Category Archives: Philosophy

Bright blood

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.

If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.

But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.

If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.

Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:

We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …

The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.

Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.

What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.

Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.

What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.

In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”

…

No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.

Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.

…

An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.

If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)

Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.

The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.

But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.

Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.

I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.

When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.

(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)

Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”

I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.

And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,

And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.

We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.

)O+

The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations

Chord, Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve said it and texted it so many times I assumed I must have posted it, but I can’t find it: The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.

Many clumsy verbosities have been massively improved by the battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding.

Two examples. First rock tumbled William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The raw rock:

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Another is from Hannah Arendt. Rock-tumbled:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Raw:

Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.

But because I’m such a repetitious and arrogant person, happy to quote and requote myself poorly, subjecting my own clumsy words to “battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding” until they become nice smooth gems. For example, “The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.”

I’ve been playing with the idea of making a letterpress book on design lifted from Jan Zwicky’s brilliant Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Each entry will be a quotation, accompanied by an extended reflection on how it illuminates some facet of design. I will be using the improved, rock tumbled version of quotations, not originals.

I love long collaborative traditions. No one person could have made anything as perfect as a bicycle.

Ordinances of time

Existentialism, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Philosophy

More than once, in the depths of hangover I have yogiberraed a lamentational oath: “I am never drinking ever again, for at least a week.”

The griminess suggests crass oxymoron, but beneath the grime is a Bergsonian paradox — a paradox of time.

Oxymoron and paradox are both species of irony. They are both operations of dual-meaning, whose duality introduces a third meaning.

What divides paradoxic irony from oxymoronic irony is that oxymoron flatly self-contradicts, where paradox finds truth in parallactic depth across planes of givenness. Paradox’s humor is comedic in the classic sense, which is conjoined with tragedy — and this irony stands at world boundaries as a herm.

This same lamentational oath can be meant with oxymoronic irony. And when it is meant this way, it speaks psychologically: we are absurd, our intentions are absurd, and even our most earnest words are spoken with forked tongues. We speak basely even when we aspire. We speak basely especially when we aspire.

Oxymoron ridicules the human condition, where paradox sublimates it. Dry ironic eyes do not twinkle.

Speaking kabbalistically, in paradoxic irony one voice instaurates meaning in pshat and another voice instaurates meaning in remez, and the difference announces together-across-planes sounds a chord, a sensus communis, a depth witness of drash. The chord may be consonant or dissonant, but it resolves in depth-sounding truth, an articulation, not only within, but across worlds.

Drash is parallactic witness, and within it each chronological moment is witness to past, present and future. Some moments look forward, and these moments are promethean. Some moments look backward, and these moments are epimethean.

Some moments are perfect in themselves. Some moments long impossibly for an infinite elsewhere. Speaking mythically, this longing is guarded by the Hespirades, who hold it futile. A scrubbed, polished and decharmed cousin of the hangover lament: We pine for fleeting moments of eternity. We miss most of all eternities we had and lost because we conflate eternity and permanence. We long to taste, once again, lost golden fruit we never tasted.

If a titan can ironize — and this is doubtful — the irony of Cronus would be the most oxymoronic.

How exponentially metaironic would it be to attempt a four-eyed ironic depth of playing oxymoron against paradox?

If anyone ever attempted such a thing, it would be Nietzsche:

To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive — and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it: — women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction — for the sake of truth.

One of my most rock-tumbled aphorisms: “Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

A few years ago, when the aphorism was still rough, I expanded this idea into an exegesis on the philosopher’s stone.

When conflict breaks out, we are shaken out of unity, and fall into the four-sidedness of conflict. There is [1] what I believe, there is [2] what you believe, there is [3] what I think you believe and there is [4] what you think I believe.(Naive egocentricity, of course, sees only two sides: what I believe and what I know you believe. Until one overcomes naive egocentricity and learns to see conflict as four-sided, progress is impossible.)

To begin reconciliation we try to go from four-sided conflict to three-sided disagreement, where there is [1] what I believe, and there is [2] what you believe and there is [3] our shared understanding of our disagreement.

But sometimes when we reach a shared understanding of the disagreement we realize that this shared understanding has transcended and absorbed our old conflicting beliefs. This new understanding is no longer an agreement about a disagreement, but [1] a new shared belief. The three-sided disagreement is now a more expansive and accommodating unity.

So it’s one to four to three and then back to one. Repeat, ad infinitum.

This post is now entirely out of control.

Diamond writing

Autobiography, Philosophy

Not long ago, I realized that none of the authors I love to read cut readers a break.

I love hard, compact, flashing books. Stand up and move around, strain and turn to find the correct angle, the light shines in. Sit dully in place, and you get less than nothing. You get flat, mystical gist.

I will make every effort to be clear, and no effort to be accessible.

Emanation?

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.

Notes on design esoterism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.

Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.

Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.

Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.

And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.

And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.

To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.

(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)

Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.

Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.

Esoterism wants to materialize.

Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.

Exnihilism is at the heart of it.

New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.

Dreamt awakening

Anthropology, Enworldment, Philosophy

Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.

Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.

We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.

Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.

We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.

And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.

Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.

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.

Looping in on exnihilism

Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy

To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?

The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.

Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.

Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.

What is truth?

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.

The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.

Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?

Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.

Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.

Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.

The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.

But back to where we began: What is truth?

Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.

(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)

Honesties

Philosophy

Factual honesty is common. Much of it has less to do with principle than cowardice. A factually honest person might only lack faith in his ability to lie, and calculates that the risk is not worth the reward.

A braver and therefore rarer honesty is one that pursues truths where lies cannot be exposed: the truth of faith, which lives in this question: How much do I truly believe this?

If we are faithful, we can rarely answer: Wholly.

If we are faithful, we often dislike where we answer: Wholly.

What do we believe wholly? Base truths. Ordinary truths. The truths we despise and would love to transcend.

What do we believe only partially and ephemerally? Higher truths. Moral truths. The truths we most love.

The base truths we would most love to doubt into oblivion we believe wholeheartedly and stubbornly.

The higher truths we would most love to believe wholeheartedly arrive and depart by their own whim, condense and evaporate, oscillate between utter persuasion and incomprehensible nonsense.

Many, and maybe most, are factually honest. Vanishingly few are faithful.

The faithless are so negligent toward faith that it no longer occurs them to question, much less lie, about what they truly believe. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” If you don’t question, you do not know, and what you say cannot be a lie, and of you do not lie that makes you honest.

Ordinary faithless people outsource their faith labor to those with whom they agree, all of whom have done the same. Is there anyone in such communities of faith who is believes from the heart, in whom the communities belief is rooted? Nobody asks because all are blind, deaf and numb to such questions. Everyone agrees to agree.

More exceptional faithless people “do the work” of forcing beliefs upon themselves — and beliefs about how strongly they believe these beliefs. They self-bully their way to the strongest possible conviction.

Might it be these self-bullying true believers who are the nucleus of belief communities? Are these the exploited workers in the sweatshops of ideology, to whom the faith labor is outsourced?

Faithful people offer truths to their heart and witness with urgent interest how the heart responds. Does she smile and accept the gift? Does she scornfully reject it? Does she ignore it as unimportant?

A faithful philosopher crafts elaborate ideas to offer his heart. He makes the highest and most beautiful and most promising ideas he can conceive. Most immediately fall flat. Some are accepted for a moment, played with for a moment and abandoned. The higher the truth, the more fleeting the joy.

Once, twice, maybe thrice in a lifetime, the heart keeps a high truth for her own.

Such high truths are enceptive seed crystals of strange enworldments.

This I know.

“Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

Truth is not a woman. But wisdom is, and her name is Sophia.

Any idea she loves feels true.

If wisdom loves an idea, we will bet our own life on it.

But her sister determines whether we win our bet and live or lose it and die.

Wisdom’s sister is fact, and her name is Material.

A general is a philosopher who dies if he is wrong.

Gnostic epistemologies

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I see very little difference between the far left epistemology of emotion (feeling as fact) and far right epistemology of faith (intuition as truth).

Both commit a sin of antisocial gnosis, claiming privileged access to some preexistent given truth that can be accessed like a datum. The very making of such claims performatively contradicts the claim that one knows. The move demonstrates ignorance of what truth is and how it comes to be known. We approach truth collaboratively with others, and refusal to do so shows that we are mistaken about what truth is and what it does and how we relate to it.

Feelings are data. Spiritual and intellectual intuitions are data. Perceptions are data. Any datum can be mistaken. Only by forming, testing, reforming, retesting, iteratively and forever tentatively can we arrive at truth. Data can give us very compelling leads, but they are the start of possible truth, not conclusions.

The process of developing possible truth and seeing some succeed and some fail, and others succeed for a long time only to fail later, or to see two conflicting possible truths each succeed for a long time, or to see one truth yield to another without ever fully failing, or best of all, to experience the surrender of one truth to accommodate another, and discover an even more successful truth… this experience of the plurality of truths and their interactions opens up a yet higher level of truth, but with radically different character from the ones that revealed it.

Gnostic epistemologies are elaborate category mistakes.

Tetragrammaton lesson

Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Symbols and diagrams

Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.

Continue reading Tetragrammaton lesson →

Crossing design with Kabbalah

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Pluricentrism

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

  • Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
  • Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
  • Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
  • Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
  • Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
  • Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
  • Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

Continue reading Crossing design with Kabbalah →

Olamot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.

What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.

What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.

What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.

What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.

Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.

Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.

Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.

Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.

Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.

Anti-Logos

Ethics

Yes, it is true that language and logic can imprison us in wordworlds, and alienate us from intuited reality beyond the reach of cognition and from our own inarticulate selves. Only what can be said and argued and objectively proven is real, and everything else is phantasm.

The problem here, though, is not with articulate reason. The problem is treating articulate reason as the sole arbiter of truth.

If we conclude that the problem is, in fact, with word and reason and decide to reject it or subjugate it, or if we claim that articulate reason knows nothing of any importance, or that it is articulate reason that generates logical and linguistic phantasms — and crown intuition and feeling as sole arbiter of truth — we only commit the same sin of excess, but in the opposite direction.

Now, we suffer another alienation — alienation from community. Without words or reason, we cannot communicate and share reality with others. We cannot make appeals or hear appeals or honor appeals. We can only fight or flee or fuck, but never love.

And in a state of anti-Logos, the community-making sacrament of communion stops being a sacrament, and becomes ritual sorcery. The “communicant” sits alone in a ritualizing crowd, performing magical motions — sitting, standing, genuflecting, self-crossing, muttering little prayers, summoning mental images and ecstasies and intimacies, and attempts to transcend the neighbor, to make direct contact with God.

No, it is not only the theorizing, theologizing, philosophizing mind that “is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”

The intuiting, feeling, imagining mind is just as capable of the same kind of solipsism, when it rejects Logos.

An ethic of the mean finds the ideal in balanced moderation.

What is virtue in balance becomes vice in extreme.

Extremists believe some things are essentially good and other things are essentially evil.

Any trace of an essentially evil thing is a slippery slope to excess. Therefore, it should be opposed with excessive essential good. Every evil microaggression should be confronted by good macroaggression. The sins of secular atheism should be overcome with fundamentalist or traditionalist fanaticism. The infuriating imperfections of liberalism are capital crimes. And so on.

But! …Extreme moderation is also extreme.

There are no preexisting, eternal rules to follow.

And no method can guarantee success.

There is no solid truth holding us up. We all walk on water together. We sink alone.

Each application of the Golden Rule must itself be guided by the Golden Rule, and the guiding Golden Rule, in turn must itself also be guided. Ah, sahib, it is Golden Rule all the way up.

Each iteration upward ripples downward. … the infinite recursive, nonlinear, radically ordered, radically unpredictable. Under the anarchic order of chaos, futures swerve, lurch and bubble. The stirring of a butterfly wing can whirl a hurricane. Here truth is known only in the moment of disclosure.

It is from this, that we are suspended, always in suspense.

Golden mid.