Category Archives: Philosophy

Kabbalah and design

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy

People ask me how kabbalah relates to design. Here is how:

To nefesh in Assiyah, whole means comprehensive system.
To ruach in Yetzirah, whole means gestalt given.
To neshemah in Beriah, whole means enworldment.
To chayah in Atzilut, whole means atonement.

In Atzilut, only the One is whole, transcendent.
In Beriah, wholes are enworldments, given ex nihilo, revealed-created, instaurated.
In Yetzirah, wholes are given gestalts, conceived.
In Assiyah, wholes are comprehensive systems, constructed.

The Whyless philosophy

Design, Philosophy, Trefoil

It all really just keeps coming back to Liz Sanders, doesn’t it?

Our working philosophies are color-blind to meaning.

Our philosophy has What and How receptors, but lacks receptors for Why.

Through this Whyless philosophy we look at something that is useful and usable and otherwise functionally valuable, and are unable to distinguish it from something desirable. It’s the same dull blue-gray color, whether we are drawn to it for mysterious reasons or because it is more convenient, effective, efficient or reliable.

We cannot help thinking that Why is another What-How function. We ask “why?”, expecting an in-order-to. Why isn’t like that. Why doesn’t ask, because it knows. It intuits value spontaneously, directly. It is like perceiving a color.

I have actually had designers say: “If it is useful and usable, doesn’t that make it desirable?”

I think we know better. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Notice, I dont say that we are color blind to meaning, only that our philosophies are.

This means that we can intuit meaning, but when we try to talk about it, or think about it, or account for it, or justify it we find ourselves unable to do justice to our experience. And many of us are in the habit of invalidating these things we cannot talk about.

Years ago my friend Jokin told me a Basque saying “what has a name is real.” The corollary to that is “what lacks a name is unreal.” One of my job functions as a philosopher is to find concepts and language to do justice to our experiences so they can have names and the dignity of reality.

I can do this job because, for whatever reason, I refuse to deny any of my experiences reality, just because my philosophy is inadequate to it. My inclination is to take these experiences seriously and explore them to see what they’re all about. In some ways, I love philosophy because I am more independent from and less dependent on my philosophy, so I can tinker with it, without becoming too horribly schizophrenic for prolonged periods of time. Instead, I become moderately schizophrenic in short bursts, maybe most of the time.

And our meaning-blind philosophy has a way of disposing of unreal experiences. We relegate them to an unreal domain we call “subjectivity.” That is a fantastic place to put it because this same philosophy has no idea whatsoever how subjectivity works, nor how it relates to objectivity. Subjectivity is a realm of pure mistake, distortion and arbitrariness that interferes with our ability to perceive the objective world, which is more or less the exact eversion of what subjectivity is.

These strange analytical problem-solving design disciplines I keep drifting into — first UX design, then strategic design, then service design — all seem to attract practitioners with meaning-blindness. Back in the day, UX was overflowing with project managers, who saw the work as a conceptual closet organizing endeavor, and cognitive scientists, who thought the job was a matter of schema-matching between a user’s understanding and navigation structures.

It seems I’m always fighting for desirability as an irreducible element of design against people who don’t even seem aware that it is core to their job.

But I find design to be pure drudgery if desirability is not a part of it. Or, I guess I could say that only desirability makes design desirable for me.

And people wonder why our lives are so meaningless. Or they don’t wonder, but rather explain it away with one of the prefab diagnoses the Whyless philosophy provides nihilist malcontents.

When our organizations, our services, our products, our spaces are designed only for function, what do we expect to happen?

The service design industry has responded to AI disruption by zigging directly into radical Whylessness.

I am zagging.

Material, medium, form, object

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

I’m thinking through the relationship between the essential elements of a design discipline — those things that define any design discipline.

First, though, I want to define design in general against disciplines, with particular emphasis on engineering and art, two domains into which design often blurs. Of course, it is an obnoxious fool’s errand to insist on technical precision in everyday speech, so please take these definitions as intended, as artificial sharpening done for the sake of precise understanding.

Design is the development of systems in which free-willed people participate as essential parts of that system. By free-willed, I mean they can (to some degree) choose whether and how to participate. A designed system is not complete until free-willed people are participating in it. As I have said zillions of times before, this is why design research is part of all design work. A system without free-willed people participating in it is still only an engineered sub-component.

Engineering is the development of systems without free-willed participants. Whatever the materials used in the system, whether concrete or logic, the components behave choicelessly. Often we engineer when we should design. We use various governing techniques to remove choice, so people become engineerable components in our social engineering projects. Or we exclude people from our problem framing, and focus solely on whatever thing we are making, presumably for them, but not in reference to them. Or we make assumptions or speculations that people will behave as we expect and hope. But the engineered thing is viewed as separate from the people who will eventually come along (or not) and try it (or reject it) and adopt it (or abandon it). Design never considers its thing apart from the people interacting with it.

Art is the development of a thing primarily in relation to the artist, and only secondarily to other people. In design, the people for whom the thing is being designed are primary and the designer is present only as a semi-reliable proxy. Some art is more systematic than other art. The essential difference is that art can (and arguably should) be made without involvement of people who will eventually participate in it by experiencing it. Gadamer argues that an artwork is never complete without its audience (and that is where I picked up this line of thought). But while the artwork is being made, the artist is the audience who completes it. While a design is being made, only representative people for whom the designwork is being made are suitable.

The most important difference between design and both art and engineering is that the latter can be done without involvement of other people who might eventually encounter what is being made, where design cannot. Design succeeds or fails by the choices of the free-willed people who are intended to participate in it.

When design becomes stylistic self-expression, it slides into art. When design becomes systems-development and problem-solving and loses touch with the free volition of human participants experiencing these systems from inside, it slides into engineering.

Now, let us establish terms, grounded in some accessible examples. Material, medium, formation, object.

Water is a material that can become a medium for a wave. The wave formation moves through it, by it, as it. A wave can keep moving beyond water, as long as some other material serves as a medium. People playing on the shore can be that material, and this is what happens when we enjoy being tossed by waves. We become a wave medium. So the wave is not essentially water, but the essence of a wave necessarily involves some mediating material. When we look from a distance, at water being moved by a wave formation we see an object: water formed into a wave.

Now, let’s get flaky. Setting aside whether this is real or true, what is meant when someone claims to be a spirit medium? It means that they as a person has become a material (like the water) through which a spirit moves or acts or speaks. The spirit moves, acts or speaks through the medium, by the medium, as the medium (for as long as the medium is serving as a medium). But the spirit does not stop with the medium. It keeps moving. It moves, acts and speaks to the people who witness the mediation, and extend the spiritual motion if they are willing to be moved and perhaps reformed or transformed by what they witness.

Design involves a variety of materials, some physical, like water, and some mental (mind-like), like our spirit medium example. Some of the forms conveyed or transmitted through media is mechanical force of the kind engineers harness, and some of the forms are ideational, emotional, symbolic (like the forms inherent in television or social media content) and some is behavioral, a mixture of physical and mental, ranging from mostly physical, unconscious reflexes to fully deliberate volitions (imitation or fashion trends among people).

The most complex material designers have learned to shape is the densely hybrid material known as organization.

This is the material the discipline of service design shapes.

Of course, organizations can be decomposed into a vast variety of materials, but this only complicates and confuses matters.

A fanciful analogy: Imagine a choreographer, who works with the material of human bodies in motion, who decides to chart, not only the movements of his dancer’s limbs, but the entire physiology, internal and external, of each dancer. He is not wrong that these materials move with the body, but this additional data overwhelms and obscures his orchestrated bodies-in-motion problem without adding much or anything of value, and demonstrates not thoroughness but shallowness of understanding of the essence of the choreographer’s craft. Indeed, compulsive thoroughness is symptomatic of lack of depth of understanding, and is a kind of compensation. When the intellect cannot penetrate deeper or saturate into what it seeks to know, it splatters, spreads out or piles up upon the surface of the matter. Ironically, this dense breadth is misnomically called “going into depth” but depth is precisely what it lacks. Depth abstracts precisely the simple essence of a matter, and allows the concrete details around it to logically crystallize around it. A dancer’s internal organs will take care of themselves if the choreographer focuses on dance movements.

So, the material of service design is organizations.

What is its medium, and what forms are conveyed via this medium?

The medium is behaviors — more specifically interactions between service actors, some of which are human and many of which are not (thank you, Bruno Latour!), across interfaces of myriad types. Currently, service design is still drowning in philosophical debt from its origination in customer experience design (a customer-centered flavor of HCD) that it focuses its attention on customer touch-points, but this only a subset of the many interfaces by which a service is woven together. Service design is drowning in philosophical debt from building itself out from a CX philosophy, and endlessly hacking and patching its methods on this inadequate, monocentric philosophical platform. (And tragically, because service design is becoming a handmaiden to journey management, which is also customer-centered in its logic, and the technological platforms being used as journey management infrastructure follows this logic, it looks more likely that service design will regress than progress.)

Now we have the material of service design, which is organizations.

And we have the medium, which is interactions via interfaces.

What is the form conveyed through this medium? Value exchanges! Each interaction directly or indirectly moves value among actors. This movement is what animates services and organizations (in two senses of the word: setting them in motion and ensouling them).

And, finally, what is the object service design produces? A network of brand relationships, each a perception of the organization, experienced as a boundary object. Brands are so much more complex than most people have the philosophical capacity to understand.

Let’s try this framework out on UX for a moment. Material: digital technology. Medium: human-computer interactions. Form: experience (of momentary value exchange!). Object: Digital thing (product, app, website, game, etc.)

A managerial cannot distinguish the form (experience) from the object, because they are exclusively objective, meaning they have access only to one objectivity (aka subject). So when they say they are building an experience, they are referring to the artifact they are coding. And they can build it just fine without involvement of people. And if the experience they build has usability problems, no problem. The experience was “instrumented” and the problems can be caught and corrected. So the experience is always improving.

But the experience actual people have — the experience designers are concerned with — does not improve. Because when they open their app to use it, they never know what to expect. It is constantly changing. They are constantly required to relearn it. And half of what they use has not been properly tested. They themselves are the usability test. Which means they are constantly subjected to usability problems of various kinds.

If you look at it this way — again, the way designers see it — it is not hard to see that this is an atrocious experience, however much the product itself improves. But managerials don’t look at it this way. They see only things, not people experiencing things over time.

A service designer sees it even more clearly. Product managers are backstage actors who shape the delivery of a service, which is the management of an experience of a digital product over a long span of time. And these services are profoundly broken because on the whole the field of product management is oblivious to the fact they are not managing a product, but service actors — custodians of a long customer experience that needs even more management than their product does.

I do sometimes bridle at service designer games which reduce every product to services, but here it sheds very useful light on the true nature of product management.

And that light becomes glaring when we look at product managers the same way we look at frontline service actors, for example, call center agents. The worst customer experience problems we find in call centers often originate in poorly conceived scorecards, that put agents’ and customers’ goals at odds with one another. The agents are evaluated by how much they can upsell and cross sell, or how quickly they can resolve a call. They are misaligned with what customers need, which is focused help achieving their own goal of getting help, or buying something inexpensive that fits their modest needs. Likewise, product managers are often evaluated by their productivity, that is how frequently and how much they are able to improve (aka change) their products. But if users need a reliable, steady tool that they can learn once and keep using, these changes harm the experience of the product, which, to say it again, is not the awesomeness of the digital thing frozen at some point in its development. Far from it.

A few ideas that emerged organically in this post that I want to catalogue for future development.

    The concept of philosophical debt. Think of this as the compounding accumulation of theories, practices and general praxis upon a misconceived point of departure, which requires eventual change of paradigm, and the discarding of many core tools and methods (redescription of Kuhn, for managerials)
    The idea of nonhuman service actors as service actors, an idea lifted directly from Latour, who always saw social orders constituted of nonhuman actors as well as human ones. Service design will probably have to catch up with Latour now, with AI agents functioning more like human actors than tech platforms.
    Design discipline defined by material, medium, form, object. It seems to me these have been smeared together, and it has caused quite a bit of methodological confusion. Most super-clever managerials are eager to avoid the inefficiency of involving service actors directly in design practices and lack philosophical capacity to grasp why this is disastrous.
    “Managerials” as a pejorative, for managers of people, products, journeys who take engineering approaches to design problems. Because they are unable to understand pluralistically in a variety of first-person terms about human interactions with each other and with nonhuman actors — they think from the one first-person perspective that dominates corporate life, a technicic objectivity that renders everything an object that behaves in quantifiable ways, and may be made, through engineering approaches, to behave differently. Whatever a managerial touches becomes social engineering. I think James Burnham influenced this coinage.

Another note on “Creation redescription”

Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Another note on “Creation redescription”:

Start with a blank sheet of paper.

Draw lines across the paper, from one side to the other, vertically, horizontally, diagonally. This is division without separation.

Cut the paper along all the lines, but keep the pieces touching like pieces of a puzzle. This is separation without exclusion.

Now remove one section of paper from the others. This is exclusion.

On that removed section of paper, draw horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

Cut the paper into bits. Arrange them how you like. If you wish, you can make little duplicates of the cut bits. If you wish you can exclude what doesn’t fit, and remove them from the other scraps, because they are irrelevant.

We can if, we wish, take all the original cut up bits, including those we removed and reconstruct the section like a puzzle. We can restore the section to a state of defined finitude.

We can, if we wish, continue by placing that restored section back with the others, and restore the paper. Imagine a great puzzle made of pieces which are themselves little puzzles.

Alternatively, we can keep our little construction made of cut up bits of the removed section of paper. We can say one of the bits is the ultimate bit and forget all the others. Or we can say the section of paper is not a section of anything, but the whole sheet of paper.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Letterpress magic trick

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Star, Symbols and diagrams

As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil.

Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness.

I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion object in a blind spot demonstration, which exemplifies nihilitude (a present nothing which leaves nothing missing, showing very clearly how blindness is the furthest thing from darkness.) It is by nihilitude that the Trickster tricks, so I cannot imagine a better vanishing-appearing figure than Mercury, the trickster angel, for this vanishing act transpiring on my little magic paper strip.

Instructions.

  1. Orient the strip so the asterisk is on the left, and the Mercury sigil is on the right.
  2. Hold the strip arm’s length from your face.
  3. Close your left eye, and keep your right eye open.
  4. Focus your eye on the asterisk, while focusing your attention on the sigil.
  5. Maintaining this dual focus, slowly move the strip closer and closer to your open right eye.
  6. Notice when the sigil is no longer there, absent, while leaving no trace of absence.
  7. Say: “Nihilitude: Nothing is present so nothing is missing.”
  8. Remember that all but the tiniest sliver of reality is submerged in nihilitude. (“Exnihilated”)
  9. Thank God for the shelter of nihilitude, which is the precious gift of moral existence.
  10. Seal it with “Amen.”

There comes a perilous point in a person’s life when the decision can no longer be evaded or postponed:

Either seem sane, or be sane.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Batshit

Philosophy, Shit theory

Another extremely important shit species that deserves analysis is batshit.

When someone believes things beyond belief, and believes them elaborately, intricately, extravagantly and urgently, we call that person batshit crazy.

Often, these beyond-belief beliefs are literally about the beyond. They are speculative. But the speculation has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer obviously speculation about reality. The speculations have detached and become a standalone batshit world, which feels way more real and interesting than whatever that other world was.

Batshit is sometimes confused with bullshit, because batshit is nonsense that never touches ground and has no practical effectiveness. But unlike bullshit, batshit is believed, intensely and sincerely. And while both bullshit and batshit fail to translate ideas into effective practices, bullshit never tries, whereas batshit ideas lead directly to batshit practices.

And it is also easy to confuse batshit with birdshit, in that it flies around in the sky. But where birdshit flies into the sky to get a better, loftier, critical look at the ground in order to shit all over it, batshit is trying to fly further than the sky, and the batshit produced in the effort is innocent byproduct, forgotten as soon as it falls into that nowhere known as solid ground.

“Batshit” is crazy nonsense — the byproduct of an urgent and failed need to make sense of things that are not even real — at least according to all you “sane” people.

Shittheory.com

Autobiography, Philosophy, Shit theory

There was absolutely no chance that shittheory.com could be available, but I decided to check, anyway.

I am now the owner of shittheory.com.

Clearly, this is a sign from heaven.

Update: shitstudies.com is also available.

Destiny speaks.

Another update: blowjobstobedone.com is available, too?

My cup runneth over.

Precisely what it runneth over with is questionable, but it is certainly overflowing with something.

Polycentered declarations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Presequence, consequence, richness

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

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

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

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

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

Three important notes:

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

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

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

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

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

Kant’s glorious limits

Philosophy

I might need to go back and reread Critique of Pure Reason.

A great many of my core ideas came from this source, most of all my understanding of intuition. But strangely, I suspect that Kant underestimated the preconceptual, prelinguistic nature of intuition and its importance to our lives.

I also suspect — maybe recklessly — that Kant’s categories pertain most to what Husserl called the lifeworld. These categories are concepts necessarily universal to all humans beings. From these, all other concepts are derived.

But the conceptual derivations are motivated by myriad intuitions beyond our sensory perceptions.

And to complicate things, once we conceptualize our intuitions, we can intuit these second-order concepts and make second-order concepts of first-order concepts derived from the lifeworld. And these concepts and the symbols used to express them can also be intuitively connected, to make conceptual systems that can themselves be encapsulated as concepts. If I am not mistaken think this is the core of Peirce’s semiology.

Another possible divergence from Kant is my belief that human beings (or at least many of us) have a need to situate ourselves in something beyond ourselves (here, I believe, I’m still in agreement with him) that we are called not only to think about or acknowledge the impossibility of knowing — but somehow obligated to participate in this being. Closest to us are interpersonal and social realities.

I think many, but not all, human beings intuit these human relational realities in a direct way. (I know for a fact my wife intuits them very vividly and reliably.) Years ago I read an article by Jonathan Haidt where he suggested that Kant might have been on the autism spectrum. Autism appears to inhibit suprapersonal intuitions, and some have even essentialized autism as “mind-blindness” resulting in “absence of theory of mind”. This might account for why social categories were excluded from his table. But had he been more interpersonally intuitive he might never have produced his fantastically precise and elaborate philosophical system in the first place, so let us give thanks not only for Kant’s amazing abilities but also his blessed incapacities.

But I think these relational intuitions might register our situated relationship not only among other people but to being itself. The best metaphysics is not theoretical speculation, but rather articulations and conceptualizations of metaphysical intuitions. Metaphysical intuitions, of course bring us into spirituality and religious life and ideas. If we carry Kant’s conceptual moves with us into this domain of reality, we are now on Cassirer’s turf. I need to read more of him, too. Reading his great (maybe greater!) student Langer’s magnum opus Philosophy in a New Key completely changed my understanding of understanding (by showing me modes of understanding that are purely plastic or performative and beyond the grasp of explicit language) and prepared me for Latour. Another reason to feel grateful for Kant’s limitations: it left wonderful work for post-Kantians to do.

So many things to read! And I’m sitting here in this wonderful room with all these books around me, some of which I have read and loved and others electric with promise.

Ingratitude and alienation

Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When someone gives you something that you value, either willingly or unwillingly, and you try to take possession of it “no strings attached” without gratitude toward the giver, something very bad happens to your soul. You suffer guilt.

This is especially true if you have no theory of relationship to help you conceptualize what gratitude is — or for that matter, any concept expressing one’s own organic belonging to living orders that transcend one’s own individual selfhood.

A philosophy of isolated self cannot make sense of gratitude, of jealousy, of loyalty, of belonging, of guilt or even of love beyond the inwardly felt emotional content. Such a philosophy takes these valid intuitions of spiritual realities as psychological hallucinations, or as biological responses to stimuli. It severs a whole category of direct intuition from the reality intuited, and this severing leaves the individual cut off from its own relational context. That is, it takes the perception of an apparent phenomenon as pure pheno- (appearance) with no corresponding superperceptual reality (noumenon).

A philosophy of isolated self is not only an expression of a spiritual state of social alienation, but alienation of all being who transcends the egoic self. All being of this kind is assigned names and explanations that strip them of the same kind of being that an egoic self has and reduces them to physical concepts.

And even this physicalization is distortive, because physical concepts do not necessarily involve any actual relationships with matter.

Physics, and science in general, is a particular class of theories about material relationships, substantiated by closely observed material interactions and rigorous tracing of causal implications of what is observed, expressed as theory. But a great many folks who never stepped foot in a laboratory or much concerned themselves with how laboratories generate theoretical knowledge, accept scientistic doctrine the way others have accepted Christian or Buddhist doctrine without ever undergoing the kinds of firsthand experiences that make immediate sense of these religious concepts, and in fact necessitate them. Scientism is an ungrounded dogma with exactly the same form as dogmatic religion, just populated with a different style of content. In other words, the medium is identical, and its spiritual effect (message) is the same.

The spiritual effect is compulsive playing of construction toy games with abstract concepts derived from physics (or theology) without ever contacting, or missing contact or even wondering about the concrete realities from which these abstractions were abstracted!

Notice how this dogmatic physicalization move resembles the self-isolating one: A revelation of a given reality is taken as the only reality, severed from the reality given. The experience of givenness of reality is accepted as real, but the given reality is denied reality. An intuition of relationship with being beyond oneself is taken as an experience within the self (an emotion one has). A theory of matter derived from disciplined and intensive interactions with matter is taken as knowledge of matter. And of course, infamously, a belief in a theology (a serious attempt to make sense of one’s actual religious life in relationship with divine being) is treated as religion itself, as if a religion is a belief system!

All these moves ignore the fact that all knowledge is abstracted from concrete reality, and concrete reality is given by intuition. Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

And if you habitually suppress intuited givens, especially intensely intuited givens, in order to preserve a construction of ungrounded concepts, you will suffer alienation. Less and less of reality will feel real to you. As social alienation increases, people will feel like phantoms or identity avatars. As world-alienation increases, the world will seem like a simulation or shadow play. And you, yourself, will feel like a ghost, dissipating and reappearing, today as one me and tomorrow another. A thunder-perfect nobody, alienated from self, precisely because that self is alienated from whatever is not of itself.

The strange thing about alienation is how all its various forms converge at the same abyss-point, the antipode of the esoteric summit: “Mind as its own place.” Milton knew.

But when we intuitively ground ourselves in a shared reality, intuited and valued diversely, but loved in common, we now have ground for participation in something realer than real in whom we subsist. We now have the participatory medium we need, connecting us to each other, connecting us to a world that feels real, connecting us to reality beyond our own sphere of experience and knowledge which may at any moment irrupt into our midst, apparently from nowhere, changing everything.

Guilt is real, gratitude is real, love is real because we belong to something greater than us. And that belonging is the source of all meaning. If we know this we will feel grateful for our guilt. If we do not, we will feel anxious hostility toward even love.

Kvetch

Autobiography, Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have a genuinely original vision that I need to get out, but it is hard to communicate.

There’s a little for everyone to love, and a lot for everyone to reject, and much for people to claim as their own domain of knowledge, and therefore a domain to which I have no claim at all.

Mystics sneer at my philosophy. Philosophers sneer at my mysticism. Both sneer at my capitalist servitude, and servile capitalists sneer at my impractical interest in mystical and philosophical matters!

I can’t win!

And everything I know about is generally considered matters of opinion. We all have philosophies. We all have beliefs about religious beliefs. And “design thinkers” spilled the beans on design: Everyone designs! Everyone is a designer!

I am no longer interested in talking to people who know better than me on the things I know best.

I sit silently waiting to get back to writing.

I’ve stopped counting but surely I’m at the end of the third trimester.

St. N.:

Ideal selfishness. — Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!

This is what you deserve if you allow Nietzsche to convert you from Western Buddhism to a bizarro dysfit judeochristian esoteric Judaism.

Intuition, commonality and scalar being

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy

In all three facets of my work — as a philosopher, esoterist and designer — intuition is central to what I do, not only in the content and goals of my work, but in how I approach the work and do the work.

By intuition, I mean something quite simple. To dumb it down to the simple essence, intuition means “without linguistic mediation”. Whenever we experience or know or do something without using words to explain it to ourselves or to direct ours actions, that is intuition.

We can have intuitive perceptions, intuitive responses, both with people (with others and ourselves), with things around us, intuitive understandings and with reality in general.

Intuitive perceptions and responses is the stuff of what Husserl called the lifeworld. We spontaneously effortlessly see-as and wordlessly deal with the things around us. We only reach for language if something resists our intuition, and we need to figure out what it is or how it works or what we ought to do.

It is almost the same with our social environment. Through what Garfinkel called ethnomethods, in social settings where we “belong”, we know how to spontaneously and wordlessly “read” other people’s symbolic actions, and to produce legible symbolic actions so we are understood. Here, too, we only resort to explicit language if things get awkward and an explanation is needed, or, in more extreme cases, demanded.

Finally, at the heart of it all, radiating to the furthest reaches, is our intuitive understanding of how particulars hang together within the universal. Prior to any explicit thought, we carry an intuited ontology within an intuited metaphysics. Or, if you prefer, we can say we have an intuited sense of everything, within which every thing is intuited, in intuited relation to everything and to every other thing. Some call this “worldview”, but the spectatorial overtones can mislead. I (perhaps confusingly) call this intuited ontology and metaphysics a faith. A faith is not what we believe, but that by which — by whom — we believe.

And all our activities, solitary and social, materially and symbolically shape the world we share. In our immediate environments, where we have ownership, we are able to shape it according to our own preferences. We have less and less influence at as scale increases. At smaller scales, we actively shape the material environment, often to make it more accessible to intuition. At larger scales we influence it only indirectly, if at all, and often what is outside of our control is also unintuitive, and, therefore in need of explanation. Here we use language to make as much sense of things as we can, to get it somehow to fit our faith — our intuitive sense of everything and things in general. This material shaping of our environment and of our general understanding of things we influence and cannot influence is what I call an enworldment.

As a designer, I am concerned with the shaping of environments. My goal is to shape them in such a way that they are readily intuited (with minimum need to figure them out), can be interacted with intuitively (with minimal need to verbally direct one’s actions) and most of all, intuited as valuable — as stabilizing and enriching one’s own enworldment.

As a philosopher, I am concerned with the shaping of symbols, primarily linguistic ones. But some of my most important symbols are visual or diagrammatic, and these help me extend the reach of my philosophical work. I have come to recognize that my philosophical work overlaps with the genre of hermeticism, in that it deploys words and diagrams and dense visual symbologies to say true things about reality beyond the scope of words. I’ve been talking a lot about objects held and valued in common, but one of our most important common objects are symbolic, linguistic and literary.

Finally, as an esoterist I am interested in what can be done with faiths. They are far from immutable. They can change in ways that can make life immeasurably and ineffable better… or worse. Think of this as soul hacking. There are many possible means for hacking souls, but my favorite means, and the one I am best at is hermetic philosophy. But design is also a powerful tool, because design shapes materials into media, and media convey and support (or block and undermine) faiths.

These three intuitive activities, initially separate concerns of compartmentalized parts of my self, over three decades have gradually converged and grown together into one complex multifaceted being. Three trees have intertwined into a lattice, and in their interilluminating density this shared set of ideas have gained reality and a palpable halo of significance. And I, as a person, have gained a sense of integrity, wholeness and reality. I am no longer spiritually fragmented, conflicted or of two or more minds on important matters.

I think, feel and act more wholeheartedly, because of my inward richness of common concerns.

I have enworded myself with enworldment.

It has been obvious to me for decades now that being is scalar, and that the individual person is only one of these beings.

Unfortunately, in this time, many of us have developed a great number of conceptual and linguistic habits, reinforced by scientistic metaphysics, to obscure and explain away the smaller and larger scales.

People who rely entirely on language for their thinking, and people whose thinking is purely instrumental (used to direct practical and social activity) will be entirely oblivious to this reality. People who depend upon ready-made words with ready-made definitions as their thought construction materials cannot think with the originality of those who articulate intuitions to develop new generative language. It is the difference between a person who enjoys constructing elaborate new things with LEGO blocks and the inventor of LEGO blocks. It is the difference between ingenuity and genius.

But if we take our intuition seriously, sub-individual and super-individual being is manifestly real. It is given even when we lack language-equipped concepts to receive it.

My first observation was of being at the smaller scale. I noticed that people became different in the company of different people. They used different words, behaved differently, exuded different energy. I intuited as different. I also notice some aspects of them were suppressed or marginalized. We see this when people fall in love. They can almost become strangers to us in their new intimacy with another.

I associated this with politics. For example, when the Germans invaded France in 1940, they met less resistance from the French Army than might have been expected. But this was not just weakness. Much of the French right felt more loyalty to the right wing spirit of the Nazis than they felt for their own republic. And when the Nazi successfully conquered Paris, they established the infamous right-wing Vichy government to govern southern France. For the Vichy French there was more solidarity across the right-wing parties than for the left and centrist French.

Similarly, across two people newly in love, spiritual factions within each can come together with such powerful affinity that it breaks the each person’s pre-love integrity, to create a new integrity between them. They become disordered and reordered, and both can estrange them from the people who had been important to them before they fell in love. This threat of estrangement and its reality is the substance of jealousy. Jealousy is the intuition of relationship-threatening psychic reorderings.

I already hinted at the larger scale beings with my Vichy France analogy. Nations are always uneasy alliances of ideological factions. Some nations have inward integrity. The factions might disagree on certain matters, but they hold other things about their nation in common, valuing them in different ways. People agreeing that they are valuable, even if what is valued differs. But if ideologies begin to value their own ideological ideas more than their nation, they may even become hostile to their nation for refusing to share their ideological loyalties. They might break faith with their own national tradition and betray it with dalliances with more like-minded foreign actors.

I first intuited this kind of ideological being as being (as opposed to simply agreeing on the same facts, preferable policies) — that is, as a shared living faith — during the charged time between 2001 and 2005 when a great many Americans discovered the intoxication of mass Standing United. Suddenly I head people adopting common language, concepts, lines of reasoning and attitudes that I’d never noticed before. I started feeling like something was speaking and acting through them, and I found it intensely and profoundly repellent. The same thing happened in 2020. People began to adopt new language, beliefs, concepts and behaviors en masse, which were not only different from before, but in direct conflict with the liberal values they used to espouse, seemingly sincerely. Now they were hardcore identitarians, who believed different categories of person should have different standing before the law, different social status, be awarded different privileges? and held to different norms. I had the same intuitive revulsion, but this time it was compounded with a sense of betrayal, because it was my liberal values they’d turned against. Their liberalism, it turns out, had been mere social conformism, not a principle of personal integrity. It seems that most people are like this. Most of us conform to a belief that integrity is important, but very few people have the integrity to resist if our tribe drifts into illiberalism, tolerance of evil or actual evil. This is normal, and this is why maintaining social order is so crucial. The majority of people, it seems, are potential extremists or supporters of extremism, because their primary mechanism of integrity is their social context, not a cultivated inner integrity. Many of the most spiritual-but-not-religious people who see religion as empty formalism (to put it in bigoted anti-Jewish language “pharisaism”) need religion far more than they can understand from within the debased faith they’ve accidentally drifted into on the currents of ideological conformity. Judaism, by the way, more than any other religion, precisely because of its formality, has emptied, fulfilled and refulfilled itself innumerable times, and has developed the richest set of symbolic forms diversely valued in common of any religion, very much including its brittle squabbling, splitting, warring offspring who believe they are the heirs of the covenant while dramatically demonstrating the opposite.

Of course, there are many scales of being between psychic factions within a person or across couples in love and ideological factions and nations. These are what interest me most, especially as a designer.

Organizations can have differing strengths of integrity. They can be integrated around common purpose, or they can be managed in siloes, or they can descend into departmental and factional wars. Organizations are beings composed of beings, belonging to larger scale beings.

To put it in the flakiest possible way, service design is in the egregore business. And design is their heir of alchemy.

I’ll just leave it there, to be rejected, neglected, forgotten or pondered.

+0(

What is horseshit?

Philosophy

Horseshit is whatever horrible stuff the far left and the far right can find to agree on.

It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

It is the crotchrot of the horseshoe.

Whatever else you find in any given pile of horseshit you can bet your life that there will be copious antisemitism.

Unsolicited advice to altruistic nihilists

Ethics, Polycentrism

Anyone who tells a child “You are not the center of the universe!” is arguing against the most immediate self-evident truth. Only an “adult” could fall for such a lie.

What we should be saying is “You are not the only center of the universe.”

When the child is a little older we can say “Polycenter yourself.” And “Center yourself around your own experiences, intuitions, understandings an?d purposes, but do so in affirmation of others doing the same. At minimum respect this reality, and to the greatest degree possible, love it.”

If we demand that children stop being self-centered and decenter themselves altogether? in the name of altruism, what we are really saying is “Abandon your own center and join me in this centerless abyss in which I abide.”

In this time and? culture this abandonment of center is what “adult” means. We don’t believe in our own cognition because it’s biased. We don’t trust our own moral judgments because our moral sense is unconsciously self-interested. But boy do we ever trust expert consensus. We trust it automatically and uncritically. We even believe the expert consensus that whoever conforms to these beliefs is a critical thinker, an individualist and an anti-totalitarian.

If someone ever commands you to “decenter yourself”, you should firmly refuse.

The appropriate reply is “I have polycentered myself. You should polycenter yourself.”

This advice to “polycenter yourself”, however, means something different from the exhortation to the self-centered child, who needs to know that other people, like themselves, are the centers of their respective universes.

This “polycenter yourself” means “The nowhere in which you abide, is not the center of the universe, nor of anything. I will not join you in your centerless abyss.”

It means “Recover your center. Then develop a capacity to inhabit a polycentered universe.”

Qualitatively, we are neither infinity, nor zero. Alchemically, we are like One, in that we are one; yet, we are not One. We are neither God nor nobody. We should all polycenter ourselves together.