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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Non-mutual empathy is submission.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The word altruism was popularised (and possibly coined) by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) c.?1830 in French, as altruisme, as an antonym of egoism. He derived it from the Italian altrui, which in turn was derived from Latin alteri, meaning “other people” or “somebody else”. Altruism may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of self-centeredness.
My current inadequately informed — (as always, I reserve the right to revise) — hypothesis is that the concept of altruism was coined by a quantlocked positivist, stuck in a wordworld of defined objects, composed of nothing but objects, comprised by nothing real. In this objective world one can only act selfishly or selflessly for the sake of exterior others, with no enveloping being among or beyond.
A service is a collective, intelligent being.
A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.
Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.
The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.
A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)
All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.
?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?
I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:
A good service lives across worlds:
Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.
Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.
Beriah makes a service serve good.