new job expecting documentation on how everything ought to be done. This kind of person’s eyes light up when “cognitive bias” is mentioned. (Or “motivated reasoning” or “implicit bias” or “institutional racism”, etc. They are all variations on false consciousness claims. They are always pointed outward at objects of critique, and never back at the ideological subject making them.)

To such people, safeguards against bias are no burden, or maybe even a support. It seems that if formalized anti-bias practices were not available, they would seek some other formalized practice. The question for them is whether the explicit practice we adopt and use has anti-bias features or not.

But some people have a very different relationship to practice. They rely more on intuition, and only occasionally verbally work some problem or another out. Much of what they know is tacit know-how, and muck of their understanding comes to be known only response to concrete situations. If, before engaging a problem, you ask them what they plan to do, they struggle to verbalize it, because, unlike the self-instructors, they don’t code their actions in words before executing them. If you ask them after the fact why they did one action rather than another, they will have to ask themselves the same question.

Yet, these intuitive practitioners are often highly effective at their craft and in solving problems, especially novel problems. Further, they are often pioneers in their fields, and in fact were behind the codification of the very practices executed by the self-instructors.

An intuitive practitioner, after successfully solving a problem, reflects on what they were doing, and tries to explicate principles that intuitively guided them. They move back and forth between practical intuitive interaction with their materials and theoretical formulations of the practice. They tack back and forth between explication of implicit purpose in their own practice, and seeing how well those explications work in guiding practice. Gradually, praxis develops.

But the best practitioners still act intuitively in the moment. If asked why they do what they do, they’ll provide an explanation that conforms closely to their intuitive responses, but this account should not be confused with the explanations given by the verbal self-instructors, which is exposing the code they run when executing an action.

But verbal self-instructor do have one huge advantage over intuitive practitioners. If intuitive practitioners are loaded with self-instructing code and told to execute that code, they lose all grace. They become awkward robots, even more artificial than the self-instructors.

In a world where all people are required to verbalize everything, where intuition and tacit know-how are denied the status of knowing, where one is only regarded as an expert when they can list their source-code on demand, where people are given instructions to execute and templates to format their output, the verbal self-instructors reign supreme.

This is, I believe, why verbal self-instructor’s instinctively love the requirement to neutralize bias. It is why they love bureaucratic rigor. It is why they want everything proceduralized. They can adopt these anti-bias and standardized practices without any impediment, but it encumbers intuitive and reflective practitioners and destroys their ability to — let’s just say it outright — to compete against them.

It tilts the playing field against intuitive and reflective practitioners, so the self-instructors can flourish and dominate.

In the past, I’ve complained about anti-bias meta-bias — the bias in what we regard as biased, versus the biases we neglect to notice at all, versus the biases we regard as virtuous, that is our ethical convictions. But there is also a deeper and worse bias prevalent among the verbal and intuitively-challenged — a procedural, rather than substantive bias — to see intuitive judgment, action and unsupervised perception as inherently more vulnerable to bias than formally codified policies and processes. So the starkest prejudices at all, both substantive and procedural, are coded into institutions, to counter what appear to be biases to the highly-biased minds who implement, support and champion them.

Reformist revolution?

Design, Philosophy, Politics

In the last week something inspiring has come into clear view for me.

It all started when Susan complained to me that she has a dozen urgent projects to do, which all interconnect and play a part in a single overwhelming goal she wants to reach. All the projects need to unfold simultaneously. I suggested she think in terms suggested by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country:

…Dissent, and the group of writers around it, felt able to dispense with membership in a movement. They were content simply to throw themselves into a lot of campaigns. By “campaign, ” I mean something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed. Movements, by contrast, neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple. They share in what Kierkegaard called “the passion of the infinite.” They are exemplified by Christianity and by Marxism, the sort of movements which enable novelists like Dostoevsky to do what Howe admiringly called “feeling thought.”

Membership in a movement requires the ability to see particular campaigns for particular goals as parts of something much bigger, and as having little meaning in themselves. Campaigns for such goals as the unionization of migrant farm workers, or the overthrow (by votes or by force) of a corrupt government, or socialized medicine, or legal recognition of gay marriage can be conducted without much attention to literature, art, philosophy, or history. But movements levy contributions from each of these areas of culture. They are needed to provide a larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of which will emerge something like Paul’s “new being in Christ” or Mao’s “new socialist man.” Movement politics, the sort which held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics which Howe came to know all too well in the Thirties, and was doubtful about when it was reinvented in the Sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born.

As I re-read this passage, it brought to mind a beautiful essay from Bruno Latour, called “A Cautious Prometheus”. It begins by describing five characteristics of design, and draws parallels between the evolution of design and Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) re-understanding of scientific truth.

…what is so interesting to me in that in the spread of design, this concept has undergone the same amazing transformations as my own field. STS, that was until a few years back but a small subfield of social science, has now received the formidable support of a much larger movement. What was a slightly far-fetched and a clearly scandalous claim, namely that there are no objects but only things and disputed assemblages, is now fast becoming common sense.

The five characteristics of design he listed can be summarized as:

  1. Design is humble: It avoids hubris, and works at enhancement rather than a foundational acts of creation.
  2. Design attends to details: It prioritizes skill, craft, and careful consideration of details, rejecting recklessly radical grand-scale action.
  3. Design is interpretive: It involves meanings, symbolism, and semiotics, transforming objects into “things” meant for interpretation.
  4. Design is re-formative: It is inherently a process of redesign, working with existing materials and contexts rather than starting from scratch.
  5. Design is ethical: It carries an intrinsic moral dimension, requiring judgments about good and bad design and engaging with issues of responsibility and collaboration, within a specific ethos.

You should read the essay yourself, but I am summarizing these five characteristics of design to provide context for this inspiring passage:

Of course, all five of these dimensions of design as well as the development of STS could be taken as a clear sign of postmodernism, as a quiet and lazy abandonment of the tasks of Promethean modernism. Some diehard modernists do think that way, but I don’t believe this is the case. As I pointed out earlier, the spread of the word “design” doesn’t come at a time when there is less to do; it comes at a time when there is more to do. Infinitely more, since it is the whole fabric of life that is now concerned thanks to the ecological crisis. What no revolution has ever contemplated, namely the remaking of our collective life on earth, is to be carried through with exactly the opposite of revolutionary and modernizing attitudes. This is what renders the spirit of the time so interesting. President Mao was right after all: the revolution has to always be revolutionized. What he did not anticipate is that the new “revolutionary” energy would be taken from the set of attitudes that are hard to come by in revolutionary movements: modesty, care, precautions, skills, crafts, meanings, attention to details, careful conservations, redesign, artificiality, and ever shifting transitory fashions. We have to be radically careful, or carefully radical… What an odd time we are living through.

At the risk of undermining Rorty’s advocacy of campaigns (aka social design projects), I’d like to suggest that energetic embrace of designerly reform could be revolutionary.

If a critical mass of people got it in their heads that progress is not measured by proximity to perfection, but rather by how many improvements we can make to the world around us, and took up the tools of design we could improve the world considerably, find meaning in doing so, and because design seeks alignment and collaboration, do so more democratically and inclusively. This way of working generates alignment and solidarity, something sorely lacking today.

What is sarcasm?

Philosophy

I think I said this before, but I can’t find it:

Sarcasm is what we do when another shirks their ironic duty, and we do their irony for them by stating their own beliefs with an ironic nonirony.

This notion of ironic duty is based on Richard Rorty’s understanding of irony’s role in liberal-democratic politics:

An ironist is someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies; (2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

 

Embracing personal finitude

Philosophy

One thing I’ve picked up from both philosophy and esoterism is cautious humility.

Every philosophical accomplishment feels like arriving at the ultimate goal. After reaching final enlightenment multiple times, and then seeing others arrive at the same enlightenment and do their touchdown dances, we start assuming that these victories are more commonplace than we can know. And we also start noticing the earliest and least impressive insights seem most unprecedented to those experiencing them and they inspire the most extravagant and extraverted eurekas.

It is easy to then go in an opposite direction. We want to transcend the ecstasy of epiphany and level them all down to mere novelties. We try to become objective about the most intensely subjective things. This can seem the epiphany of epiphanies. In fact, it is a mystical self-alienation. It is an objectivist misapotheosis. I’ve called this eclipsis.

I think the best thing we can do is stay squarely inside our finitude and our finite experiences and be as faithful to them as we can. We can try to transcend where we actually are and enter a new place where we will actually be. But knowing that we can always be elsewhere is not being elsewhere or everywhere. While we are where we are, we can remain aware that others have surpassed us and might very well witness our latest accomplishment and see its full modesty.

But why not, in all modestly, feel our full immodest excitement at our own modest accomplishment? Why not just take what happens as given, and do what we do, feel what we feel and say what seems true to us as well as we can? Let’s not stand outside ourselves and look at how we might seem from eternity? This seems the surest route to doing solid, valuable work. And it is the highest privilege of unimportance — a privilege we should not squander.

Hyperobject of knowledge

Esoterism, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religion

The reason I am clarifying my theology is so I can contrast it with Richard Rorty’s inspiring atheistic alternative. But as is so often the case, I share Rorty’s disbeliefs. The God I know is not the “God” Rorty rejects. And a great many of Rorty’s atheistic hopes are hopes that, for me, are inseparable from my religious faith. To put it in his own words, he favors an atheistic description, while I favor a theistic one.

My main point of disagreement with Rorty is over the role of religion in social life, and the importance of maintaining commonality of faith across divergent modes of understanding. Here I find esoterism persuasive. Religious language and practice support a pluralism that supports cultural solidarity and personal spiritual growth and flourishing. But conceiving this truth requires a different mode of thought than science. Those whose understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” is scientistic will find themselves unable to enter this mode of understanding. Worse, they will consider this incapacity a virtue, and reinforce their humble “can’t” with a proud “won’t”. They want’t to break with the past and with those loyal to the past, and actively effect a rupture they believe they merely observe.

Now I’m thinking about where I disagree with esoterists. First, I do not believe in their absolute hierarchy of development. I do think there are degrees of understanding of esoteric truths, and I these truths are common across traditions. But we gain these only with some real and painful tradeoffs. We lose some virtues as we gain others. A religious community needs the full range of virtues, not only intellectual ones. I do not believe esoterists ever arrive at a full understanding of God.

With respect to knowledge, God’s infinite being is best understood as a hyperobject (to use Tim Morton’s term), an object of knowledge of a scale and topology ungraspable by any individual mind, and therefore best “known” through distributed understanding. But this is just the belief part of religious faith. Religious faith is a whole-being affair, something done with the entirety of one’s heart, soul and strength.

If this blog were an online publication, I’d set this post aside for further editing. But this blog is a public diary, so I’m hitting “publish”.

A failed attempt at theological clarity

Enworldment, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religion

When I profess belief in God, people are often either baffled or they misconstrue what I mean.

Things get weirder when it turns out that my beliefs and attitudes can diverge from or even clash with those of some religious believers, while harmonizing with those of some atheists. I will frequently tell atheists “I share your disbeliefs.” But then I will seem to agree with with theists. Because of my esoteric orientation which accepts the necessity and relative validity of approximate understandings, I avoid contradicting good-faith simplistic understandings. I do this not only because such conflicts are nearly impossible to resolve, but even mere because I believe creating this kind of conflict is wrong. Despite our theoretical differences, at an infra-theoretical intuitive level, I believe they are as right as possible, and that their beliefs inspire good action. This is what I choose to emphasize.

So depending on context, it can look like I agree with everyone, or it can look like I agree with nobody at all. Everything is fuzzy or endlessly qualified. My yesses do not mean yes and my noes do not mean no.

I’ve mentioned before that the pragmatic maxim is useful in theological discussions.

C. S. Peirce formulated the maxim several different ways. My favorite is:

To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception—and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

(I love these words so much I plan to enshrine them in a letterpress piece.)

When someone states belief or disbelief in God, this tells us nearly nothing. But when we ask what follows from one’s belief or disbelief in God, an entire world begins to unfold. Let us make an attempt to unfold my world.

Pragmatic consequences of an essentially divine reality:

  1. Reality transcends the grasp of reason. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Reality is inexhaustibly surprising.
  2. Each and every person is a minutely bit divine reality, and each transcends the understanding of every other person. Every person is a source of surprise, both in who they are and what they can show us about reality.
  3. Morality is one aspect of reality that transcends truth. Reason cannot and must not veto conscience; it can only make appeals to conscience and pursue positive judgment. Reason is a lawyer before the judge, conscience.
  4. Morality obligates us to live in accordance with transcendence. We must invite, welcome and extend hospitality to surprise and the judgment of conscience, not only intellectually, but in our being: emotionally, intuitively and practically in our being — heart, soul and strength.
  5. The consequence of immorality is alienation. We have the freedom to wall ourselves up inside our reason, acknowledging only realities that reason reasons is reasonable, but this cannot be accomplished without a felt loss of reality. It only feels like punishment.

Above I linked to an earlier post, and I prefer my earlier, simpler expression:

I believe in God, and therefore we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. We must live as a part of a reality that includes and exceeds us, and requires us to do so.

But honestly, the sequence is backwards. For the last year, my friend and colleague Darwin Muljono has been preaching the gospel of critical realism, which I vulgarly interpret as pragmatism-in-reverse. It encourages us to ask: “if things are such and such a way, what conditions are necessary for this to be so?”

I believe — and cannot sincerely disbelieve — that we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. I believe in the reality of this obligation more immediately and deeply than I believe in evolutionary psychology theories that treat this conviction as a by-product of instinct. A reality that can morally obligate us in such a way is divine. That is the condition of a morally-obligatory reality. Therefore, I cannot sincerely disbelieve in God. My intellectual conscience forbids suppressing this fact, so I will not suppress it.

I will close this mess with another favorite C. S. Peirce quote:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Achieving Our Country

Philosophy, Politics

Over the last several years my alienation from progressivism has grown so complete, I’ve wondered if I’m still a left liberal at all.

I decided that a good way to gauge my drift would be to return to the book I have considered my political Bible and see how I respond to it now. That book is Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country.

The answer is, of course, that I have not drifted at all. I agree with it as much now as I ever did before. It is progressivism that has changed — and it has changed in a way Rorty tried in vain to warn us about.

It is a huge irony that this book became famous for a shockingly prescient passage that predicted the election of a Trump-like demagogue, and not for the insightful critique of cultural leftism that laid out the causes of the foreseen event. Most — but not all! — leftists were content to just boggle at the prophetic accuracy.

Had they taken the rest of the book to heart, they might have sobered up and avoided Trump’s reelection. But instead they pushed things even further in the wrong direction.

There is a consensus that there has been a vibe shift and that the left is “done with woke.” I see what they see, but I think the diagnosis is superficial. I have only seen changes in mood and emotional intensity. The root cause — the ideology and its habits of interpretation — is unchanged, and I feel sure it will reactivate and cause more damage when events jolt it back from dormancy.

Very few people think about how they think — only what they think. Education trains them to think like all educated people think. After this training, they process information almost automatically, like a program.

Because they think exactly like others think about the same information fed from the same sources, they reach the same conclusions, and this creates an illusion of objectivity. “Everyone has independently come to the same conclusion as me because I’m thinking logically with valid information, and arrived at the truth.”

There is nothing wrong with this. We cannot change the fact that people think uncritically. The only variable is the ideology they are programmed to run.

In a healthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that support society. In an unhealthy society the population is programmed with ideologies that undermine, weaken or even intentionally harm society. It’s still passive, uncritical conformism, just a passive, uncritical conformism that believes itself assertive, critical and independent.

What this bad programming is essentially is a cultural autoimmune condition that causes the body politic to attack itself.

Again — the cure to this cultural autoimmune condition is not teaching true critical thought, but accepting the fact that 95% of folks are never going to think critically about anything, and that this is good. If you feed them critical thoughts they’ll be as thoughtless as ever but do thoughtlessly destructive things instead of thoughtlessly constructive things. Better to provide them a solid ideological foundation to serve as a platform for their achievements. We have never found better programming than liberalism.

(If this sounds cynical, it is because you overvalue philosophical thought. There are many other virtues, and those are more worthy of admiration than philosophical virtue. There is moral integrity, courage, honesty, industry, ingenuity, thoroughness, athleticism, artistic talent, beauty, charisma, tenacity… so many others.

Unknowable unknowns

Philosophy

I think I’m about to repeat an old thought. It’s yet another play on Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” formulation. But this adds to the unknown unknowns a third and more difficult dimension of mystery: knowable and unknowable.

Rumsfeld’s original quote:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

I want to expand the “unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know” in to account for two very different reasons we may not know that we do not know something.

Here is my expansion:

  • Knowable unknown unknowns — we don’t know that we don’t know because we neglected to consider some relevant thing that, had we considered it, would have made sense to us and enabled us to respond effectively.
  • Unknowable unknown unknowns — we don’t know that we don’t know because we are philosophically unprepared or unequipped to notice some relevant thing, so even if we had considered it we would have been unable to make sense of it, and it could not have informed an effective response.

Metaethics

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

When contemplating moral action, we seek ethical principles. We do this almost by cognitive reflex. We ask: “By what principle is this action justified?” We expect to find an answer. Is this because we believe that the essence of morality is rules — rules we must follow in order to be good?

In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig situates rational ethics within a broader nonrational context, which he calls metaethics. Metaethics still obligates us to act, but not on the basis of something we can codify. We act on the basis of relationship, on intuition of the living reality of another person.

It is tempting for anyone from a Christian conditioning (which emphatically includes progressivists) to assume the metaethical ground of ethics must necessarily be merciful. But doesn’t this just establish another rule to obey — a rule to abolish enforcement of rules? A rule of unconditional kindness, of self-sacrifice for the good of the other, of imitation of the crucified redeemer — of automatic altruism?

My Jewish instincts are inclined to view that as an evasion of moral responsibility. Face to face with being who transcends our own, we are addressed and called to respond with one’s own extra-logical conscience. Hineini.

Perhaps Kabbalists are right, that the balance tilts toward Chesed (mercy and love) and away from Gevurah (severity and law). As a holdover from my old math-mystic days, I like to imagine the balance at approximately 61.8% Chesed to 38.2% Gevurah. This tilt implies that we should err toward mercy or charity, while still exercising our judgment as fully and faithfully as we can. But unless I am deeply mistaken, Kabbalists understand the necessity of Gevurah’s discipline, and that the desire to annihilate Gevurah and leave Chesed entirely unrestrained is a form of evil-enabling evil.

I am urgently interested to see if Rosenzweig develops his concept of metaethics in a direction that holds each person metaethically responsible for his own choice and application of ethical systems.

Of course, but maybe

Ethics, Politics

“I’m against violence…” “I do not condone murder…” “Killing is unacceptable…”

…But maybe…

“…he started a much-needed public conversation.” “…he expressed an anger we all share.” “…he has put sociopath executives on notice.”

In other words, he did a bad thing, but maybe he also did some good.

How much good?

So much good that maybe we won’t regret the murder? So much good that maybe the murder was justified? So much good that maybe the murderer was, in fact, a hero?

And how bad was the murder, really?

Is it really so bad to murder an alleged murderer? How many death did this man cause? Is the world a worse place with one less sociopathic zillionaire?

I met a group of friends for dinner last night. The question of Brian Thompson’s murder came up.

I listened to everyone washed their hands with “of course…” before bloodying them with “but maybe…”

I protested the but-maybes. I insisted that we decouple the condemnation of murder from the obvious need for healthcare reform.

It was assumed that my protest was a protest against murder, and, being both tired and outnumbered, I lacked the clarity at that moment to respond.

Driving home I realized that my problem is not with murder or with violence.

If Brian Thompson had been charged, tried and found guilty of 40,000 deaths and sent to the electric chair, I would not have the reaction I’m having. I’d be saying something like “of course we should never celebrate an execution, but maybe….” And the same will go for whatever punishment Brian Thompson’s murderer receives.

My problem is that one man — an elite among elites, posturing as a victimized marginal figure — extralegally appointed himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. And my even bigger problem is that a great many fellow-elites, who share his outlook, vaguely approve of his vigilanteism, because he is dispensing justice as they see it.

The outlook goes like this: “This system is hopelessly corrupt. The powerful are beyond the reach of justice. Maybe we are past the point of getting justice any other way.”…

…”So maybe… it would be a good thing if CEOs feared for their lives when they do ?harmful things to the public.”

A few points:

1) This is literally advocating terrorism. Terrorism is use fear as a political instrument.

2) What the public perceives as harmful is very easily manipulated through propaganda. The public has believed a great many incorrect things, even in the recent past.

3) Half of this country — albeit a less elite and privileged half — holds completely different theories of corruption. They believe that woke radicals dominate our institutions, including education, media, finance and technology, and that the system is hopelessly rigged to give woke radicals more and more power to do horrible things like persecuting white people, destroying religion and public decency and transing all the kids, and so on. The conspiracy theorist fringe of the right believes even wilder stuff. There’s this universal principle of morality known as the Golden Rule. How do we feel about them sitting around a table saying “Of course, thou shalt not kill, but maybe…”

The problem as I see it is that we have all become so goddamn sure that we are so goddamn smart and well-informed and well-intentioned and self-aware that while of course I believe in liberal democracy, maybe… just maybe, the country would be better off if people like me had dictatorial power.

That is my problem.

Our liberal-democratic institutions are designed to make indulgence in our false omniscience impossible. When they work correctly, they force us to take one another seriously as persons. We must win public support for our preferred leaders and their policies through persuasion. We must win customers by offering them better value. We must make our case before a jury of our peers.

These experiences sometimes show us the limits of our omniscience. We come away less omniscient, but much wiser.

That wisdom advises reforming our institutions when they stop working correctly. It advises against giving up on institutions and going radical, illiberal and antidemocratic. This is especially true when we convince ourselves that only antidemocratic illiberal action can save “our” liberal democracy.

I had a friend who was a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. I found his worldview horrifying. The horror had less to do with the falseness of the beliefs than it did the pragmatic consequences of those beliefs: if he truly believed what he professed, he was obligated to respond violently.

My QAnon theorist had no evil intentions. He had no selfish ambitions. He just wanted to protect us from others with evil intentions.

When leftists talk about conservatives, are they really that much different? They have fancier resumes, more reputable authorities underwriting their convictions and more respectable coercive tools backing their wills, but the logic is the same. Conservatives don’t really mean what they say. They are trying to trick you. If you listen to their arguments and find some of them persuasive, you are a sucker. They are motivated solely by greed, but we are motivated only by the public good. Which is why we must fight the greedy, lying people with ruthlessness. We must fight them with every economic and social tool at our disposal. Maybe violence, if it comes down to it.

We learn more about a person by listening to what they have to say about their enemies than from what they say about themselves.

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Actant systems

ANT, Design, Etymology

Design develops actant systems. Polycentric design disciplines (including service design) are optimized to integrate multiple interacting human actants into the actant systems they develop. In contrast, monocentric design disciplines were optimized for a single human actant.

One exciting aspect of seeing design this way is purely etymological. Human actants in a design system are designated defined roles in the system. They are, as such designees. In design we designate roles both to people and to engineered sub-systems as actants within our systems. Cool!

Dark glass

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

Twenty years ago when I was first reading Nietzsche, fully on fire and burning to pure ash, I became convinced that Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian of some weird variety. The belief lacked evidentiary foundation. Not only could it not be proved, but proving it seemed somehow wrong.

The belief was rooted in hermeneutic experience: having sacrificed my old truth at the altar of interrogation, a new kind of truth could emerge. That truth made the clearest and most vital sense of the Gospels. Please notice — it was not only a new truth, a new “belief system”, a new set of opinions on what was and wasn’t true, good or existent. It was a new kind of truth and entirely different way to approach truth. This new kind of truth was not a set of facts to look at and to accept or reject. Rather, this was a truth to be looked through, which revealed a new world of givens — and that new given world was infinitely preferable to the old one.

Nietzsche’s comments on Christianity, on Christians, Jews, Jesus, Saul/Paul and his use of polyvalently charged appellations — like “the founder of Christianity” — make his attitude toward the Judeo-Christian tradition highly… multistable. Depending on the tone of our reading and the care we take in considering everything Nietzsche might have meant in each of his statements, we could take his utterances as a whole to be radically atheistic or passionately (but covertly) evangelical. Or something else entirely.

When we look through a dark glass what we see is a matter of focus.

We can focus into the dark glass and see what images the glass reflects, which includes the image of our own selves as objects, and all the objects that lie behind and around ourselves. Our human-all-too-human eyes are magnetically drawn toward our self-image. “There’s me!”

Or we can focus through the glass to see what images the glass transmits — the objects on the other side of the glass.

If we never reflect on focus and just take the image we see at face value, we naturally assume we have seen what there is to see in the glass. We look into it and never look through it, or we look through it and never look into it, and, consequently never understand the full reality of the dark glass, which is, whether we look into it or through it, always involved — unseen — in the act of seeing.

Book Idea: Designing Hat

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ideas, Politics, Works

I have an idea for a book I will never write. I may just steal Borges’s beautiful move: writing a short story that is a review of a nonexistent book, outlining its key ideas. Or maybe I’ll add a new meta-level of laziness and just outline the Borgesian short story I will never write.

This never-to-be-written short story will be a fictional review of the never-to-be-written book Designing Hat, which is, of course, an allusion to DeBono’s actually-written pop-biz classic Six Thinking Hats. In this book DeBono advises strategic hat changes to address various situations. My book, however recommends putting on your one designing hat and never taking it off whenever approaching any problem involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything.

This single move, I’ll argue, can clear up all kinds of hellish nonsense we all detest. It won’t solve everything — no method can — but it can dramatically improve our chances of making real progress. In the process, it can reduce everyday hostility and nihilism while increasing solidarity and goodwill.

In the grand tradition of inflating the importance of design, I will insist that design thinking is effective far beyond its usual applications. Since almost everything we do is a variation on “problems involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything”, the advice is more or less to superglue your designing hat onto your head.

Political problems, from the pettiest household squabbles to international crises, should be addressed as design problems. Even if we are not hands-on participants in shaping domestic or foreign policy, our conversations about these issues will improve if we approach them in a designerly manner. And meetings, too… Ninety-five percent of meetings could be vastly improved if approached as design collaborations.

The review will offer a succinct summary of each chapter, showing how adopting designerly attitudes and practices makes everything better:

  • Segment people in reference to a clear purpose
  • Go to the reality you want to change and observe it for yourself
  • Ask people to teach you about their lives
  • Fall in love with problems, not solutions (I think Marty Cagan coined this?)
  • Win alignment; never resort to coercion
  • Do not argue if you can prototype and test
  • Do not debate; compare options
  • Make smart tradeoffs

There are definitely more chapters, and I’ll keep adding them as they occur to me. Please comment if you have ideas for chapters.

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

Design, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).

Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.

I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.

The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!

I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.

I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.

(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull that plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize, psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say, because, in fact, I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas. They will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)

The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.

I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effect both religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.

Philosophical antecedents

Hermeneutics, Philosophy

Franz Rosenzweig’s description of the peculiarities of philosophical reading reads familiar and true:

The reader has a particularly high regard for the first pages of philosophical books. He believes they are the basis for all that follows. Consequently he also thinks that in order to have refuted the whole, it’s enough to refute these pages. Hence the immense interest in Kant’s teaching of space and time, in the form in which he developed it at the beginning of the Critique. Hence the comical attempts to “refute” Hegel by refuting the first triad of his Logic, and Spinoza by refuting his definitions. And hence the helplessness of the general reader in the face of philosophical books. He thinks they must be “especially logical,” and understands by this the dependence of every succeeding sentence on every preceding one; so that when the famous one stone is pulled out, as a consequence “the whole collapses.” In truth, this is nowhere less the case than in philosophical books. Here a sentence does not follow from the preceding one, but more likely from the one following. Whoever has not understood a sentence or a paragraph is little helped if, in the conscientious belief that he must not leave anything behind that is not understood, he reads it perchance again and again or even starts over again. Philosophical books deny themselves such a methodical ancien régime-strategy, which thinks it may not leave behind any fortification without having conquered it. They want to be conquered napoleonically, in a bold attack on the enemy’s central force, upon the conquest of which the small outlying fortifications will fall automatically. Thus, whoever does not understand something can most assuredly expect enlightenment if he courageously goes on reading. The reason why this rule is difficult for the beginner, and, as the cases cited above show, also for many a nonbeginner to accept, lies in the fact that thinking and writing are not the same. In thinking, one stroke really strikes a thousand connections. In writing, these thousand must be artfully and cleanly arranged on the string of thousands of lines. As Schopenhauer said, his entire book wants to impart only a single thought which, however, he could not impart more briefly than in the entire book Thus, if a philosophical book is worth reading at all, it is certainly so only when one either does not understand its beginning or at the very least misunderstands it. For otherwise the thought that it imparts is scarcely worth re-considering, since one evidently already has it, if one knows right at the beginning of its exposition “where it is leading up to.” All this is valid only for books; only they can be written and read without any consideration for the passing of time. Speaking and hearing follow other laws. Of course, only real speaking and hearing, not the kind that derogates itself a “lecture” and during which the hearer must forget that he has a mouth and becomes at best a writing hand. But, at any rate, for books it is so.

Just where that decisive battle of understanding is fought, where the whole can be seen at a glance, cannot be said in advance; in all probability already before the last page, but hardly before the middle of the book; and surely not by two readers at precisely the same point. At least when they are readers who read on their own and not readers who, because of their learning, already know before the first word what is written in a book, and because of their ignorance do not know it even after the last one. In respect to older books, the last-mentioned readers’ virtues are most often found in two sorts of people, professors and students; in respect to newer ones they tend to be found in one and the same person.

Exnihilist Manifesto

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.

I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.

What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.

It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.

But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.

In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.

The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.

We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.

Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.

If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.

If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.

If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.

If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.

If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.

If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.

If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.

If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.

Nothingness is dreadful.

It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.

Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.

If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.

It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.

How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?

The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.

Imagined murmurations

Philosophy

Imagine a murmuration of starlings alighting upon a tree. As they land, they converge on the tree, saturate its branches and shape themselves to the tree itself. This would be an intuitive murmuration.

Imagine this flock of starlings collectively recalling the tree within their flock. They sing to one another of their positions, relative to one another. They try to reproduce those same spatial relations in mid-air deep in the sky. And for a moment they collect themselves — re-collect themselves — into the form of that tree. This would be a remembered murmuration.

Imagine this flock of starlings collectively recalling all the various trees they’ve alighted upon. There is a way this alighting goes, despite the differences between one unique tree and another. It is different to land in trees than to land on rocks or roofs. A discipline is distributed throughout their flock, a discipline that knows landing in trees. This would be a practical murmuration.

Could this flock make use of its practical tree-alighting murmuration to collect themselves to form novel trees in the sky? This would be an imaginative murmuration.

Is there a limit to this imaginative murmurating? When is a formation no longer a tree, but a rock-form or roof form? When is the flock practicing, in its mid-air performance, alighting on a roof or rock, rather than alighting on a tree. This would be an essential murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings disciplined for simplicity, flying in geometric formation, according to strict rules of relation. This would be logical murmuration.

Imagine flocks of starlings flying out its simple logical murmurations in ever more elaborate permutations. It would form and reform itself according to its simple rules, ramifying limitlessly. This would be mathematical murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who aspired to recreate essential tree forms, essential rocks forms, essential roof forms, using only logical and mathematical murmurations. This would be scientific murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who attempted to use only its scientific murmurations for alighting in trees. Maybe it would fudge its landings to accommodate the essential noise of real trees. But iterative attempts to land with increasing precision reduce this noise to near silence. This would be technical murmuration.

Imagine a flock of starlings who never once alighted on anything. The flock learned to reproduce the technical murmurations of other flocks. It knows of tree, rocks and roofs by collecting itself into the technical murmurations for which it has been carefully trained. It doesn’t know what it is to alight on a tree, but it can collect itself into a technical murmuration “about” a tree. This would be alienated murmuration.

Our souls are murmurations of intuitive I-points. Each intuitive I-point knows a bit of the world around it. Each I-points knows some of its fellow intuitive I-points. In Kabbalah, they are known as divine sparks.

Our faiths are the murmuration movements we can perform — defined against those movements we cannot. Some faiths can alight on trees. Some cannot. Some faiths can imagine novel trees, and discern trees from rocks. Some cannot. Some can fly in technical formation. Some can only fly in technical formation. Our faith limits what we can intuit, conceive, recollect or imagine. I call these formation capacities enceptions.

A soul can be blown apart by strong winds.