Category Archives: Hermeneutics

Contemplating aloud

Design, Hermeneutics, Kabbalah, Polycentered design, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

(Note 9/10/26: this post has been updated at least seven times since the initial publication, and the latest table has evolved out alignment with the account given below.)

Here is the latest version of the Well-Tempered Kabbalah.

 

This little one page-book of mine is sprawling out, with a fourth table column, “truth”. PaRDes is no longer covering understanding or truth. It is now “word” — meaning any communicative form. And I have reversed the order of Remez and Derash. I am intensely nervous to change the sequence, but it is right for my present purposes. If it is a mistake, it is an honest one, and it is a mistake I have to make all the way. My rationale is bobbing about in the prose below.

Truth is now the knowing essential to each world. I have found beautiful Hebrew and English words for each of these truths, and rather than translate they complement one another to convey meaning. Nitpas — grasped or captured truth — are the givens we use to construct truth in Asiyah. Hashkafah means roughly viewpoint or worldview, and I give it the English word “conceptive” — what enables and limits the perceived and conceived givens available to us for our experiences and understandings. If Nitpas are the grasped givens, Hashkafah is the receptive capacity required to do the grasping — a state of Ruach. If the Hashkafah of Ruach changes, Ruach itself changes, as do the givens it receives in Asiyah. Hitgalut is revelatory, which I call enceptive. Where Hashkafah does the conceiving, Hitgalut is aware that it is conceived within an encompassing intellect of which it participates, and this intellect is the ground and source of other possible conceptions. It is from here radically new understandings emerge ex nihilo from inconceivability. The etymological meaning of Hitgalut is “self uncovering”, and it shares a root with galut, “exile”. Hitgalut is welcoming home of exiled Ruach to the source of its self. And finally, there is Devekut (cleaving) — mystical union beyond thought — the goal of Kabbalah and all esoterisms.

What is slightly tragic about this work is that I am reducing Kabbalah for a focused purpose. Kabbalah is abundant with Remez, but this work is Derashic. I am choosing less evocative and open ended words, and it affords less multiplicity of interpretation. It is one application of something greater and richer and far more beautiful, to which it belongs, and remains loyal as an expression.

What I care about most is how communities may enworld themselves in shared truth, practice and artifacts.

What efforts must we undertake, what ordeals must we undergo, what resistance must we overcome to find more expansive and accommodating orders, when our own is sufficient for our own needs but insufficient for others?

This is what I want to distill as simply and beautifully as I can.

But before we can distill a truth we must mash it, mix it and let it ferment in the alembic.

I am struggling with the sequence of Remez and Derash.

I cannot avoid belief that Derash is the expression of an accomplished stability of understanding — manifested as lucidly understood content, but manifested by a spiritual “container” — which is a capacity for perceiving certain forms of reality, for conceiving their significance and implications, for expressing and insinuating these implications, and conversely, an inclination to be persuaded to belief by presence of certain conceptual articulate forms. I have called this structure of receptive capacity which does the believing of believed-in content, but does much more than that a faith. Increasingly I am choosing to call faith by the Hebrew word Ruach.

We know Ruach only by its words and actions, and so we tend to disregard everything except the fruit — the stuff we can see and grasp. We forget the tree, the roots, the soil, the whole spiritually environing garden and fixate on sensory and conceptual objects. All these forgotten origins of the objects of our objectivity and the subject by whom this objectivity exists is Ruach and the realm of formation in which Ruach lives is called Yetzirah.

To express its existence, Ruach presents concepts and descriptions of sensory objects and events (the graspable things of the actual world of Asiyah) in a way that galvanizes or reinforces or illuminates a particular way of experiencing and understanding — the manifestation of Ruach. When we participate in the life of Ruach in this way, — actively showing or receptively receiving — this mode of language is Derash.

When liberal arts managerial thought leaders sagely reveal that, they are, at bottom, essentially storytellers, and then extoll the power of story, this is Derash. When sociopolitical commentariat speak of “narratives” underlying news stories or other commenter’s ideological distortions and omissions, all this is Derash. When we notice the strangeness of the past, the awkward or graceful artificiality of its gestures and expressions, this is Derash of an alien Ruach of a past era, a zeitgeist. Romcoms are highly stylized Derash, which is why they have a short shelf-life — vividly accessible for a moment, before wilting and repelling all but the nostalgically enchanted. Scientific paradigms guiding theory choice and formation, and even the instrumentation and practices within a scientific program — the common pre-rational conceptions are scientifically disciplined Ruach.

Derash takes the standpoint of one particular Ruach, and coherently presents reality from where it stands, relating an event or unfolding series of events from its own perspective, according to its own field of relevance and interrelations, conveyed in language optimized to communicate its experience of truth, infused with its moral valences, its own sensibilities and tastes.

By my understanding Remez is the hint of significance in expressions that we, caught within the limits of our current Ruach, are unable to understand coherently or clearly. We sense tantalizing but uncanny signal in the noise, and we are drawn to it even as we are repelled by it. Remez is how transcendent possibilities of faith and understanding call to us from beyond our current limits. This is the voice of Neshamah, the Siren of Wisdom, our higher self, and her music is Remez.

Remez is destabilized polysemic chaos, belonging to a higher realm into which we may ascend. This is the realm of Beriah. This chaos is not a chaos of absence of order, but a chaos of too many simultaneous orders — an infinitely signal-rich static requiring filtering for reception by finite Ruach. Ruach ascending to Neshamah, may be reconfigured for more expansive formation, and this is newly manifested in Asiyah, narratable as new Derash.

New self, in a new world, with a new story to tell, with new responses and new responsibilities…

In my practical experience as a designer, everyone tries to understand one level too low.

People try to prematurely construct systems using current conceptual repertoires, and often they are out of tune with one another, or as Kuhn put it are unconsciously operating from incommensurable paradigms. Each misalignment is adjusted, bridged or fudged piecemeal, and consequently the system has no sense of wholeness however systematically sound its integration.

Or people use force to impose their own limited understanding upon all others, who must adopt that understanding or work with incomplete understanding. Or they go to war with other groups in their organization who see things differently with the intention of winning enough power to impose their views.

Teams rarely transcend Ruach. Their stories are Derash of their own Ruach, and the villains of Derashic stories are often those of other Ruchot.

Part of the problem is that many of our political ideologies are considered by its adherents to be ultimate truths. Whoever is outside of the ideology is outcast. All more local understandings must fit inside the ideology and harmonize within it.

I am trying to develop a framework for talking about these levels of understanding, the challenges of communicating across them, the difficulties in overcoming them, as well as the hope and importance of succeeding.

From the moment I began designing, this has been the ineffable Why driving my need to understand what I am doing when I design or when conditions obstruct my efforts to design.

I will repeat my definition of design. Design is the crafting of any kind of system in which people participate as intrinsic parts of the whole. Paul Rand was right: Everything is everything, even when those doing the designing are unaware. And when we do this we mistake the non-human systematic components for the whole, neglect the “people part” and leave the designed whole languishing in semi-oblivion.

Another random note on Remez. When an artist crafts, the art collaborates in its own making. The artist is moved to say or make poetic forms whose meanings are charged with mystery. The artist cannot fully explain the meaning intimated by these expressions, but the expression is intuited to be right. This intimation is Remez, and without Remez, the art is cut off — exiled from what gives art life and meaning.

This is why true ideologues are unable to produce art.

Ideology makes tidy fables with tidy morals.

Hyperactive listening

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Love, Polycentered design

Susan and I have a new method for fighting.

We start with her expressing what is pissing her off — pure stream-of-consciousness thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, images, etc.

When she is done, I steelman her grievances, speaking as much as I can from her perspective — as if she were addressing me. I attempt to method act her point of view, adding sarcasm, emotional digs, humorous abuse and expressive flourishes to indicate insight into her feelings as well as her thoughts.

Then Susan joins in and piles on, with additional points I neglected to mention, which I integrate into the overall argument.

Essentially, we collaborate on kicking my ass as thoroughly and brutally as possible, until she feels everything has been said as thoroughly, clearly and forcefully as possible. She tells me that this process helps her feel thoroughly understood.

Only after she ratifies my understanding do I try to answer her points. Obviously, it’s pretty easy to steelman my own perspective, since it’s the perspective that persuaded me.

Then we try out possible resolutions of our differences. For each candidate possibility we do the same steelmanning, method acting and collaboration until we find a shared perspective and common ground to use as a new point of departure.

This is essentially polycentered design applied to domestic conflict.

I feel fortunate to belong to a two-person organization with this kind of collaborative culture.

Articulating truth and word

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception.

And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level.

Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach.

When two or more Ruchot encounter one another Ruach-to-Ruach, each chooses: descend to Nefesh or ascend to Neshamah.

If both choose ascension, dialogue transpires. In the spirit of I-Thou, each relates to the other as Thou and implicitly assumes a shared transcendent being in whom both participate. Neshamah is that shared transcendent being in whom dialogical partners become participants.

Hans-Georg Gadamer says that in profound conversation, the conversation has us. Neshamah is the being of the conversation, who animates each Ruach together within itself. When we “conduct” a conversation, each participant is a medium through which the conversation flows.

From participation within Neshamah, revelations ex nihilo irrupt from Chayah, source of selfhood, bringing with its influx direct intuition of ultimate wherefore.

In being, Chayah becomes medium of Ein Sof.

In revelation, Neshamah becomes medium of Chayah.

In dialogue, Ruach becomes medium of Neshamah.

In subject, Nefesh becomes medium of Ruach.

In life, matter becomes medium of Nefesh.

But matter and Ein Sof are one, and this unity is Shekhinah.

Raw notes:

  • Mode of world
  • Mode of self
  • Mode of truth (of knowing)
  • Mode of word (saying or hearing) (PaRDeS)

Is the table: world, self, truth, word?

World Self Truth Word
Atzilut (emanation) Chayah (source) Union Sod (mystical)
Beriyah (creation) Neshamah (intellect) Epiphanic Derash (homiletic)
Yetzirah (formation) Ruach (spirit) Subjective Remez (allusive)
Asiyah (actuality) Nefesh (soul) Objective Peshat (literal)

Here is what is bothering me. I committed Well-Tempered Kabbalah to a perspective from the standpoint of Asiyah, which — it seems to me — is less a choice than an acknowledgment of a necessary constraint. But this “word” column is radically Asiyah-rooted. A word links an actual finite thing in Asiyah to some kind of truth within or beyond Asiyah.

  • If Peshat is a literal word mode… observing and recording objective givenness… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Remez is a figurative word… observing and thematizing subjective difference in concrete experiences… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Derash is a homiletical reading… lucid spiritual participation in transcendent being… (Neshamah is always one in whom Ruach participates)… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Sod is a mystical reading… immediate disclosure of our source of being… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Presequence, consequence, richness

Design, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Pragmatism

A statement is made in the nexus of two implicate meanings, one preceding it as an implicit question to which it is an answer, and another following it as every possible practical response implied in what is stated. To understand a statement is to understand both the presequent and consequent implicate meanings, together in one thrust of meaning.

Hermeneutic presequence — an implicit question, to which the statement is a response.

Pragmatic consequence — the full set of ramifying practical implication that follow from a statement.

The range of possible hermeneutic presequences and pragmatic consequences varies from philosophy to philosophy, and can be called its semantic scope. Semantic scope is the ideal set of every possible meaning a philosophy can attempt to express, however well or poorly it expresses them, and whether or not it actually makes the attempt.

Three important notes:

First, the range of possible meanings should not be confused with realities to which a meaning refers. The latter should be called metaphysical scope. A philosophy with large semantic scope might focus densely on a narrow metaphysical scope, and a philosophy with narrow semantic scope might extend itself across a vast metaphysical scope.

Second, there is no accessible superset of semantic scopes. Every semantic scope appears to itself to be the ultimate superset, and whatever stands beyond it lacks sense, and may, more often than not, really be nonsense. But claims of nonsense cannot be proven, especially if we take hermeneutic presequence seriously, as heirs of positivism rarely do.

Third, this framing distinguishes ontology from metaphysics. Ontology belongs to semantic scope, not to metaphysical scope.

A fourth note is even more important: The overlap of meanings and practical responses to meanings in realities, especially social realities (collaboratively generated), has a perceptible positive quality. Pluralism is not only an accommodation for many various solitary individuals, it makes shared realities more tangibly, richly real. In this richness we feel the presence of other souls and the value of this reality and its sharedness.

A corollary of the fourth note: If semantic scope is shared between people, this opens the way to expansion of metaphysical scope. Shared semantic scope enables showing and sharing more and more reality.

What is richness?

Design, Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Shit theory

I cannot stop thinking about Christopher Alexander’s essay “A City is Not a Tree”.

The specific theme that is emerging as most important to me is this idea of a designed thing’s capacity to accommodate multiple perspectives, as intrinsically valuable.

A functionalist might see such accommodation in terms of versatility. A functionalist would say that each accommodation signifies benefit to another segment of person.

But I think what Alexander is saying is very different from that. The accommodation of other subjects is part of each person’s experience of common things.

When many different kinds of people love the same thing in different ways, this thing is experienced as richly valuable. It is charged with possibility and the presence of others. It gathers an aura of transcendence about it, which signals to us that we are neither alone as individuals nor as like-minded parts of a collectives. We feel the truth that ours is only one finite enworldment among many others who regard the same things as valuable, but in many different ways. These enworldments overlap, and this feels like life — vibrant, full of possibility, adventure, potential sources of inspiration. The palpable density of overlaid heterogeneous valuing is what we mean when we say something feels rich or vibrant. It has a halo of inexhaustible moreness around it.

This is why organizations which belong to many people in many ways feels vibrant. With each new perspective and practice that finds its own opportunity to serve in this organization, the organization gains a new kind of value.

Conversely, an organization dominated by one logic will feel flat and standardized and harder to value, if not oppressive to some degree. Homogeneity is imposed — one expertise and one standard methodology is applied to every problem. It is hooded with a sense of constriction. Worse, as members of the organization try to bring their own uniqueness to the work — try to make the organization their own their own by contributing their own sensibilities — and find that whatever does not conform to the monologic of the organization is unvalued, or even discouraged or prohibited a sense of futility and alienation sets in. One cannot own the organization in a new way. Each employee must resign themselves to renting a defined role — they will never own any place in such an organization.

Consequently, the organization has the same artificial, stilted corporate feel as Alexander’s artificial city. It doesn’t matter the size or legal status of the organization. It could be privately owned and have only twenty or so members. It will feel corporate. And all attempts to add style or whimsy will come off like all phony corporateness: a bullshit coating for a bunch of mechanical meaningless chickenshit.

A lattice-form organization, valued — even loved — in common, in myriad divergent ways, from within and from without, will be haloed with a vibrant, living, compelling brand.

An organization is not a tree. It is especially not an org chart.

Years ago, a friend of mine showed me a screenplay he was writing. It felt morally flat to me. Every character did they only thing they could morally do to. There was only one moral interpretation of the story. My advice at the time was to build more ambiguity into each character, so we are unsure of whether their actions were moral or not.

I am realizing now that I was looking for moral and narrative richness in that story. It needed to accommodate multiple readings. ?

And what made the famous short story “Cat Person” was so fascinating was its moral multistability. I found out after reading it, that the author’s ethical assessment differed from mine, which only made it more impressive.

A story is not a tree.

A reader should feel their own freedom to bring themselves to the reading, and to read themselves into what they read.

Politically, I have described myself as a militant pluralist. That is because I want public life to have richness. That means we cannot impose one moral logic upon public life. There must be room for disagreement, debate even conflict. The only thing that is not debatable is imposition of one’s political will while refusing to debate. This is especially true if in the name of harmony, or safety, or comfort, or even “diversity”, that everyone be forced to conform to the same ethical stance on what one group believes to be an undebatable, nonnegotiable matter.

Neither society nor culture nor polis is a tree.

Whoever seeks to impose a tree upon society is totalitarian, however, benevolent their intent.

When a text or tradition is so densely accommodating that innumerable people over millennia can read that text in myriad intensely meaningful ways, that text gains value with each new insight. The sheer density of insight makes that text glow with a blindingly bright halo of holiness, especially when readings diverge but the text becomes more beloved in collision of interpretation — sacred argument.

The attempts of theologians to find the one correct meaning desecrates the text and the infinite being who is the subject(s) of the text. The infinite being is reduced to finite idol.

It is my belief (an insuffiently supported one) that service design should intentionally design lattice-form services. Current service design practice creates inflexible lifeless pre-structures. It tries to construct artificial organizations, and whatever life in an organization survives, is due only to shortcomings of service design method. It is a little bit like Bauhaus designs. Their charm and warmth come from limitations of fabrication to achieve the precision they sought. Likewise, all most technocratic business management. Businesses succeed despite their management. If managers had the transparency and control they really wanted, the organization would be drained of all richness, and people would hate their surveilled, controlled lives. And indeed, management is getting better at doing what it thinks it’s supposed to do, and we are all suffering as a consequence.?

That is my perspective on my field. But can my field accommodate it? Are they “ready to hear it?” Probably not…

Hermeneut lifecycle

Existentialism, Geometric Meditations, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Wheel

For a decade I have struggled with an enduring aporia, a question concerning enception. (An enception is a capacity to receive a given of some particular form.) My question concerns whole versus part, but even just saying it this way gives me the missing answer.

At various times I have talked about enceptions in terms of a holistic ordering principle among capacities (or faculties) and at others as the capacities (or faculties) themselves to be ordered.

When approaching enception part-to-whole we emphasize enceptions as multiple capacities of reception of givens — a capacity to -ceive / take in a reality of some particular form, whether through perception, conception or intuition. Without enception for a particular form, that form remains submerged in oblivion. With the enception the form can be taken as a given — a perceived given reality or conceived given truth.

Enceptions operate at every scale. The perceptions of our five senses are taken-together (con-ceived) gives us sensus communis (perceptual common sense of what is real). And our social participation mediated by language gives us another common sense of shared understanding of the world with others of our community. Communities collaboratively build varying enceptive systems of understanding, each with its distinctive knowledge and practices.

This scaling brings us to the other use of enception, the whole-to-part approach. Here an enception which is a principle of holistic ordering, which crystallizes or harmonizes multiple capacities/faculties into a stable and self-reinforcing subjective system with its own ontology and objectivity. According to this view, the enception is not so much a function of parts, but of the stability of some ultimate, ordering enception. By this view, with a change in ultimate enception, givens can both irrupt into givenness or vanish back into oblivion. This seems true.

How I managed to not see this all along is beyond me: The hermeneutic circle is also the hermeneut lifecycle.

I knew this.

West and autumn and evening:
Establishing,
Perfecting,
Immortalizing.
North and winter and night:
Questioning,
Breaking,
Liberating.
East and spring and morning:
Playing,
Experimenting,
Discovering.
South and summer and day:
Believing,
Committing,
Conquering.

Beings cycle through phases,
each phase a relation of whole and part,
with its own mood and thrust.
In west and autumn and evening,
beings participate in the order.
In north and winter and night,
beings revolt against a world
unable to comprehend them.
In east and spring and morning,
beings wander freely,
groping for possibilities of relation.
In south and summer and day,
a movement emerges,
persuading and enlisting –
proceeding from the most yielding
to the most resistant.

Commonality

Enworldment, Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.

I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.

Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.

Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.

At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.

For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.

But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”

Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.

This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.

Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+

Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.

L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.

Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”

Kids these days.

The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.

What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.

I have at least one viable option for the future.

Sadly, everyone still knows everything.

There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.

“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”

Ethics, Existentialism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

Each time I see a young people’s eyes light up at the mention of the word “ethics” — and, oh, how they do light up! — I remember this Nietzsche passage:

So, how many people know how to observe? And of these few, how many to observe themselves? ‘Everyone is farthest from himself — every person who is expert at scrutinizing the inner life of others knows this to his own chagrin; and the saying, ‘Know thyself’, addressed to human beings by a god, is near to malicious. That self-observation is in such a bad state, however, is most clearly confirmed by the way in which nearly everyone speaks of the nature of a moral act — that quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner, with its look, its smile, its obliging eagerness! People seem to be wanting to say to you, “But my dear fellow, that is precisely my subject! You are directing your question to the person who is competent to answer it: there is, as it happens, nothing I am wiser about.”

This is also true of aesthetics and of religious/spiritual/philosophical insight.

Cultivating moral judgment, aesthetic taste or profundity of insight is certainly personally rewarding, but it is a stupid and noxious mistake to expect recognition or acknowledgement for it. Because in each and every one of these subjective fields our appreciation for anyone else’s accomplishments is entirely constrained by what we have accomplished ourselves.

Unless we work at perceiving it, we each are always the apogee of everything that really matters.

Wouldn’t it be a comical paradox if it turned out that the closest a human can come to apotheosis is finally overcoming natural misapotheosis?

Study as religious practice

Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Religion

It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.

This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.

One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.

Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.

The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.

If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.

The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.

Eternal recurrence of the metatragedy

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah

I accidentally jumped ahead in Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives and stumbled upon a familiar and deeply significant drama.

Idel’s central claim is basically that Kabbalah has two distinct but related foci — a theosophist Apollinian focus, and an ecstatic Dionysian focus. These two foci stand in tense union with one another, exactly as they were (according to Nietzsche) in Greek tragedy. The two foci complement, but can, at times, seem to oppose one another.

But both together oppose something else — and this something else is philosophical rationalism. In Birth of Tragedy the rationalist was Socrates. In Idel’s metatragedy, the rationalist is Maimonides. I see the religion of Maimonidian excess as Reform Judaism (JewUU), a form of religiosity within-against which I have rebelled since age 10. This is what has me so charged up this morning.

I should have known my participation in Reform Judaism was doomed from the start when the head rabbi at my synagogue laughed and told me that a Unitarian-Universalist kid would find Reform Judaism very familiar.

I’ve always identified Hermes with the Apollo-Dionysus union — not because of any special affinity with either Apollo or Dionysus, but because Hermes is the god of divine conjunction (as symbolically expressed in Janus-faced boundary herms). Divine communication occurs not across distances, but through elimination of distance in ontological union.

Let us never forget that it was Hermes who bound and chained the benevolent but hubristic rationalist titan to the rock.

Perhaps this tragedy of vital intellection (toward transcendence) vs rationalist hubris of pure immanence recurs eternally.

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.

Kabbalistic exnihilism

Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

Speaking in Kabbalist language, objective thought is confined to Assiyah.

Material and sensory objects are confined to Malkhut d’Assiyah; subjective objects to Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Gevurah and Chesed d’Assiyah; objective truth to Binah d’Assiyah; objectivity itself to Chokhmah d’Assiyah.

(Psychologism everts the relationship of subject and object. It is the futile attempt to grasp truths of Yetzirah in the inadequate terms of Assiyah. Psychologized religion is antireligion.)

Until one intuits the transcendent source of all the material and immaterial objects, one knows nothing of Yetzirah. Yetzirah can only be known by apperceptive participation in various modes of existence in Yetzirah. (This is the radical pluralism of hermeneutics.) Yetzirah is known solely by its fruits in Assiyah.

But the indirect experiencing of Yetzirah can open awareness to Beriah — but only if we learn how nothingness works. It is natural to know nothing of nothingness.

Once we catch Beriah in the act of creation ex nihilo, we become exnihilists.

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.

Hebrew heart

Hermeneutics, Judaism

Apparently, I never posted on something very important I learned in Torah study several years ago.

For ancient Hebrews, the heart did not signify what we assume it does, reading it today. We assume the heart is what feels. But for them, the heart was not the seat of emotion. The soul — nephesh, the breath — was what feels emotions. The heart — levav — was the seat of understanding.

So when Pharaoh was said to be heard of heart, this did not mean he was unfeeling. It meant that he was unable to conceive things in any way except his. He had hardness of understanding, and this inability to understand made him unable to empathize.

Hermeneutic sclerosis

Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Politics

The chief affliction of ideologues is something I’m calling hermeneutic sclerosis, a hardening of interpretive schema. An ideologue has lost control of her gestalt formations, and her world of meanings becomes fixed and inflexible.

This matter is on my mind today because I just finished Nellie Bowles’s The Morning After the Revolution, a tour of the excesses of the world since 2020. This book casts harsh light on how both “antiracism” and in trans activism employ the same move to resolve deep conflicts within its own ideals.

Both movements appear entirely unable to avoid stereotyped understandings of the world. “Antiracists” and trans activists view black people and women in especially stereotyped ways, which, by normal standards necessarily result in bigotry. But progressivism condemns bigotry. Fortunately, according to itself, bigotry is only problematic if that bigotry involves an oppressor identity imposing negative stereotypes on an oppressed identity. The reverse case — bigotry against an oppressor — is not only permissible bigotry, but a laudable form of activism, which helps to re-balance the cultural prestige books by humiliating oppressor identities who have become too uppity, and puts them in their proper place. After enough humiliating oppression at the hands of the oppressed, equality will be restored, and no further humiliation of anyone will be required. But until then it is important to express generalized hatred of masculinity and whiteness and heteronormativity. (And now, of course, Israel.)

(How the oppressed are able to impose their will so effortlessly and why oppressors are powerless to stop the humiliation is a question progressivists work tirelessly to avoid asking. If your ideology is against power per se, and believes the that true sources of an oppressor’s power and even their true identity must be unnamed and concealed, discovering that you, yourself, possess overwhelming societal power and that you are very much viewed as the oppressor class by an underclass who resents you, not because they are vicious bigots, but simply because they resent you, their oppressor — to see this clearly for once, would spell total moral collapse. So, they employ a combo punch of argument from incredulity and argumentum ad hominem: “La la la la la! I don’t understand how anyone could possibly reject our gospel of social justice! Those who reject it must be dupes of foreign propaganda! They be in denial and unconsciously want to preserve their own power! La la la la! They must be totalitarians who want to abuse their voices and votes to subvert Our Democracy! La la la la!”)

The redefinition of bigotry to encourage categorical hatred against oppressor groups, is fortunate, for it affords a possibility for escaping damning labels like “racist” or “sexist” or “transphobe”, even when escape from seeing in stereotype is impossible.

Or perhaps this redefinition was established out of the necessity of breaking out of this otherwise impossible condition.

Either way, here is the move: The progressivist gives up on the hopeless project of willful refusal to acknowledge their authentic stereotyped perceptions, and gives over to them entirely. But they reverse the value judgments of each stereotyped perception. What, before, was assigned a negative value and called vice is now reversed into a positive value and celebrated as virtue. And what was extolled as virtue is reversed and condemned or mocked as vice.

The activist who sees exclusively in racist stereotypes find liberation in reversed valuation, pretending that what was bad is good, and what was good is bad.

The chapter on Tema Okun is revealing:

Born in 1952, the daughter of a well-known progressive professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tema rebelled against what she saw as an overly intellectual family life.

She went to Oberlin and majored in physical education. “I knew it would freak my father out if I was a P.E. major, because it was anti-intellectual. So those three things kind of converged, and I became a P.E. major,” she said of the choice. She started a graduate degree in sports medicine at Chapel Hill but failed the training exam and never finished her degree. (Later, she went on to complete a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, with a thesis titled “The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know.”)

After a breakup, she moved to Seattle, worked as an aquatic and fitness director for a local YMCA, and got into the clogging scene, joining a group called the Duwamps Cloggers. She started working in the anti-racism world, and she liked it, eventually partnering with anti-racist educator Kenneth Jones.

When they worked together, Tema was often in charge of details like plane reservations. Kenneth didn’t care much about details. She would get upset and feel resentment, creating what she described as a relationship of “belovedness and tension.”

But Tema always stayed a little different from the others in that alphabet soup. They were all too focused on formal nonprofit structures and minutiae, she thought. They were focused on just what was right in front of them.

Tema was having a spiritual experience. One night, after a frustrating day seeing a lot of bad white behavior, Tema sat down and something “came through her.”

“I operated mostly as a vessel and the words came through me rather than from me,” she wrote in 2021, in a self-published retrospective about the list. “The original article was my one and only experience of producing something that came through me.”

The document was so simple. The list was so clear. It did not ask those white women to learn about Puerto Rican political figures. It did not tell them to phone bank and mail letters to their congressmen or get on a plane. It told them to release their perfectionism. It told them that urgency itself was white supremacy.

Under Tema, the anti-racism movement could shift from a political movement grounded in facts to an emotional and spiritual one. The battle did not need to be about structural realities and governments. It could be about ourselves. Objectivity — facts — it’s all racist. Whiteness is a virus that kills.

“The purpose of white supremacy and racism is to disconnect us from each other,” Tema said one day during a talk with a reverend. “To disconnect each of us from spirit, source, creativity or whatever you name the energy that connects all of us. White supremacy and racism are designed to disconnect us from the earth, the water, the wind, the sky, the sun.”

The goal of Tema’s work is not necessarily to raise up black and brown people but to take down the white supremacist system. It is not to add more diverse faces at the boardroom table but to dismantle the table.

“The underlying assumption is that this white world is the default world, the normal world that we should all aspire to,” is how she put it to a crowd at a conference once. “This white world is in deep trouble. What we need is an entirely new table or perhaps no table at all.”

This is what made Tema different from the rest of those Bay Area anti-racists. It’s why it was so powerful.

“An assumption of racial equity work in the past was that racial justice was to the benefit of people of color, and we’re going to lift people of color into the white world, and that’s the goal,” Tema says, in a keynote address to a data science conference called JupyterCon. “And what I see changing, which is really, really critical, is that more and more white people understanding that that’s not the goal. This is not about simply including people into the white world. It’s about questioning the world.” She has a lean face and long gray hair. She speaks slowly, carefully. Sometimes she holds her hands together as if in prayer.

Whiteness, to Tema, is like the serpent. She calls it a “constant invitation” that has to be turned down.

She often talks about anti-racism in openly religious terms.

And the new anti-racism has been embraced by a liberal Christian world that articulates whiteness as a sort of satanic possession — an original sin. The anti-racist movement grew, and the scenes were familiar Christian scenes. In June 2020, white police and activists in Cary, North Carolina, washed the feet of black protestors and asked for forgiveness.

Some anti-racist training programs are semireligious organizations, sometimes explicitly. One diversity training program with four locations around the country was called Crossroads Ministry. They’ve since rebranded as Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training.

Tema makes appearances to religious bodies. She appeared with the Reverend Tami Forte Logan, a preacher with the African

Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The event is put on by Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church in Asheville, North Carolina. The event began with the audience being asked to breathe deeply together.

In the recording, Tema comes on in a purple blouse, a gray sweater over it. There’s children’s artwork behind her. The room is dark but she is lit, which is how she styles most of her appearances.

The Reverend Tami, who is black and younger than Tema, says when white people are exhibiting the traits of whiteness, they seem crazed.

“From the outside looking in, I’ve observed that often unfortunately it almost looks like a possession, like something just takes over white people,” the reverend says.

Also there is Pastor Marcia, who is white and with Grace Church. She agrees.

“What is it that makes whiteness so seductive?” Pastor Marcia says. “It internalizes itself in white bodies but also black, indigenous, and brown bodies. It gets into our cells. It changes the way our bodies work. What is it about this that is so seductive that we literally eat it and drink it and let it seep into our bones?”

Whiteness seeps inside her. She’s drawn to it, and she hates it.

When someone gives in to that temptation for whiteness, they die, Tema says. Anyone can drink of whiteness. Anyone can die of it.

“People from different ethnic communities that end up giving up their ethnicity in order to join whiteness, it is death. It is completely death and the actual suicide, addiction, depression, all those rates are much higher in the white community, and I think there’s a direct connection,” Tema said. “We have this sense that we are involved with something that is so wrong and bad.”

Freedom from the traits of whiteness is the goal. Freedom from the urgency, freedom from the written word, freedom from perfectionism. These are white values, and we can be better and happier without them.

“This isn’t about helping others,” Tema says. “It’s about how my life, my happiness, my belonging depends on helping to enact racial justice in our world.” Pastor Marcia agrees.

“Tema, I want to say hallelujah,” Pastor Marcia says. “I see white people being set free from their own bondage.”

The chapter on trans activism does the exact same move with female stereotypes.

My own diagnosis of this painful and pain-inflicting condition is to “flip the script” as some new agers like to say, and claim that the problem is one of far too much reliance on emotions. Progressivists try to achieve with pure willful emotional manipulation what can only be achieved with thought — specifically philosophical thought — thought with provides us new modes of interpretation, and with these new modes of interpretation, now experiential givens with new valuative valences.

This is why I’ve coined this term hermeneutic sclerosis, or if you want to avoid being a presumptuous blowhard, “interpretive hardening” or hardening of the understanding. Today’s huge-hearted, hot-blooded political sentimentalists are so sure that thinking is a cold, logic-bound, argumentative, aggressive force (something belonging to the world of those detestable creeps, the white men) that they subscribe to a notion of justice that knows only compassion, forgiveness and forbearing and excludes all rational judgment, limits, discipline.

We can see this very clearly in Brene Brown’s mangling of the definition of empathy. Empathy has (until its recent ideological capture, deformation and fetishization) meant the effort to understand the experiences of another person when such understanding is not immediately accessible. It is a function of coordinated thought and feeling. Sympathy is spontaneous feeling-with another person.

But in Brene Brown’s hands, “empathy” means double-plus sympathy. It means really, really feeling in an involved way instead of not really feeling in a distant, uninvolved, phony way.

There is no trace of hermeneutical thinking in Brown’s definition. And most young people I’ve talked to about it see no problem, because they share her prejudiced blindness toward thought, and fail to recognize thought’s indispensable role in human understanding and justice.

They have no method of understanding the experiences of other people except to listen carefully to their testimony, paying very close attention to the emotions they report having, to assign truth status to that testimony and to have the most intense and expansive emotions of their own about the fact that the other had such feelings.

“Empathy” among progressivists is not empathy. It is a mixture of political sympathy — the natural feeling-with their like-minded ideologues, usually of resentment, rage and hatred — plus imaginative pathos of the kind people enjoy when reading a novel. It is, again, an exercise of hypertrophied sentimentality and atrophied intellect that knows only one mode of interpretation, the unbiased, objective one that all benevolent, intelligent and educated people agree is the truth.

Until this prejudice against philosophical hermeneutic genuinely empathetic thinking is overcome, I fear things will get worse and worse, stupider and stupider and more and more evil.

Moral nonlinearity

Autobiography, Ethics, Hermeneutics, Ideas

My generation was shaped decisively by chaos theory. James Gleick’s bestseller Chaos: Making a New Science was, for many of us, not merely an introduction to, but rather, an initiation into a radically new approach to understanding order.

Chaos theory shows how even the most strictly determinate process can be radically unpredictable, if that process has the form of an iterative feedback loop. Most processes (even processes as simple as an object sliding across ice) can be reframed as nonlinear processes, and when seen this way, much that was once factored out as incidental noise turned out to essential signal.

When I first read the book, back when it was still actually on the NYT bestseller list, I was scientistic to the core. I was a hard determinist, in fact. The notion that I could have both the perfect, rational order of determinism, and also enjoy pristine, virgin unpredictability was exhilarating. I didn’t even know I wanted this radical unpredictability until I was given it, and was shocked by my own joy in receiving it. Radical order and radical unpredictability!

By this principle things will happen the way they happen, proceeding with invariable necessity, and they cannot unfold otherwise, but there is no way at all for us to get ahead of the process and see where it is going. We can only enact or follow the process, and see where it goes.

Since then, I have applied this pattern of radically-rational-yet-radically-unpredictable feedback processes to many phenomena outside of the domain of math — and many of these processes are core to my personal mission.

Design, of course, is famously iterative. And it is also notoriously unpredictable. We must constantly console nervous manager-types who need to know what we are going to learn before we learn it and what we are going to invent before we invent it. We have to tell them: trust the process. The process is a nonlinear one, and part of its rigor is refusing to draw conclusions using straight euclidean rulers. We must participate in the nonlinear process of learning-making-learning-making… and eventually, something will crystallize.

Hermeneutics is also famously nonlinear. The hermeneutic circle describes the interplay of whole and part, with the whole being your own understanding — an understanding that gives significance to parts, yet the parts constitute this whole. Learning is the development of a whole from parts that either support or extend or undermine or even break the whole into which parts are integrated.

Now, today, I am thinking of moral principles as nonlinear.

All too often, without even noticing, we assume that morality will be a linear rule. We wonder what we should do in x-situation. We apply a moral rule to the problem, get a decision, then execute the decision.

I originally applied this line of thought to the Golden Rule.

If you approach the Golden Rule linearly and assume the proper procedure is to feed the question into the Golden Rule Machine and see what answer it spits out, the Golden Rule will appear manifestly dumb. But if, rather than accepting that first answer, we instead iteratively receive it as a question to be fed back into the Golden Rule, things get more interesting. With each cycle, the output become more intuitively right, and not as an asymptotic approach to a predictable point. Outputs bounce around chaotically. For instance, the process almost immediately stops being one that occurs within one’s own mind, but expands beyond the skull to include those who are or might be affected by the decision. If someone is going to do something that affects you, don’t you want them to involve you? According to the Golden Rule you should do likewise.

This means even if we accept a the most rigorously rational morality it does not follow that this gives us the ability to unilaterally calculate what is moral. Morality is not a code of determinate rules, but a process we must follow — and it is a collaborative process we must follow with others.

Linearity — physical, cognitive, moral — is strictly for limited circumstances, one person or a few, within a limited context within a limited span of future time.

Beyond these narrow bound is radical order and radical surprise. So let us say amen.

Burnham on ideology

Hermeneutics, History, Politics

Below is a selection excerpts from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution concerning the nature and use of ideologies.

In this book, Burnham (a reformed Trotskyite, and future conservative luminary) argues that Capitalism was in the process of dying and being replaced by something quite different from capitalism — a sort of officialized crony capitalism presided over by well-trained experts who would serve and benefit this new economic order in a hybridized public-private sphere. These expert administrators would form a managerial class, with its own new class interests, reflected in a new ideology justifying its class dominance.

Note, this book was published in 1941, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and well before an Allied victory was anywhere near assured, or even likely. Also note, at this point in history, the shock and still present devastation of the Great Depression was, for many intellectuals, taken as a decisive refutation of the capitalist and liberal order. Planned economies appeared to be the future. Finally, this book was written before the public was able to make retrospective sense of the war. In reading this book now, we are witnessing history-in-the-making, as opposed to history-ready-made, with all its clean tidy lines and mythologized motivations. Few people today seem aware of how long it took to attach the Holocaust retroactively to the USA’s involvement in the war. Even the passions whipped up by Pearl Harbor were still lacking. The youth of the “Greatest Generation” felt apathy toward the ideologies that still stirred the hearts of the adults — an apathy erased by war myth.

It is the coat of mythologizing varnish that makes history unavailable to us, and makes the present seem uniquely alive and real. I find the passages below to be fascinating time-capsules, which reveal how closely what happened “back then” resembles what is happening now.

It is even harder than in the case of political institutions to generalize about the belief patterns of capitalist society. For our purpose, however, it is not necessary to be at all complete. It is enough if we choose a few prominent beliefs — the prominence can be tested by their appearance in great public documents such as constitutions, or declarations of independence or of the rights of man — which nearly everyone will recognize as typical of capitalist society and which both differ from typical feudal beliefs and are sharply at issue in the present period of social transition.

The beliefs with which we are concerned are often called “ideologies,” and we should be clear what we mean by “ideology.” An “ideology” is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called “rationalization” in the sphere of individual psychology. An ideology is not a scientific theory, but is nonscientific and often antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events — though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories. Thus the theory of evolution or of relativity or of the electronic composition of matter are scientific theories; whereas the doctrines of the preambles to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, the Nazi racial doctrines, Marxian dialectical materialism, St. Anselm’s doctrine of the meaning of world history, are ideologies.

Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together. Analysis of ideologies in terms of their practical effects shows us that they ordinarily work to serve and advance the interests of some particular social group or class, and we may therefore speak of a given ideology as being that of the group or class in question. However, it is even more important to observe that no major ideology is content to profess openly that it speaks only for the group whose interests it in fact expresses. Each group insists that its ideologies are universal in validity and express the interests of humanity as a whole; and each group tries to win universal acceptance for its ideologies. …

and

…the ideologies of capitalism, the bourgeois ideologies, have become impotent. Ideologies, we have seen, are the cement that binds together the social fabric; when the cement loosens, the fabric is about to disintegrate. And no one who has watched the world during the past twenty years can doubt the ever-increasing impotence of the bourgeois ideologies.

On the one hand, the scientific pretensions of these ideologies have been exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much as sciences; but they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, are not universal laws of nature, but are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time.

But the scientific inadequacy of the ideologies would not by itself be decisive. It does not matter how nonscientific or antiscientific an ideology may be; it can do its work so long as it possesses the power to move great masses of men to action.

This the bourgeois ideologies once could do, as the great revolutions and the imperial and economic conquests prove. And this they can no longer do.

When the bourgeois ideologies were challenged in the Saar and the Sudetenland by the ideology of Nazism, it was Nazism that won the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the people. All possible discounts for the effects of Nazi terrorism must not delude us into misreading this brute fact.

Only the hopelessly naive can imagine that France fell so swiftly because of the mere mechanical strength of the Nazi war machine — that might have been sufficient in a longer run, but not to destroy a great nation with a colossal military establishment in a few weeks. France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war — as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.

Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth’s world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for “indifference,” “unwillingness to sacrifice,” “lack of ideals.” How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have!

In truth, the bourgeoisie itself has in large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies. The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears. This, too, is unmistakably revealed in the policy and attitude of England’s rulers during the past years. What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement but a recognition of bourgeois impotence? The head of the British government’s traveling to the feet of the Austrian housepainter [Hitler] was the fitting symbol of the capitalists’ loss of faith in themselves.

Every authentic report during the autumn of 1939 from Britain told of the discouragement and fear of the leaders in government and business. And no one who has listened to American leaders off the record or who has followed the less public organs of business opinion will suppose that such attitudes are confined to Britain.

All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead, to hold power and privilege in society, is boundless self-confidence.

I am sure it is obvious to anyone who knows me at all that I am reading this book because I believe that Burnham’s predictions were mostly spot-on.

It is obvious to anyone who wants to see it that the class interests of the Managerial Class are perfectly served by Progressivism. Of course loyal Managerial Class members are passionate about “doing the work” of discovering every other identitarian false consciousness than the central, monstrous interest of their own Class — a diversionary tactic I enjoy calling “the herring of color”.

I awoke to this truth with the help of Thomas Frank, who wrote what is in effect the sequel to Burnham’s book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, where Burnham’s predictions play right out in the story of the Democratic party embracing the interests of clever young overclassers and kicking the working class to the curb:

Our story begins in the smoking aftermath of the 1968 election, with its sharp disagreements over the Vietnam War, its riots during the Democratic convention in Chicago, and with a result that Democrats at the time took to be a disastrous omen: their candidate for the presidency, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. Soul-searching commenced immediately.

There was one bright spot in the Democrats’ 1968 effort, however. Organized labor, which was the party’s biggest constituency back then, had mobilized millions of working- class voters with an enormous campaign of voter registration, pamphlet-printing, and phone-banking. So vast were their efforts that some observers at the time credited labor with almost winning for Humphrey an election that everyone believed to be lost.

Labor’s reward was as follows: by the time of the 1972 presidential contest, the Democratic Party had effectively kicked the unions out of their organization. Democratic candidates still wanted the votes of working people, of course, as well as their donations and their get-out-the-vote efforts. But between ’68 and ’72, unions lost their position as the premier interest group in the Democratic coalition. This was the result of a series of reforms authored by the so-called McGovern Commission, which changed the Democratic party’s presidential nominating system and, along the way, changed the party itself.

Most of the reforms the McGovern Commission called for were clearly healthful. For example, it dethroned state and local machines and replaced them with open primaries, a big step in the right direction. The Commission also mandated that delegations to its 1972 convention conform to certain demographic parameters — that they contain predetermined percentages of women, minorities, and young people. As it went about reforming the party, however, the Commission overlooked one important group: it did nothing to ensure representation for working-class people.

The labor leaders who, up till then, had held such enormous sway over the Democratic Party could see what was happening. After decades of toil on behalf of liberalism, “they were being taken for granted,” is how the journalist Theodore White summarized their attitude. “Said Al Barkan, director of the AFL/CIO’s political arm, COPE, early in 1972 as he examined the scenario about to unfold: ‘We aren’t going to let these Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over our party.’”

But take it over they did. The McGovern Commission reforms seemed to be populist, but their effect was to replace one group of party insiders with another — in this case, to replace leaders of workers’ organizations with affluent professionals.

Byron Shafer, a political scientist who has studied the 1972 reforms in great detail, leaves no doubt about the class component of the change: “Before reform, there was an American party system in which one party, the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white-collar constituencies and in which another, the Democrats, was primarily responsive to blue-collar constituencies. After reform, there were two parties each responsive to quite different white-collar coalitions, while the old blue-collar majority within the Democratic party was forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identified predominantly with its needs.”

Years ago, when I first became interested in politics, I assumed that this well-known and much-discussed result must have been an unintended effect of an otherwise noble reform effort. It just had to have been an accident. I remember reading about the McGovern Commission in my dilapidated digs on the South Side of Chicago and thinking that no left party in the world would deliberately close the door on the working class. Especially not after workers’ organizations had done so much for the party’s flat-footed nominee. Besides, it all worked out so very, very badly for the Democrats. Neglecting workers was the opening that allowed Republicans to reach out to blue-collar voters with their arsenal of culture-war fantasies. No serious left politician would make a blunder like that on purpose.

But they did, reader. Leading Democrats actually chose to reach out to the a?uent and to turn their backs on workers.

We know this because they wrote about it, not secretly… but openly, in tones of proud idealism, calling forthrightly for reorienting the Democratic Party around the desires of the professional class.

I am referring to a book called Changing Sources of Power, a 1971 manifesto by lobbyist and Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton, who was one of the guiding forces on the McGovern Commission. … Dutton’s argument was simple: America having become a land of universal and soaring a?uence, all that traditional Democratic stuff about forgotten men and workers’ rights was now as relevant as a stack of Victrola discs. And young people, meaning white, upper-middle-class college kids — oh, these young people were so wise and so virtuous and even so holy that when contemplating them Dutton could scarcely restrain himself. They were “aristocrats — en masse,” the Democratic grandee wrote (quoting Paul Goodman); they meant to “rescue the individual from a mass society,” to “recover the human condition from technological domination,” to “refurbish and reinvigorate individuality.” Better: the young were so noble and so enlightened that they had basically transcended the realm of the physical. “They define the good life not in terms of material thresholds or ‘index economics,’ as the New Deal, Great Society, and most economic conservatives have done,” Dutton marveled, “but as ‘the fulfilled life ’ in a more intangible and personal sense.”

And this — this grotesque class narcissism and its efforts to achieve total class supremacy, dictating what is ethically permissible and factually correct in public discourse and, increasingly, private opinion — is what passes for “left” today.

And whatever criticizes it must, necessarily be “far right”! And we all know what far right really means. It is a teflon chute to national socialist hell. We need to tilt it to the left, where the HR departments of international corporations want it to go.

Everybody’s taking pills of various kinds these days, that give them privileged access to True Truth, lifting them out of the illusions of the Matrix into the true reality. That true reality, of course differs depending on the color of pill. A pill peddled by an Ibram X Kendi gives you one True Truth and one pushed by a Mencius Moldbug will give you another. (Somehow all these pill-poppers always forget that the red pill did not actually work as advertised, but only simulated an escape from simulation.)

I subscribe to this simulated escape from simulation view of the world.

I’ve got a whole medicine cabinet stuffed with these wonderful sorts of pills. They’re called books. History books, sociology books, religious texts. I’m partial to philosophy books, and by “partial” I mean “strung out”.

So soft-headed, warm-hearted, schoolmarmish progressive ladies, cold-blooded, hot-headed basement-dwelling aspergers cases and dried-up old hipsters who try to keep pace with the kids on social media — these poor souls might be fooled by the old “scales falling from your eyes” born-again, enlightenment fairytale — but I only pity the naive, gullible fools who take these kinds of shifts at face value and think they now number among the Knowers.

But I’m a weltanschauung whiplash veteran and I promise you: I know better than you about how perspectival shifts work. I shift paradigms and standpoints faster than you cycle through sneakers. Every month, I’m seeing through a different philosophical lens.

I’m like that friend of yours from college who was on drugs so much of the time he was able to drive, study, work, socialize and function better than normal while stoned, drunk and tripping. I’ve done enough of these shifts to have developed an understanding of shifts (or at least the range of shifts I’ve allowed myself to undergo so far), as well as becoming a discerning consumer of these mind-altering word drugs. As an addict/connoisseur I’m here to tell you, Listen Liberal is the Acapulco Gold of political shifts. +oO(-

It won’t give you Real Reality, but it will give you a new angle from which you can very distinctly and vividly see why some people — most of all me — see Progressivists not as they do — as brave, altruistic, critically-thinking heroes fighting on the right side of history — but rather as detestably smug, brittle, conformist, cowardly, presumptuous, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-oblivious, self-serving, self-absorbed, collectively-narcissistic, crybaby pricks.

Lesser mysteries

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Taoism

From my phenomenological, hermeneutical and pragmatic inclinations and self-education, I cannot help but read Renee Guenon (and to a degree, Frithjof Schuon) critically, as conveying extremely sharp, clear and, above all, grounding insights into the human condition — that is the condition of finitude within and toward infinitude — but proceeding from these to unwarrantedly objective speculations about the structure of what extends beyond what can be objectively known.

Having ridden this planet around the sun more than fifty times — which, believe it, or not, continues to surprise even after twenty or even thirty rides, and not in ways you might derive from the first thirty — and having been spiritually humiliated out of (I hope) most of my youthful hubris, I’m saying this not only tentatively, not only cautiously, but with acute, apprehensive modestly.

When I say “I cannot help but” I say it with anxious awareness that this might very well situate my stage of understanding to someone who has transcended it — but also, to those who most definitely have not.

Such is the nature of transcendent insight: those who know can’t tell and those who can tell don’t know nearly as much as they believe. When evaluating claims to transcendent knowledge, one crucial thing I look for is signs of awareness of this “horizonal” condition. If you have been given a divine gift of unshakable certainty, I will suspect, perhaps wrongly, you are still in the early and paved stages of your journey. The first appearance of new-to-me always is always new-to-the-world, most of all with the most commonplace wisdom.

So, here it is, laid out flat for convenient scrutinty: The same human tendency that compels us to ground our subjectivity in an objective world, to attribute mind to the functioning of a brain, makes metaphysicians ground our subjectivity in a positive metaphysics. Or, to put it in Guenon’s language, from where I stand I see the Lesser Mysteries (of “true man”) as greater than the Greater Mysteries (of “transcendent man”).

There.

Hineini.

I must really be where I really am if I wish to really go to other real places.

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If you know better, please speak up.