When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Beyond contemporary mysticism
Contemporary mysticism, like all contemporary popular thought, reserves all conceptual clarity and precision for material reality alone. Mysticism is a misty, nebulous remainder, hovering above and glowing behind material reality — an opalescent swirl of vague hopes, of insinuated meaning, of faint underwritings of morality.
I have chosen to distribute my own clarity and precision more broadly — across infraformal material, formal psychic, and supraformal spiritual realities. This choice is informed both by my everyday experiences working among humans and nonhumans as a designer, and by my mornings spent reflecting on these experiences and on my past reflections — integrating, clarifying, iterating.
We all need this expanded clarity, but we cannot even articulate the need, precisely because of our truncated clarity. We have optimized our understandings to account for physical phenomena, but we wave away the immediate matters at the heart of our lives — love, beauty, meaning, relatedness, belonging — as someday-to-be-explained epiphenomena.
We placed the particle at the center of our persons, and set these human matters in orbit around it. And now we must do the most complex calculations of epicycles within epicycles before we can calculate why our families matter to us more than life itself.
Last night Jack asked for the musical instrument “you blow into”. I didn’t know what he meant. Each wrong guess made him more visibly desperate. So we went to the instrument box and started rummaging. We found a pitch pipe tuner, and he was able to say that “it is like that.”. When we found the harmonica, his relief was instant and total. It was obvious, though, that most of his pain and subsequent relief had more to do with his need to communicate than with his need for the harmonica. The two needs were bound up together and compounded exponentially.
When a toddler begins to melt down we sometimes say “use your words.” This does two things. First, it teaches them to begin with communicating their needs before expressing their frustration. But second, the very act of communicating calms and stabilizes them.
Imagine a world where adults feel inexpressible frustration at having their most fundamental human needs unmet, but are, at the same time, unable to articulate their needs and account for why those needs matter.
A toddler with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs throws himself to the floor and screams and kicks and demands Froot Loops. An adult with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs riots in the streets and makes political demands.
We must rethink our metaphysics. At the very least, our civilizational survival depends upon it.
Design and form
We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.
If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.
If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.
To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.
Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.
When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.
Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.
Protected: Objectivity
Idel
I just realized that my last post was just a freaky restatement of Moshe Idel‘s mission, or at least my current understanding of it: a phenomenological approach to Kabbalah.
Good metaphysics
I prefer to build out my mysticism, as well as my scientific understandings, from everyday given reality, which Husserl called the lifeworld.
When we proceed this way, carefully preserving the links between what we experience directly in the lifeworld, toward what we gradually recognize as not-yet-known, possibly unknowable in principle, and (at the very least) inexhaustibly re-knowable, we develop an understanding of planes of reality beyond the world of intuitive effective action and the world(s) of constructible-destructible truth(s).
Let those with the sensibilities to conceive what this means make sense of it.
Some folks want to take these transcendent truths (metaphysics) that seem for all the world to explain manifest truth (the lifeworld) and treat them as an adequate substitute for it. “We are in the lifeworld, but not of it.” (The scientistic metaphysicians are just as bad as any other in their need to escape the reality of life. “What do I care what happens in this paltry here and now, to me and my loved ones, as long as the youuuuuuniverse keeps cranking out novelties?”)
Others (correctly) see in this kind of metaphysicry a lame attempt to escape the lifeworld, and (incorrectly) dismiss all metaphysics as escapism.
Good metaphysics never sever these worlds from one another. The ladder stands firmly on the earth and penetrates the roof of heaven, so that truth may circulate between.
If we practice good metaphysics, resisting the impulse to chop the ladder at the knee or neck, our lifeworld transforms. Reality is given to us differently. This is what is meant by revelation. Revelation is not a secret message about reality whispered into a guru’s ear; it is a disclosure of reality to our common sensibility.
I fear I will never transcend Nietzsche.
Transformation of Things
Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.
Chuang Chou did not know whether he was Chuang Chou or the butterfly.
But the butterfly had no doubts, which means he had certainty.
Therefore, it was the butterfly who dreamt Chuang Chou.
This is the logic of ideological butterflies, who cannot conceive how anyone might disagree with them.
Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
What is meant by the Transformation of Things?
Most of us spend our lives flitting and fluttering through existence, conforming to norms, nonconforming and dissenting within the acceptable norm-supporting range. As long as we cooperate, we remain who we’ve become within a world that is simply what it is. Today’s world, though, is universally acknowledged to be socially constructed, distorted by cognitive biases and shot through with blind spots.
But very, very few people think to question the rock-solid critical metaworld behind the constructed world, and to wonder if that critical metaworld is not just as constructed, blind and corrupt.
And this is the sublime joke: the critical metaworld, not the “constructed world”, is the world where everyone actually lives today. That alleged constructed world, the object of critique, is just a decoy. (Same with self. Most folks who “do the work” of self-scrutiny, scrutinize a decoy self. The critical metaself evades notice and operates behind the scenes with one hundred times the bias, blindness and self-serving logic as the decoy identities it so theatrically renounces.)
Today, when everyone seems to have learned to “question everything” fewer people than ever before actually question anything real. They don’t even notice the critical metaworld from which “the world” is questioned, critiqued and challenged — which cloaks and protects it from all question, critique or challenge.
If you do manage to find the critical metaworld, though, and if you do choose to interrogate it, you will find that this metaworld dissolves under scrutiny.
When it dissolves, deeply weird things happen to you. But those weird things manifest as changes to the given world — so weird they make magic seem mundane and paltry in comparison. Everything and every thing transforms in the most inconceivably uncanny way.
Now we have a before and an after. Before we had only lack of doubt. Now we have profound doubts.
Between after and before there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
Textless marginalia
My Goodnotes app sometimes malfunctions and hides the pdf I’m annotating.
My careful underlining, sans text, looks so pretty.
Scalar being
Once we accept the existence of collective beings, and we understand that these beings can suffer the same psychological problems any individual person can have, or isolated complexes within an individual persons can have — the world looks radically different.
Nietzsche clearly saw being as scalar in this way, observing:
Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
And
Morality as the self-division of man. — A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover’s faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.
Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “impossible and yet real”? Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when a pigheaded man says, “I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man’s way?”
The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not “selfless.” In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.
Even in his notorious attacks on people (Wagner, being the most famous), Nietzsche was attacking representative agents of collective beings:
I never attack people, — I treat people as if they were high-intensity magnifying glasses that can illuminate a general, though insidious and barely noticeable, predicament. This is how I attacked David Strauss or, more precisely, the success of an old and decrepit book in German ‘culture’, — I caught this culture in the act… And this is also how I attacked Wagner or, more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our ‘culture’ that mistakes subtlety for richness and maturity for greatness.
And of course, for those with ears to hear it, Nietzsche’s famous concept of Übermensch obviously referred to a collective being, not some solitary hyper-ambitious dark-triadic wannabe Caesar or Jesus figure.
So when I read Progressivist analysts and commentators scratching their heads over the latest Wall Street Journal poll, showing that Democrats are at a 35-year popularity low, trying to understand how it it is possible that any sane, moral, semi-informed person could possibly hate the left —
…seeing that no group of people in the history of humanity has ever been this benevolent, this sensitive to the plight of the vulnerable and marginal, this concerned about this planet and its living inhabitants, this self-aware and attentive to its own biases, blindnesses, privileges, power imbalances, this obsessed with justice and ethical conduct, this independent- and critically-minded, and this courageously determined to make the most radical changes to the world…
— I marvel at how they miss the possibility that they are caught up in a collective narcissism.
But nobody can tell any narcissist — individual or collective — anything they don’t already believe. The groupthink of the left summarily dismisses the views of anyone who challenges its own self-conception and self-image — its vision of its own exceptional moral, intellectual and technical character — and in fact lashes out in a classically narcissistic way at anyone who refuses to see it as it wishes to be seen.
So Progressivists as a group, and as individuals insofar as they think, speak and act as Progressivists, are hated the way all narcissists are hated — while they themselves collectively experience nothing but persecution from vicious, stupid, inferior people who misunderstand them and fail to appreciate their unbelievable, mind-boggling awesomeness.
Note: Progressivism isn’t the only insane collectivity out there, of course. Everyone these days — and in every time, for that matter — is caught up in some collective being or another. It seems the most prominent collective beings active today are contemptible in differing ways. I’ve been caught up in several of them, myself. Nobody is immune. But that is the point: Nobody is immune! Progressivism thinks it is exceptional and immunized, thanks to its special awareness and its mitigating techniques. This conceit makes Progressivism a zillion times more self-oblivious and meta-uncritical than it should be, given its pretensions and aspirations.
A great many people who lack the audacity to indulge their narcissistic impulses in their own individual self will instead gratify them by identifying themselves with a collective narcissism, and “selflessly” giving over to it. You see it often with parents who hyper-protect and privilege their own children over the reasonable needs of other people, we see it in historically oppressed groups who claim special status with special benefits to compensate for past wrongs. We see it in religious fanatics who imagine themselves as having special relationships with “God” with inside knowledge and a special duty and destiny.
Observing the Golden Rule, interpreted ever-more radically, at ever-deepening meta-levels, is the hardest thing a person can attempt. Most of us fuck up and mistake the self or the collective with whom we identify with God.
Why? Because.
Technicity’s Why is always asked as: “What is it for?”
And this technic Why is reflexively answered with a Because of a specific form: “…in order to…” — in a long and unending chain of in-order-tos.
Technic Why means: “What is its use?”
This deformity of meaning is the valid impulse behind our indignation at calling the person for whom a design is intended the User.
Fundamentalist “religion” is the technic reduction of intrinsically good life-toward-the-Absolute to a system of Why-Because rules one must observe in order to earn magical rewards and in order to avoid magical punishments. It is technicity pristinely alienated from Earth, Man and Heaven, with all technicity’s negative trade-offs and none of its advantages.
Absolutism-Pluralism dialectic
We know — and cannot avoid knowing — that there is one Absolute beyond plurality. When we assert the relativity and plurality of truth, it is precisely toward the existential truth of that one Absolute that we reach.
But this reaching toward the Absolute exceeds all grasping. We apprehend an essentially incomprehensible truth. This apprehended, uncomprehended truth — the existential acknowledgment of an Absolute transcending relativity and plurality — contains, envelops, permeates and involves our being, entirely and without remainder.
We cannot grasp this truth We situate ourselves within it and participate in, in awareness of our relationship to it.
We can no more comprehend the Absolute and have it as an object of thought than we can see sight or hear hearing. You can stare into a mirror for years or decades searching for your I, but all you will ever see is your Me. You can scour the universe and history in search of the Absolute, but your very search is an ontological absurdity.
The Truth of the one Absolute cannot be known objectively or contained in language.
There is capital-T Truth, but that Truth is not an objective truth.
So pluralists and relativists are right, and dogmatic absolutists are wrong, if relativists mean: All objective truth is relative and plural.
But absolutists are right, and radical relativists and pluralists are wrong, if absolutists deny that all truth is relative and plural. Only objective truth is relative and plural — and not all truth is objective.
Here is where absolutists and pluralists can sublate their antitheses and philosophically transcend to something truer: That to which objective, relative, pluralistic truth must relate — always, inescapably and without exception — is the Absolute.
Any idea or argument that attempts to deny this relation is wrong in every possible sense of the word.
Pascal’s Wager 2.0
I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:
- If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
- If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
- If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
- If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?
But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.
Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.
Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.
Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.
But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.
Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.
But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?
In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?
So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
- If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
- If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?
I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:
Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.
This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.
Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:
To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?
I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.
I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:
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…
Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.
“Doing the Work” of liberation
Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.
Here is the passage:
Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.
Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed firsthand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.
. . .
During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).
In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.
One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.
It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.
Here is the sequence of thoughts:
- “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
- In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
- Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
No, reality is not constructed.
Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.
But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.
And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.
Walk good.
Pluralism
I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.
I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.
But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.
We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.
But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?
Practical fantasy
Back in the early 2000s, my brother and I developed a “practical fantasy” vision of bicycles.
Scott ran a bike shop. Over the years, conversing with many customers, he began to notice that everyone who cares about bicycles carries in their soul some ideal image of themselves within the world, and they project that ideal image onto their bicycle, onto themselves as rider, and onto some ideal riding scenario.
A gearhead is one such archetype. He owns the lightest, most advanced technology. He imagines the awed envy of fellow cyclists when they see how his bicycle is specced out and how light it is… Wannabe racers imagine themselves bursting ahead of their rivals… Wannabe couriers snake through dense traffic taking insane risks, scoffing at the certainty of gruesome injury and likely death… There are tweedy retro fetishists, transporting themselves from home to cafe to studio to bookshop. (Who me?) … Rugged all-terrain riders, carrying their survival gear into the wilderness… Ultralight nomads Eurail from country to country with their foldable, carrying only what fits in the knapsack… We defined a small set, but the full list is extensive.
Scott wanted to decode those practical fantasy archetypes, so he could equip the subset of cyclists he liked and served to fully actualize their fantasy.
Central to this practical fantasy vision was a goal: Transform the fantasist into an actual rider. Liberate the bicycle from its garage imprisonment, and liberate the cyclist from their skull imprisonment.
When I recall this vision, it is just one application of a general theory of design.
The same dynamic applies in every situation where a user of some designed instrument extends their own ideal being into the world through that instrument — enworlding and self-actualizing themselves — making themselves at home in a world they partially shape to their own ideal.
Reminder: Philosophies are one such instrument.
Complicit in evil
The type of person who believes the essence of evil is injustice — bias, greed, selfishness, callousness, and so on — tends to interpret more radical forms of evil as justified reactions to injustice.
They have a truncated conception of evil. Anything beyond injustice on the spectrum of moral negativity — sadism, hatred, vengeance, malevolence, the desire to annihilate — is as invisible to them as ultraviolet.
Unfortunately, their conception of good is equally truncated. This type views the essence of good as the fight for justice against injustice. As a result, they are all too inclined to interpret radically evil actions as aggressive — but righteous — resistance to injustice, deserving their full, enthusiastic support.
Consequently, this type not only tolerates radical evil, but supports it — and at times actively participates in evil.
Misfinition
I have a reading group that meets on Sundays. We initially formed to read Buber’s I and Thou together, then we attempted Rosenzweig. Now we are reading Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah, a compilation of beautiful passages from Kabbalists, one after another — including this one by Rav Kook:
The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine — all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God” — these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition — these, too, would engender heresy.
Yesterday, when we were discussing the mismatch between human thought and God’s infinitude — repeated in many passages, expressed here by Kook with “Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry” — I coined a word for this most fundamental of category mistakes: misfinition: the attempt to define and thus render finite what is essentially infinite.
But this is not the only place we make this category mistake. Whenever we try to make any subject — who is, by virtue of subjecthood vis-a-vis ourselves, both transcendent and non-finite — into a finite object of knowledge, we commit a minor heresy.
And we cannot stop doing this when our mind compulsively tries to grasp and comprehend and have whatever it touches. Wherever we find ourselves engulfed, integrated, involved, environed — we cannot resist the temptation to once again grab the garden by the fruit and consume it, so we can have it as our own property. We do this even to our own subjectivity, and when we do, we are narcissists.
It is in its undefinability that every subject is created in the image of God.
Moral misappropriation
Jewish prophets innovated speaking truth to power.
It was Jewish monotheism — worship of the one God above all, to whom all must answer — that, for the first time in human history, distinguished goodness from political power. Only this world-transcending authority authorized a righteous man of God to rebuke a king.
And speaking truth to power on behalf of the powerless — this, too, was a Jewish invention.
Before the Jews, there was no distinction made between might and right, and the powerlessness had no moral standing or significance.
This moral vision has been so thoroughly appropriated by modern leftists that they take it for granted, and no longer recognize its source. And when these leftists step on the neck of “zionist” Jews, allegedly in the name of justice, they do so standing on the shoulders of Jewish giants.
If you want to understand modern antisemitism, Mary Douglas’s forward to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift offers an important insight:
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
And if you think a freely-given gift generates resentment, that is nothing compared to a stolen “gift” that the “recipient” wants to possess as their own natural birthright, theirs to have without any debt of gratitude.
We see this in right-wing supersessionism, and in left-wing appropriation of the Jewish invention of social justice, which is really just post-religious christianoidal appropriation of vestigial spiritually-unrooted moral attitudes.
Protected: The bad faith behind antizionism
Materialoid idealists
To think a lot about matter, to use the language of physics as your “final vocabulary”, to force all ideas to ground themselves in scientific truths before they are accepted as valid — none of these mental operations makes a person a materialist. It makes the the person an idealist who uses materialist concepts and language to construct a mental world. It makes them a materialoid idealist.
They think the mental model of the world inside their head is a faithful duplicate of the real world, and whatever they deduce about their mental world is necessarily true of the real world. They might say “I might be wrong”, but their doubts are epistemological, when they should be ontological. They misconceive what truth is.
Materialoid idealism is a kind of anti-religious fundamentalism.
Like all fundamentalisms it is collective-solipsistic.
Like all fundamentalism, it appropriates language meant to orient us to a reality of which we are a part, in which we participate, but which transcends us and reduces it to a set of ideas that fit neatly inside one’s own understanding, that is our own property, which we worship as supreme.
Fundamentalism is ideoidolatry.
Materialoid idealists are scientistic fundamentalists.
There is a weird sort of hostile consanguinity among fundamentalists. It’s like “honor among thieves” — an adversarial kinship among folks who live in opposition to one another but who operate at the same plane of existence. It is why debates between theists and atheists never go anywhere. They are self-reassurance rituals, that outside the us-versus-them, there is nothing.
This kind of person has two kinds of hate.
There is the ordinary comprehensible hate of fellow fundamentalists who believe the wrong things, who worship the name and notions of Allah or Jesus instead of the name and notions of Feynman or Marx.
Then there is the deeply anxious uncomprehending hate of aliens whose beliefs and practices simply make no sense at all, and which bring up all kinds of visceral, sincere but ineffable unpleasantness.
The second hate is so much worse that fundamentalists will set aside their shallower hate and ally against it, however much it exposes how little they actually care about the positive ideals they go on and on about to justify their true negative ideals.
Real materialists interact with materials, their thinking is a response to difficulties they encounter in the course of these interactions, and what they come to believe about materials are ideas that effectively guide their interactions.