The philosopher’s stone turns lead into gold.
You cannot spend a lead coin. You can’t even give it away.
So lead coins accumulate until they crush the life out of you.
Without my philosopher’s stone, my salary would be the death of me.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Job description
I do not aspire to be an expert, even in fields of expertise of my own invention.
If you need expertise, go find an expert.
But if no expertise exists to address what ails you, I’m here for that.
I’ll approach it as a philosophy design problem of the form “Here I don’t know my way about,” with the aim of reaching a common understanding of “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. I’ll design you a little localized philosophy that enables you and your collaborators to define and share a problem so it can be solved.
It will be messy and inefficient and unpredictable. But it will be interesting, if you can handle it.
It’s practical “beginner’s mind” without all the bullshit westernized Zen, with all its blissed out peace and escapism.
Etiquette and depth of faith
Life has taught me that some people will like me and others will not.
I don’t need to believe people who dislike or disrespect me are bad people. It just means I am probably not supposed to socialize with them, which includes working too closely with them. I’m sure that given the right setting, most of them are somewhere in the range of okay to awesome. They’re just not for me, and I’m not for them.
Others will like me right away — at first, as long as we do not exceed a certain depth — but past that point, they will like me even less than people who instantly dislike me. By “others” I mean everyone.
Of course, if my etiquette were better, fewer people would dislike me immediately. But that would require focusing on other things that I consider far more important than universal likability. In fact, it would require betraying those other things, since likability is something between real or feigned commonality of faith, and etiquette is the art of hiding difference. I’m out to differentiate, and deep disagreeability is the best means to that end.
One of my more pessimistic beliefs is that past a certain depth, we all diverge in faith. Deep down, we are all un-alike and perplexing to one another, and need to suppress this essential difference in favor of commonality. If you automatically drive to the maximum depth with every friend, you will be a friend-losing machine. I am understanding that my depths are just for me. Nobody’s going down there with me. Not only is that reasonable; it is good. I’m not going down into their depths with them either! Fair is fair.
(Oh, you’re different? You respect debate and difference of opinion? Debate and opinions are shallow. Perhaps limiting discussion to depths that debate can resolve is a weird sort of etiquette. Perhaps someday some Francis Fukuyama type of pop political theorist will write a book that casts liberalism as some sort of etiquette of the public sphere. See, this is the kind of rude shit I try to keep to myself, except here on my perverse public diary, this anomablogue. Abandon hope all ye who enter here and eavesdrop on my private thoughts.)
If you have talents in etiquette, that is, social grace, you can reveal more of yourself without irritating or offending others, but I am untalented in that area.
For now, my primary use of etiquette is keeping the few friendships I value.
Autobio DNA
In high school geometry I would never memorize proofs beyond the fundamental axioms. I found it easier just to re-prove them. It took me longer to finish tests, but my teacher let me work through the lunch break.
And this has been my life ever since, for better and for so much worse.
On youthful omniscience
Nietzsche: “He who sees badly sees less and less; he who listens badly hears more than has been said.”
I would add: “And he who thinks badly knows everything.”
Ideally, youthful hubris gradually matures as it is tempered by repeated surprise.
By surprising others and being surprised by them, hubris gives way to a capacity and inclination for mutual respect.
The prerequisite for this tempering is integrity. The personality cannot be hard to the point of brittleness so that it shatters under the impact of shock, but it must be firm enough that it can hold a shape, however much its form develops. But it cannot be soft to the point of formless liquid that experiences ripple and slosh through it, leaving no enduring change. The ideal mean is probably not the halfway point between unyielding and unresisting, but more in the vicinity of 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unyielding.
An excessive appetite for domination or submission — often reflected in preference for authoritarianism tends to retard development of mutual respect. But so does an excessive aversion to all bonds of obligation, which makes mutual respect unnecessary and encourages social alienation, at a terrible cost to the human soul.
Liberalism is operationalized mutual respect. But authoritarians and alienated anarchist punks know nothing of this — while believing they are wise to it.
Protected: A quick seethe
No, what really is metaphysics?
Metaphysics is the transcendent remainder of one’s own ontology. It is the surplus oblivion around what each of us means when saying and meaning “everything”. It is the radical surprise we anticipate when we attempt to expect the unexpected or to account for unknown unknowns. Nothing could be more personal than one’s own metaphysics.
Token versus symbol
The word symbol comes from the Greek word symbolon. In ancient Greece, a bit of pottery or other object would be broken into two pieces and kept by different people, to be used as a primitive form of authentication. Producing the other half of the symbolon was proof of identity or authenticity.
It is a little like those popular pendants tween girls buy shortly before getting in a fight and becoming enemies.
Similarly, a symbol can be seen as half of a meaning, completed by a reality the symbol is meant to indicate.
A symbol is completed by an intuition outside of language.
A token, on the other hand, is a verbal game piece whose meaning is determined by a language game. A token refers only to other tokens or combinations of tokens inside its language game.
The more our understandings are constructed from tokens, and the less they contact reality symbolically, the more abstract and unnatural these understandings feel and the more truth and reality come apart.
A person whose language is mostly tokens is in an alienated state I call wordworld.
Pluricentrism, polycentrism
Pluricentrism is the principle that the universe has — or more radically, is — myriad first-person agential centers.
Polycentrism is the principle that these agential centers interacting with one another, produce systems with agency of their own.
Pluricentric Maxim
Two quotes from my last post deserve to be separately framed:
Sarcasm is what we do when another neglects their ironic duty, and we must do it for them.
And
The Pluricentric Maxim — Always remember: “I am not the only center of the universe.”
Absolutism, Sarcasm and Alienation
Sarcasm is what we do when we are forced to do the ironic work another refuses to do themselves.
As Richard Rorty taught, irony is a core virtue of citizenship in a liberal democracy.
A good citizen must both hold to their own ideals while also respecting the fact that others do the same — and that everyone egocentrically thinks their ideal is manifestly superior for what are manifestly the best reasons.
Liberal-democratic irony can be summed up in a pluricentric maxim: “I am not the only center of the universe.” It is a supplementary update to the Golden Rule. A patch, if you will.
Liberal-democratic institutions are intended to operationalize this respect for universal egocentricity.
It is true that they rarely achieve this noble goal perfectly. But they do it far better than one group deciding that its collective egocentricity is so self-evidently superior that it can just unilaterally impose its own moral whim.
And if one egocentric person or one egocentric group loses its pluricentric irony and begins to naively assume that the noble goal of liberal-democracy is identical to the ideal it egocentrically believes… and if that group condemns liberal-democratic institutions whenever those institutions deviate from its own egocentric ideal… or worst of all, and sees such deviation as evidence that these institutions are no longer liberal-democratic!…
Well, the irony here is that it is the egocentric person or group who has lost its liberal-democratic virtue of irony. It is only because they no longer know what liberal-democracy means that they think it is lost.
They, themselves, are the enemies of what they believe they epitomize.
When a citizen of a liberal democracy lacks the virtuous irony required for participation in liberal-democratic life, and fails to exercise it, this is first, comical, then frustrating, then offensive, then alienating, then just infuriating.
You can try to explain it to them, but if they lack ironic sense, they will fail to understand.
They will object, “This doesn’t make sense.” Lacking all irony, if it makes no sense to them, they will assume the idea itself has no sense — that it is nonsense.
Ironically, I’ve known experts in irony who had no idea at all how to be ironic. They knew all about irony, but in practice they were entirely unable to think ironically.
They speak of history testifying unambiguously about moral shortcomings of this nation. Of how this history unambiguously implies their preferred forms of activism. Of how it is responsible use of power to compel those subject to one’s power — and unable to resist — to conform to one’s own socio-political and ethical ideals.
According to them, power disparities are bad only when they are abused.
Sure, people in the past thought they were using their power for good, but they were naive and wrong.
Unlike us.
Notice the sarcasm. Notice the contemptuous tone.
Respect is irony we exchange in dialogue.
Respect acknowledges that when we look at another and see them in our world, they look back and see us in their world. It says that we each are the center of a universe in which we somehow both dwell together.
Contempt is lack of this respect — for the other, for togetherness in pluricentricity. Contempt takes one’s own naive egocentricity for reality itself, and cares nothing about what the other thinks or feels about it.
Sarcasm is contempt for another person’s contempt. It is irony frustrated to the point of alienation.
Sarcasm is what we do when we must do another’s ironic duty for him, because he will not do it himself. We say contemptuously for the other what he should have said himself with ironic self-awareness.
So all you brave defenders of democracy — with your unmatched intelligence, self-awareness, humanity, sensitivity, empathy, moral decency and courage — thank you for all you have done, or at least tried to do.
Thank you for instructing us on our unconscious prejudices, our cognitive biases, our motivated reasoning, our unearned, unjust privilege, our self-interested abuses of power.
Hopefully, you and your true-believing allies will soon get the unlimited, unopposed power you need to remake the world into a kinder, juster, more equitable and more diverse place.
Rorty
In light of my last post, I might have to read Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism straight through this year. Or maybe I will reread Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
Conscience warfare
I am blessed-cursed by an overactive intellectual conscience.
That intellectual conscience conducts incessant pincer attacks on my complacent certainty.
On the right flank my intellectual conscience attacks with the challenge: “But what do you really believe?” And sadly, since the late 1980s — when my future wife taught it a devastating form of feminine skepticism — it rolls its eyes at arguments, and contemptuously swats away appeals to logic, authority, and so on. It cares zero about my head, with its talkative brain and mouth: “Just because you can argue it, it doesn’t follow that you believe it.” It goes directly for the heart: “Would you bet your life on it? Would you bet a loved one’s life on it?”
This line of questioning often ends the battle. Rarely does this interrogation produce a simple “yes” or “no”.
But then on the left flank my intellectual conscience attacks with a complementary challenge: “But what are you missing?” If any simple “yes” or “no” survived the right flank attack, the left flank normally sweeps it out effortlessly. Despite its bluster, certainty is rarely the fruit of superior understanding. And it is with this indubitable truth — which has not only survived the “would you bet your life on it” test, but has been toughened and strengthened by it — that the left flank attacks and annihilates certainty.
My intellectual conscience is now attacking my most recent religious beliefs.
Wish me luck. This might get ugly-beautiful.
And all this is only for private thought.
I have a whole other intellectual conscience for public thought.
My public thought intellectual conscience is solely about arguments, adherence to principles, respect for institutions, and their formalities and rules, refusal to be the only center of the universe. It tolerates no heartfelt passion imposing itself on unconsenting recipients.
My public thought intellectual conscience demands perfect liberalism.
Overall, my intellectual conscience draws the sharpest and darkest lines it can over the blurry, slimy, hazy, fuzzy, irregular, shifting, multilayered surfaces of the lifeworld — dividing private from public, public from private.
For many “the personal is political”.
But let us not confuse descriptions and moral norms.
The personal should not be political.
And the political should not be personal.
Conflating them destroys both.
And indeed, today, because of public-private conflation, each of us and all of us are coming apart.
I respect my intellectual conscience(s) more than anything else.
I would love to be generous enough to judge only myself by it.
I live my life choking down the superior judgment of others.
“That quick, willing, convinced, talkative manner”
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?
Twofold convention
The anti-intellectualism of conventional mystics, and the anti-mysticism of conventional intellectuals: these are a single convention. And we all know with more than our minds that we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven or earth.
Protected: Lou Salomé
Psychedelic meaning
I don’t know what conventional mystics experience in ecstatic visionary states, but I assume these experiences are related to psychedelic experiences.
In my limited experience, psychedelic experiences were intensely meaningful in ways that are nearly impossible to talk about. Although I did experience vivid visions in that state, I was never terribly fascinated by the visions themselves nor in the question concerning the ontological status of the mysterious noumena. At the time, my strong unexamined inclination was to take them as imaginary, and not to attribute any kind of real existence to them.
I prefer to phenomenologically bracket visions, and approach them phenomenologically. I am most concerned with the significance of the ineffable meaning. I am interested in the genus of this meaning, the question of why this meaning is ineffable, and how we may relate ourselves to it.
Maybe my other conceptual commitments preserve themselves through this attitude and this field of relevance. But my gut tells me that this focus will bear fruit. This doesn’t exactly put me at cross-purposes with traditional mysticism, but it does put me at what could be described as a parallel purpose.
Sophia
From Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives, “Weeping as Mystical Practice”:
I shall begin my description of the techniques by focusing on a practice — unnoticed before — that can be traced back through all the major stages of Jewish mysticism over a period of more than two millennia. I refer to the recommendation of the use of weeping as a means for attaining revelations — mostly of a visual character-and/or a disclosure of secrets. …
It is obvious that, for Luria and Berukhim, weeping is an aid to overcoming intellectual difficulties and receiving secrets. It is plausible to interpret the final sentence as referring to a revelatory experience, in which the supernal gates are opened. This text is recommended for a practical purpose; it appears that R. Abraham Berukhim indeed had the opportunity to apply this recommendation, as it is reported that Luria had revealed to him that he would die unless he prayed before the Wailing Wall and saw the Shekhinah. It is then reported:
“When that pious man heard the words of Isaac Luria, he isolated himself for three days and nights in a fast, and [clothed himself] in a sack, and nightly wept. Afterward he went before the Wailing Wall and prayed there and wept a mighty weeping. Suddenly, he raised his eyes and saw on the Wailing Wall the image of a woman, from behind, in clothes which it is better not to describe, that we have mercy on the divine glory. When he had seen her, he immediately fell on his face and cried and wept and said: ‘Zion, Zion, woe to me that I have seen you in such a plight.’ And he was bitterly complaining and weeping and beating his face and plucking his beard and the hair of his head, until he fainted and lay down and fell asleep on his face. Then he saw in a dream the image of a woman who came and put her hands on his face and wiped the tears of his eyes…. and when Isaac Luria saw him, he said: ‘I see that you have deserved to see the face of the Shekhinah.'”
It is clear that the two visions of the woman — that is, of the Shekhinah — are the result of R. Abraham’s bitter weeping: the former a waking vision of the back of the Shekhinah, the latter a vision of her face, which occurs only in a dream. The first one provokes anxiety; the second, comfort.
In my own philosophical experience, perplexity and angst — sacred dread — always precedes revelatory insight, instaratio ex nihilo.
This recalls Nietzsche’s mysterious and beautiful preface to Beyond Good and Evil:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.
Beriah is the home of the enveloping alter-subject beloved by philosophers, forever beyond possession or mastery. She is Sophia, the Shekhinah. In Assiyah, she appears through the sefirah Binah. When we approach her dogmatically, she turns her back on us and we despair. When we approach her as she wishes to be approached, she reveals her face, shading the blinding light flooding in behind her.
Kabbalistic everso
I spent all day Monday (Dec 22, 2025) printing two Sefirot pieces — one safely orthodox and one riskily extra-orthodox (or maybe postorthodox, but probably flat-out wrong).
Now I want to sanctify what I printed by using it to say impossible things.
For years, I’ve been working out a topological conception of modes of knowing. The topology can be expressed clearly in Kabbalistic language. Apologies for the repetition of recent posts. I’m rehearsing. I might fold Everso and Exnihilist Manifesto together into a short Kabbalistic text.
Natural knowing is cognitive comprehension (etymologically “together-grasping”) and conception (“together-taking”) of finite forms, defined as something against an indefinite field of everything else. Object: ob-ject “thrust-before”.
Let us call this kind of objective understanding Pshat, the subject who understands in this mode Nefesh, and everything given by this kind of understanding Assiyah. Assiyah is a world of convex objectivity — material or nonmaterial — physical, psychic, conceptual, ethical, etc. In Assiyah, even subjects have objective form.
Objective form as opposed to what? This, precisely, is the problem. Few people transcend Pshat, in order to have something with which to compare it — mainly artists, poets, mystics, philosophers, literary connoisseurs and weirdos.
To transcend Pshat we must apperceive our acts of perception, conception, comprehension, and our failures to conceive and comprehend, and our changes in perception, conception, comprehension. The grasping of comprehension and the receiving of conception are not forms that can be comprehended or conceived, but rather formative acts, which participate in one of myriad possibilities of formation.
Formation is known only indirectly by the forms they produce. They are trees known by their fruit. They are media known by their content. Behind all objectivity — “thrust-beneath” it, “under-standing” it — is subject.
Let us call this kind of understanding Remez, the subject who understands in this mode Ruach, and everything given by this kind of understanding Yetzirah. Yetzirah is a world of concave subjects, each an ontology with its own objectivity.
Expressed topologically: Forms are convex; formation is concave.
Transcending form altogether (both form and forming) is the supraformal ground of form and forming, which enters awareness when formative modes destabilize and recrystallize, and entirely new givens are revealed ex nihilo. New givens are received in a luminous flood of meaning and wonder. Reality is profoundly strange and infinitely meaningful.
What is pragmatically comprised by the word “everything” is surprised by more-than-everything.
Let us call this kind of understanding Drash, the “subject” who understands in this mode Neshamah, and the more-than-everything given by this kind of “understanding” is Beriah. Beriah is a world entirely beyond subjectivity and objectivity — the ground of both and neither.
The luminous influx of meaning is Sod, the “subject” who receives it is Chayah, and it emanates from Atzilut.
Eternal effigicide victims
Jew-haters, antisemites, anti-Zionists have diverging reasons for hating what they conceptualize variously in religious, racial, historical, political, ideological terms.
The ontology shifts about according to the faith and doctrine of the ones doing the hating. But the emotion — angst expressed as hate — and the target of the hate is constant: Am Yisrael, the People of Israel. It is Am Yisrael and our perpetually evolving, disrupting, regenerating, self-transcending tradition, dedicated to the ever-expanding transcendent One beyond being.
Am Yisrael is the radical other who stands in for the radical Otherness of the transcendent. When it is impossible to annihilate reality and reality’s transcendent ground, but one needs to vent infinite hatred somewhere, however impotently, the best lightning rod for discharging one’s angst is whoever loves what one hates.
And when effigicide is directed at Jews, it is rarely confined to Jews for long, for the simple reason that Jews are not the only people who offend ideoidolators.
Effigicide is the violent expression of angst toward the supraformal absolute directed at someone with living form.