Category Archives: Philosophy

Traversing the star grid

Autobiography, Esoterism, Fables, myths & parables, History, Ideas, Kabbalah, Philosophy

I am pretty sure I first read whatever it was that implanted the myth of the star grid in my head when I was eight or nine, and I was at an apartment building playground near where my friend Devlin grew up. My mom was friends with a woman named Chichi (or something like that). She lived in an incredibly cool ring-shaped house, with a garden in the center. My mom would visit with Chichi and my sister and I would play on the playground with the kids who lived there. Years before we became friends, I encountered Devlin on this playground, wearing a Frankenstein mask chasing shrieking kids all around the pinestraw and cheap playground equipment ubiquitous in the mid- to late-70s, whose white, scarlet and royal blue paint was always sunbleached and chipping under rust rot, and always missing several bolts and, like our moms, barely holding together.

I must have been in the habit of bringing books to that playground, because I have two vivid book memories from that exact spot. One was Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and specifically a part of the book where Charlie is menaced by vermicious knids. The other was an astronomy book, whose name I do not remember, which introduced me to the notion that from some point in the universe an observer could look out into space, and in every direction see the stars in orderly array.

This idea embedded in my imagination, and might even be my first philosophical experience. It is certainly the first philosophical idea I remember, unless we count the insight I learned from Mark Twain, that evil could be comical, which, of course, paved my path to Nietzsche.

This star grid insight, however, set me on the way to Thomas Kuhn. We could, it turns out, change what we see by changing how we see it; and one way to change how we see is by changing our own position relative to what we see.

And suddenly, transformed by that image, a new perspective on seeing crystalized in me. The difference between arbitrary scattering of stars or data-points and diamond-clear faceted order was a matter of aspect, of relative position and orientation. You can toil at mapping the vast mess you see from your seat, and scry whatever meaning you find there. But you might find something shockingly simple if you just unchain your head from its fixed point, stand up, walk around, resituate your body and eyes and observe from many positions and perspectives how things present themselves.

I’ve told this star grid story before, but I’m inspired to tell it for a specific reason today.

Today I am hearing it as a story of multistability. Gestalt psychology was, as far as I know, the first systematic study of perceptual multistability. Philosophical hermeneutics approached texts as a matter of semantic multistability.

But my core interest is psychic multistability — because when we find a new perspective of semantic stability in a text, that change reverberates in us. The meaning of the text transforms before us, and in some elusive way, we change with it. This inner change is why books linger with us and change the mood and tone of our lives.

Philosophical texts, though — and this includes philosophical fiction — induce stable, lasting shifts in our conceptual order, which extend beyond texts and reading experiences, and apply directly to the givenness of the world. We effortlessly, spontaneously perceive and conceive some part of reality differently, and experience it in a new way, intuitively, prior to any thought or language. We experience a new given truth.

And sometimes even the bounds of the text’s subject matter are breached, and these same concepts and percepts appear unexpectedly, and equally spontaneously across many fields of experience, in the intuition of analogy. (“This is just like the star-grid!”) A form (what Plato, speaking Greek called “idea”) that orders one domain applies also to other domains, otherwise unrelated.

But some psychic reorderings break the bounds of analogy and all figuration, and reveal reality as a whole in a completely new aspect, changing literally everything all at once, opening entirely new previously inconceivable meanings, the most important of which are outside the domain of form.

This is why I care about the different modes of reading and writing, and the forms of truth they indicate and induce.

These are all gestell shifts, and they are known only by their fruits. They are known inwardly by their experiential fruits in the articulate gestalts we perceive and conceive across the What, How, Why and Who of our experience; they are known outwardly by observable responses to these experiences.

We have fixed notions of what these gestell shifts essentially are, why they occur and what behaviors should result from them. We tend to admire them, at least from a safe distance. Because they are admired, they are pursued by some who lack intrinsic interest in what induces the shifts. Some try to induce the inward transformation through strict self-control, by adopting outward behaviors of those reputed to have been transformed. They want to become admirable. Others ape the outward behaviors of transformed souls, in order to win admiration for what they are not.

I am not sure how helpful these old criteria and conventions are. They may just reflect what humankind required at its point of development between 300 BC and 300 AD. Earlier times admired radically different qualities. We must change our individual and collective selves in response to what new technologies enable us to self-inflict, to cope with and to achieve. Different technologies create new self-inflicted conditions, copes and possibilities.

Religious language relies on spatial metaphors. Spiritual journeys involve ascensions to higher planes, and risks of falling into lower ones. Mediums leave their bodies and rise heavenward. And when expressing intellectual experiences, we speak optically and spatially about standpoints, perspectives, points-of-view, aspects. Many of the most consequential shifts in understanding I have experienced can only be expressed geometrically. A person can lie in bed dreaming, or sit in a dark theater watching a stationary screen, or sit in a ramshackle playground reading a book and be transported to distant imaginary, intellectual or imaginal places. How many transports are there, and how many are yet to transport us?

On respect and design

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

A friend observed: “You have a serious problem with being disrespected, don’t you?”

That is correct. I definitely have a strong aversion to disrespect. Most people do.

But my aversion might be more intense than usual, and it is for a very specific reason that accounts for the intensity.

It is not that I need other people to esteem me.

I have a pretty clear sense of my value and also where I’m not valuable. I appreciate being valued, of course, if the value is genuine. If another person can inform my own judgments of me that is valuable — for instance, if they can perceive clearly, where I am unclear or oblivious. If a person has a negative judgment of me, but it is poorly informed, or their judgment is faulty, it only makes their negative judgment less valid than my own. It is unpleasant to be judged negatively, of course, but it doesn’t influence my own judgment.

My specific problem with disrespect is that it obstructs dialogical collaboration. And without dialogical collaboration, design problems can never rise higher than constructing uninspiring little systems of known bits.

And system construction is not what I do.

I am after shared holistic understandings. My work is to understand divergent perspectives, each from a first-person perspective, and then, through philosophical effort, transcend perspectival limits in order to find higher and more comprehensive understandings. These new understandings illuminate practical problems in revealing new ways, affording solutions that are both novel and valued together by a wider array of people.

I call this work precision inspiration.

If work offers a possibility for precision inspiration, every task associated with the work is charged with purpose.

If it does not, it all becomes intolerable, soul-deadening tedium.

Here is where respect becomes an existential issue.

Precision inspiration work can only be done in conditions of mutual respect. It requires people to actively care about what other people think, how they think, and why it matters to them. That is what respect is: being concerned about another person’s What, How and Why.

Disrespect is an attitude toward others that is averse or incurious to another person’s What, How and Why. It makes dialogical collaboration impossible. It makes epiphanies impossible. It reduces design to system construction.

This is why, for me, working in conditions of disrespect is an existential threat.

I’m cool with people not caring what I think. I’m used to that. My thinking is not for dull people, lazy people or people so ideological, or brilliant or narcissistic that they do not need to hear what you think. And sadly, under these political conditions, that is a rapidly growing majority of people. I’m not for people like that, and I don’t need to be.

But I cannot work with — and certainly not for — people like that. Wherever I work, I need conditions of respect, if I do not have them, I cannot work. Some people can. Some tough, combative types even enjoy it like a game.

Fighting to win respect from people who wish to withhold respect is not a game I will play.

Know thyself.

Hyperactive listening

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Love, Polycentered design

Susan and I have a new method for fighting.

We start with her expressing what is pissing her off — pure stream-of-consciousness thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, images, etc.

When she is done, I steelman her grievances, speaking as much as I can from her perspective — as if she were addressing me. I attempt to method act her point of view, adding sarcasm, emotional digs, humorous abuse and expressive flourishes to indicate insight into her feelings as well as her thoughts.

Then Susan joins in and piles on, with additional points I neglected to mention, which I integrate into the overall argument.

Essentially, we collaborate on kicking my ass as thoroughly and brutally as possible, until she feels everything has been said as thoroughly, clearly and forcefully as possible. She tells me that this process helps her feel thoroughly understood.

Only after she ratifies my understanding do I try to answer her points. Obviously, it’s pretty easy to steelman my own perspective, since it’s the perspective that persuaded me.

Then we try out possible resolutions of our differences. For each candidate possibility we do the same steelmanning, method acting and collaboration until we find a shared perspective and common ground to use as a new point of departure.

This is essentially polycentered design applied to domestic conflict.

I feel fortunate to belong to a two-person organization with this kind of collaborative culture.

Articulating truth and word

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I have been thinking of PaRDeS as modes of understanding, but I have been losing confidence in that conception.

And now I am having to rethink the being of the self and of how truth is known at each level.

Buber’s duality of I-Thou and I-It strikes me as a choice of Ruach.

When two or more Ruchot encounter one another Ruach-to-Ruach, each chooses: descend to Nefesh or ascend to Neshamah.

If both choose ascension, dialogue transpires. In the spirit of I-Thou, each relates to the other as Thou and implicitly assumes a shared transcendent being in whom both participate. Neshamah is that shared transcendent being in whom dialogical partners become participants.

Hans-Georg Gadamer says that in profound conversation, the conversation has us. Neshamah is the being of the conversation, who animates each Ruach together within itself. When we “conduct” a conversation, each participant is a medium through which the conversation flows.

From participation within Neshamah, revelations ex nihilo irrupt from Chayah, source of selfhood, bringing with its influx direct intuition of ultimate wherefore.

In being, Chayah becomes medium of Ein Sof.

In revelation, Neshamah becomes medium of Chayah.

In dialogue, Ruach becomes medium of Neshamah.

In subject, Nefesh becomes medium of Ruach.

In life, matter becomes medium of Nefesh.

But matter and Ein Sof are one, and this unity is Shekhinah.

Raw notes:

  • Mode of world
  • Mode of self
  • Mode of truth (of knowing)
  • Mode of word (saying or hearing) (PaRDeS)

Is the table: world, self, truth, word?

World Self Truth Word
Atzilut (emanation) Chayah (source) Union Sod (mystical)
Beriyah (creation) Neshamah (intellect) Epiphanic Derash (homiletic)
Yetzirah (formation) Ruach (spirit) Subjective Remez (allusive)
Asiyah (actuality) Nefesh (soul) Objective Peshat (literal)

Here is what is bothering me. I committed Well-Tempered Kabbalah to a perspective from the standpoint of Asiyah, which — it seems to me — is less a choice than an acknowledgment of a necessary constraint. But this “word” column is radically Asiyah-rooted. A word links an actual finite thing in Asiyah to some kind of truth within or beyond Asiyah.

  • If Peshat is a literal word mode… observing and recording objective givenness… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Remez is a figurative word… observing and thematizing subjective difference in concrete experiences… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Derash is a homiletical reading… lucid spiritual participation in transcendent being… (Neshamah is always one in whom Ruach participates)… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?
  • If Sod is a mystical reading… immediate disclosure of our source of being… what is the mode of truth, given to what mode of understanding?

Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping

Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am suspending this question for now.

Construal belongs to the mode of system. We construe a logic of construction. We figure something out and comprehend the relationship between a set of objective givens and a systemic whole they constitute as parts, linked logically or causally. This is the objective understanding of Nefesh, in the objective world of Asiyah.

Conception belongs to the mode of gestalt. We spontaneously receive a given gestalt whole. We are given gestalts both perceptually through the senses and conceptually through the mind. Each whole spontaneously resolves into given sub-wholes. The sub-wholes do not constitute the whole; rather, each whole comprises sub-wholes articulated within it. This is the subjective understanding of Ruach, in subjective world of Yetzirah.

But we do not experience our own subjectivity. Our own subjectivity manifests as given sensory and mental objects, as reality as we know it, as “objective reality”. It is only when we notice differences in responses to or beliefs about “objective reality” that subjectivity is indirectly discernible. This is only possible, though, if we do not naively invalidate other subjectivities as mistaken or deceptive. If we take other subjectivities as valid, we learn that objective understanding is rooted in subjectivity, and that material reality constrains objective understanding but does not determine it the way naive realism assumes. This process is dialogue.

If we pursue understanding of other subjectivities, and persevere until we succeed, success manifests as acquisition of new gestalts in new forms of objectivity. We are able to spontaneously perceive and conceive new gestalt articulate wholes. This acquisition is insight.

Pursuit of insight into other subjects — fellow Ruchot — is not straightforward, however. It is intellectually, emotionally and existentially demanding, and this is why we neglect or actively resist doing it. It is easier to ignore or invalidate other subjects, and subjectivity in general.

The most difficult aspect of trans-subjective understanding is the challenge of loosening and overcoming our own subjective limits. Those limits are uncannily enforced by nothingness. Each Ruach has an implicit ultimate conception of everything, beyond which there is nothing. In pursuit of inter-subjective understanding we must become skeptical toward our own sense of everything and the apparent nothingness beyond it. Everything becomes only everything to me within my own Ruach, and nothing becomes only that of which I am as-yet oblivious.

This introduces an entirely new attitude toward reality that intuits reality as largely — and in fact, overwhelmingly — transcendent in essence. This is the world of Beriah — the world by which Yetzirah and, consequently Asiyah, are given ex nihilo from nothingness.

To find our way to fellow Ruach we must puncture the roof of oblivion, and ascend to Neshamah. From there we may descend back to Ruach who can accommodate my old understanding and that of my fellow Ruach. More important than the present expansion, though, is something else: an immediate intuition of the eternal inexhaustibility of ex nihilo epiphany. This faith is intellection, also known as gnosis, the root of both subjectivity and objectivity.

Intellection is revelatory-creative, epiphanic. In intellective faith we press into the outer limits of everything as we conceive it, through the oblivion of nothingness, and intuit that nothingness is eternally pregnant with infinite moreness. The insight into nothingness resulting from this intellection immunizes against naivety of nihilism, and I call it exnihilism.

Entirely beyond philosophy is the absolute in Atzilut. From here I will observe Wittgenstinean silence.

Truth of religion

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Wheel

Regarding religion, here is what I know, limits and all:

Our finite minds are inadequate to the relative infinitude of reality.

Whatever objective truth we craft from the raw givenness of reality, it is irremediably selective and approximate.

Our focus of attention and involvement determines our subjective being, and this, in turn, determines the objects of our perception and conception we receive as given, and this determines our focus and involvement, and so on, in the reinforcing cycle of subjectivity and objectivity known as the hermeneutic circle, universally symbolized by the mandala.

We have some degree of choice with regard to our givens, but it is far from an arbitrary choice. It is mysteriously constrained, and the craft of theosophy instaurates truth within these constraints. These mysterious but real constraints and resistances vary from subject to subject and material to material, but they must be observed and answered to, and the degree of faithfulness to these constraints is the degree of truth in what we do and say and are.

Over time we materially reform our environments in ways that require us to renegotiate the truths we adopt and live by. Our truth comes out of alignment from our social reality, and we lose our capacity to make sense of the world around us, to interact with it effectively and to receive and appreciate its value. Our enworldment loses its What, How and Why, and to recover it we must redesign our enworldment, starting with theosophical craft.

Why start with theosophical craft? The core problem is loss of clear, effective, sacralizing truth. If we allow the deteriorated former-truth to select our focus and direct our efforts we will only deconstruct and reconstruct new structures by the logic that made everything broken in the first place. We’ll re-institute the worst of the old, while thinking we are overcoming it. We must revive first the judgment that will guide the rest of the work.

We court this judgment by pressing toward the nothingness that veils inexhaustible moreness, forever pregnant with inexhaustible shock, and enduring the ordeals of aporia.

None of this is speculative. I have lived this year many times. Naive nihilism has been shocked out of me.

But this should not be taken as disparaging speculation. Speculation is an indispensable and unavoidable design device. Upaya is the interface between finitude and infinitude. It reveals, conceals and imaginally masks the essential oblivion.

Designing for counterbalance

Philosophy, Wheel

In monotonously over-ordered times, a handful of heretics find inspiration in transgressive, dissolutive ideas, while the conformist majority continues to extend and enforce ever-increasing order, believing correctly that this trace of defiant resistance is the seed of anarchy.

In cacophonously under-ordered times the philosopher’s situation reverses with the conditions. Now the majority automatically stampedes over any and every order, toward the maximum dissolution, decay, and liberation in the purest chaos — while a dissenting few seek order. The latter pursues shelter from storms and buoyancy against floods. This is done not from love of order or hatred of disorder, but from loyalty to the mean.

Because our time is an anarchic, cacophonic time, I am inspired to design countervailing philosophies of order.

And here I will discredit myself, as if I had credit to lose, by invoking Nietzsche.

In excessively Apollinian times, a Dionysian philosophy restores tragic integrity; but in excessively Dionysian times, an Apollinian philosophy is in order. Loyalty to the mean: this explains why my bookshelves are filled with apparent opponents to my ideals. Our deepest loyalties eternally transcend every contemporary stance:

…the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.

So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.

Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.” Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher — if today there could be philosophers — would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility. …

The last thing this time needs is more deconstruction, more defamiliarization, more disorientation, more strangeness and estrangedness, more arbitrary fantasy, more liberation, more disorder — to pour yet more buckets of chaos into the chaos in which we are drowning. What is most needful in this time is to bail out our boat before it capsizes, submerges and merges with its watery ground.

Pragmatic design maxim

Design, Pragmatism

The pragmatic meaning of a designed thing is the set of behaviors that follow from its activation.

There are other meanings of a design, of course, but from the perspective of business viability this is the literal cash value of any designed thing.

Service system development

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism

The interface between business viability and design desirability is behaviors.

The success of every business initiative hinges on customer behaviors, and to a slightly lesser extent the behaviors of people on the front lines who serve those customers, and the behaviors of many others who support the front line.

Design specializes in what motivates those behaviors, which inhibits or redirects them, and what kinds of conditions encourage networks of behavior that produce favorable business outcomes.

The interface between operational feasibility and design “desirability” (I prefer “adoptable” or “joinable” or even “partakable”) is the shaping of the actual conditions that produce the behaviors. This, of course involves the production of the customer touchpoints designers shape. But in service design, internal touchpoints exist at every interface between people and the rest of the organization. Besides touchpoints, there are also organizational infrastructure that are not touchpoints in any conventional sense — policies, team structures, technologies, partnerships, etc. These enable or constrain conditions for behaviors, and these are carefully considered and, where appropriate, changed.

The interface between business viability and operational feasibility is the initial and ongoing investment to produce the conditions that will produce the behavioral return on investment.

The overlap of all three together is what I call the field of service system development, one third of which is service design, fluent in business viability and operational feasibility, but specializing in adoption/participation factors.

Pinhole gates

Philosophy

I have been concerned with the topology of eversion for a long time – long before I began my kabbalah studies, which was relatively recent. I’m old enough now that I experience as recent anything that has happened within the last ten years.

Traditional esoteric thought has viewed the various domains of thought in planar terms, arranged vertically in varying heights, across which beings climb upward or downward. The vocabulary of transcendence is erected upon this topology. Our spiritual understandings – linguistically, conceptually, imaginally – is saturated with height relations.

Eversion works with a related but different set of relations: inner versus outer; from versus toward; inside-out versus outside-in; content (contained) versus container. I consider subject versus object to belong to this same class. And as I deepen further in kabbalah, subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.

Since immersing in the four worlds, I’ve pondered the question of whether or where eversions occur (or become necessary) for understanding changing relations across worlds. For example, in understanding another subject – whether that subject is the subjectivity of another person or that of an academic subject does not much matter – we start with a set of third-person objective data (characteristics, behaviors, utterances, concepts, claims), engage some second-person alter-ego in dialogue, in order to loosen our own subjective objectivity of wherefores and therefores and to learn to hear – for ourselves – a different set of wherefores and therefores, of questions and responses, by which reality may be approached in a new subjective objectivity. In this process subject-object are eversed through the I-Thou aperture – the pinhole in the camera obscura of reality.

But where are the pinholes? There is certainly one between Assiyah and Yetzirah. Any strategic design researcher must cross through this narrow gate several times a year in order to understand our research subjects individually, then collectively, then together with our collaborators. This dialogical passing is synesis.

I referred to another pinhole earlier: “subjective-objective knowing versus intellection beyond subject-objective form.” This is the pinhole between Yetzirah and Beriah.

But, in terms of the sefirot, does any sefirah serve as pinhole? Chokhmah is the obvious candidate, the zero-point from which Binah radiates and refracts.

I am tempted to take Malkhut-Keter as the collected intraworld transcendent light – the Malkhut Therefore of one world becomes the Keter Wherefore of the next.

Another possibility is looking at the topology dynamically, that is morphologically. Which “direction” is one going with respect to the One? Here it is difficult to avoid transcendence language. Ascent is everted descent, on the same ladder. Inhalation is everted exhalation in the same lungs.

For now, I have no conclusive answers, only new meditations to commence.

It is all very pretty.

Between wherefore and therefore

Chord, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Faith moves in the present, between wherefore and therefore.

“Wherefore…?”: Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief

“Therefore…?”: Pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

Each belief is engendered by an implicit wherefore before unfolding into explicit therefores.

Belief precedes speech and action, and is the fruit of faith. It is the rustling between whither and whence.

I originally formulated this idea using the model of the pragmatic maxim:

To fully understand the meaning of any idea, first, conceive it as the response to a question or problem that engendered it, then develop the practical consequences that follow from it.

Thanks to C. S. Peirce for the pragmatic maxim:

In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Thanks to M. Tismisesky for bludgeoning Peirce’s verbosity into a two-word provocation:

And therefore…?

Thanks to H.-G. Gadamer for his “hermeneutic priority of the question”.

To understand a question means to ask it. To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question.

Scraps for the exnihilism file

Kabbalah, Philosophy

Every finite one is articulated from the infinite One by degrees of nihilitude. Nihilitude and finitude belong entirely to infinitude and are essential within infinite self-articulation. Before the beginning, there is a faint trace of indivisible difference. At the beginning, infinity and the possibility of finite being divide without exclusion. In the beginning, exclusive subjectivities separate from one another. Thereafter, everything is a sum of objects, and non-objects are nothing. Each degree layers nihilitude upon nihilitude.

Hermeneutic presequence is an implicit question upstream of belief, and pragmatic consequence is a field of implicit action downstream from belief.

The pragmatic consequence of a belief is its implicit “Therefore…?”

The hermeneutic presequence of a belief is its implicit “Wherefore…?” “and this answers what?”

Belief is prior to speech and action. Belief is the fruit of faith, a wherefore and therefore, a wither and whence of spirit, a rustling in the present.

The wherefore flows from Yetzirah; the therefore unfolds into Assiyah.

Sophists are so spiritually underdeveloped that they lack the capacity to conceive even the possibility of wisdom transcending their own. This is one of the most radical category mistakes, for wisdom is precisely active awareness of this possibility. Wisdom is wise most of all to how oblivion works and lives in ironic tension between certainty and certainty of disruptive, radical surprise ex nihilo.

Metacognitive incompetence entered the popular sphere as Dunning-Kruger.

But millennia before, Plato spoke of metasophical incompetence as double-ignorance — not knowing that one does not know. Socrates knew he did not know, and for this reason was the wisest man in Athens.

But every age has its sophists who know they know and, with the confidence and barbarous serenity of youth, dispense to all what everyone knows is wisdom: wisdom is confident, self-certain, calming, comforting, accepting. Who wouldn’t pay top dollar for such wisdom?

One fool’s dissenting wisdom:

The dangers for a philosopher’s development are indeed so manifold today that one may doubt whether this fruit can still ripen at all. The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist” — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look, for looking around, for looking down. Or he attains it too late, when his best time and strength are spent — or impaired, coarsened, degenerated, so his view, his overall judgment does not mean much any more. It may be precisely the sensitivity of his intellectual conscience that leads him to delay somewhere along the way and to be late: he is afraid of the seduction to become a dilettante, a millipede, an insect with a thousand antennae, he knows too well that whoever has lost his self-respect cannot command or lead in the realm of knowledge — unless he would like to become a great actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and pied piper, in short, a seducer. This is in the end a question of taste, even if it were not a question of conscience. Add to this, by way of once more doubling the difficulties for a philosopher, that he demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or No, not about the sciences but about life and the values of life — that he is reluctant to come to believe that he has a right, or even a duty, to such a judgment, and must seek his way to this right and faith only from the most comprehensive — perhaps most disturbing and destructive — experiences, and frequently hesitates, doubts, and lapses into silence. Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, “desecularized” enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…

The substance of oblivion, ignorance and the very possibility of surprise is shared with relevance, focus, discrimination and mortality. Nihilitude, and more nihilitude. Without nihilitude, we return to our source.

Well-tempered words

Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I used a musical metaphor yesterday, conceived mid-thought, and today I’m appreciating its aptness. I mentioned well-tempered vocabulary, making an analogy (or anomalogy) with tempered scales to which harpsichords, pianos and most other keyboard instruments are tuned.

I have been looking for just the right set of English translations of Hebrew words for the sefirot and olamot and related ideas. I am also bringing some decades-old ideas to this work. I am pursuing internal harmony within the traditional framework but also across tradition to my own personal understanding, which, being a product of my own limit-bound finitude, certainly contains the usual scotomata, oblivia and eye-beams. Nothing lines up perfectly, but by looking at whole and part together, hearing chord and harmony in each meaning, they can be gathered in approximate inter-perfection.

My hope is that this sincere attempt at harmonious assimilation will coax my reason upward to be graciously met and tempered by intellection in descent, and that any work I do in this spirit will effect the same for anyone who tries to play golden ball with these words and ideas.

Perfection in such translation work is impossible. There are always trade-offs, audible disharmonies, humilities. Perfection is our holy asymptote, and it is not ours to have. The best we can do is give ourselves to this infinite perfection and play our finite part within it, at our finite, imperfect best.

Kabbalah prints v.2

Kabbalah, Letterpress, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

I need to print revised editions of both the dialectic sefirot (which seems more true and important to me by the day), and the Jacob’s Ladder reference sheet, for a mix of boring and interesting reasons.

The boring reason is transliterative consistency. My earlier prints had some minor inconsistencies that are bothering me. Da’at, Tif’eret and Netsach have been changed to Daat, Tiferet and Netzach. Assiyah has been changed to Asiyah.

More interesting are some refinements in alternative translations translations of sefirot.

  • Gevurah changes from “power” to “severity”.
  • Chesed changes from “love” to “kindness”.
  • Netzach changes from “eternity” to “overcoming”.
  • Hod changes from “splendor” to “glory”.
  • Malkhut changes from “kingdom” to “sovereignty”.

These changes are all still traditional, but make a better-tempered whole.

Most exciting though are the changes in the four worlds chart.

First, I made two intensely satisfying improvements to the column labels:

  • “subject” is now “self”.
  • “understanding” is now “givenness”.

In the rows, I re-tuned some of the language:

  • In Atzilut, Chayah changes from “life-essence” to “source”, and its givenness remains “mystical”.
  • In Beriah, Neshamah changes from “divine breath” to “intellect”, and its givenness changes from “interpretive” to “intellective”.
  • In Yetzirah, Ruach remains “spirit”, and its givenness changes from “allusive” to “figurative”.
  • In Asiyah, Nefesh changes from “vital soul” to “soul” and its givenness remains “literal”.

I plan to print this new sheet and live with it for a week or two before committing to plates.

This is starting to feel very much my own intimate understanding within my tradition, and it is becoming more starkly beautiful to me with each revision.

Update August 19, 2023: I was considering “lovingkindness” for Chesed. There are good arguments for it. Viewed from approximate absoluteness, as emanated from Binah, Chesed is, in fact, complete lovingkindness, from which Gevurah develops its complementary severity. But viewed from below, which is the perspective of this sheet, Gevurah can be excluded from Chesed, which is then mere kindness — the loveless niceness of unconditional mercy and tolerance — always toward some at the expense of others.

Worlds, selves, givens

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

In the lifeworld dwells vital soul, to whom literal truth is given.

In the world of form-and-order dwells spirit, to whom figurative truth is given.

In the world of creation-revelation dwells intellect, to whom intellection is given.

In the world of emanation wells the source from whom being flows forth and returns.

The lines above are a summational response to a hymn by Nachmanides, translated in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

From the beginning of time, through eternities

I was among his hidden treasures.

From Nothing he called me forth, but at the end of time

I shall be reclaimed by the King.

My life flows from the depth of the spheres

Which give order and form to the soul;

Divine forces build it and nourish it;

Then it is preserved in the chambers of the King.

He radiated light to bring her forth,

In hidden well-springs, right and left.

The soul descended the ladder of heaven,

From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

Scholem then proceeds to discuss the three “spiritual agencies”, which in my Jacob’s Ladder “reference sheet” I labeled “subject”, but which I might simply call “self” in future editions.

The psychology of the Zohar shows a peculiar mixture of two doctrines held by certain schools of mediaeval philosophy. The first distinguished between the vegetative, the animal, and the rational soul — three stages which Aristotelian doctrine regarded as different faculties of the one soul, while the mediaeval followers of Plato were inclined to think of them as three different entities. The second, which was generally held by the Arab philosophers and popularized among the Jews by Maimonides, is based on the conception of the “acquired intellect.” According to this view, the rational faculty latent in the mind is actualized in the process of cognition, and this realization of the intellect is the sole guide to immortality. To this doctrine, the Zohar now gives a Kabbalistic turn. It retains the distinction between three spiritual agencies: Nefesh or life; Ruah or spirit; and Neshamah or soul proper, but abandons the idea that they represent three different faculties of the soul. Rather all three are already latently present in the first, Nefesh, and the higher grades correspond to the new and deeper powers which the soul of the devotee acquires through the study of the Torah and through meritorious actions.

Neshamah is the intellective self in Beriah, to whom reality is given in intellection.

This term, intellection, is a concept I learned from perennialists (followers of Schuon) and it concerns a kind of gnosis invited (never caused) by spiritual effort, which yields spiritual fruit, but which transcends spirit and vital soul. It transcends objective reason and subjective ontology.

Intellection is the true telos of philosophy. It is here that we receive gifts of immortal life from others and bequeath it to others willing to receive it. Here we move and are moved by the tossing of the golden ball.

Intellection is known solely by its fruits in figurative and literal givenness — enworldment.

A footnote in Scholem gave me another jolt of recognition this morning.

It referred the Zohar’s spiritual diagnosis of origninal sin.

He joined below and separated above, when it was necessary to separate below and to join above.

I consulted the Zohar for context:

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.”

“The fourth commandment: to realize that YHVH is ha-Elohim, God, as is said: Know today and take to heart that YHVH is ha-Elohim), God (Deuteronomy 4:39). To include the name Elohim in the name YHVH, realizing they are one, indivisible. This is the mystery written: Let there be me’orot, lights, in the expanse of heaven to shine upon earth (Genesis 1:14-15), that the two names be one, with absolutely no division — that me’orot, lights, spelled deficiently, merge in the name of heaven: one together and indivisible, black light with white light, indivisible, and all is one. This is the white cloud of day and the cloud of fire in the night, as they have said: ‘Quality of day and quality of night’s — to be arrayed by each other to shine, as is said: to shine upon earth.

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

“Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.

“This is the mystery written: Let them be me’orot, lights. The shell rises in the wake of the kernel. The kernel is or, light; the other side, mavet, death. Or [light] in letters joined together, mavet [death] in separation. When this or [light] disappears from there, the letters of separation join together. …”

This understanding of sin as reversal of proper relationships reminds me of the animating insight of a poem I wrote twenty years ago in a metanoiac outburst and continue to edit and revise:

In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
bury the ground with broken branches.

Quadrephania

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Within the actual world are myriad objects of myriad materials which can be combined or taken apart, in myriad ways.

Within the formational world are myriad subjects to whom reality is given and withheld, each in its own way, according to receptive capacities and responsive capabilities.

Within the revelatory world is being beyond subjectivity and objectivity, the source of all articulate reality – differentiation-in-unity – intelligibility. Here reality is given as absolute truth, inconceivable and incomprehensible, all-conceiving and all-comprehending, ineffable but certain. The source of subject is known solely by its fruits, subjective reformation effects objective change, revelation, creation, instauration ex nihilo.

Within the infinite world emanates the source of being, the source of infinite unity, beyond all. Here reality is ungiven mystery: infinite One. Emanating: am-ing, adonai-ing, is-was-will-be-ing.

Why am I compelled to return to the four worlds again and again, to show them so they can be recognized by those with the capacity to do so?

Because these worlds, far from exotic or distant or rare, are more present than presence, all the time. The only question is whether we are ready to receive them in their full fourfoldness and respond.

The actual world acts upon us, and we act upon it. The actual world resists us, and we resist it. We know reality by its defiance of our actions and expectations. We intuit many possibilities, and we are met with exponentially more impossibilities.

The formational world surprises us with different givenness from different subjects. Reality is given to me differently from how it is given to you. Reality is given to biology differently from how it is given to mathematics or to literature. We cannot in good faith doubt it is the same reality, but we cannot avoid contending with the difference, and this very contention is seeking an ever-elusive transcendent truth.

The revelatory world – which is also the creative world, and thus the instaurational world – is the world that radically surprises us with spontaneous changes to our own subjectivity and consequently changes to the givenness of reality. This is the site of the miracle of re-enworldment ex nihilo. Any first re-enworldment will be taken as revelation of a true self in a true world. But a truer self in a truer world is given with multiple re-enworldments, and this is the exnihilist enworldment of ever-possible enworldment.

And the infinite world? The more present we are to what is present to us, the more real its omnipresent reality is to us as ground, and the more important our belonging within it grows.

Let me make this even more plain, and more practical. Let us root this in actual events in the actual world.

Most of the time we must adopt one subject – and its objectivity – as the sole valid subject.

Subjects are complex. We all contain multitudes. In addition to the subjective universals assumed to be shared by all human beings (Husserl’s famous “lifeworld”), educated people are taught to understand the world scientifically, mathematically, historically, politically, fictionally, legally, economically, etc. to varying degrees. And all these subjects are coordinated within a sort of ideal collective “supersubjectivity” within which we situate our own partial understandings, as we socially participate in organizational life. In our organization, some things are known best by us and other things make partial sense to us. Other things we ignore and leave to others.

Any organization has a supersubjectivity, and it determines the intra-subjective order within its social being. A university is an example of an unusually expansive, deep and explicitly structured supersubjective organization. Unless an organization is some kind of tyrannical cult dominated by one genius and limited to that one person’s subject – (and trust me, such places do exist) – an organization’s supersubjectivity transcends the subjectivity of each person who participates in it. But it is real, and it guides the reasoning and reasoned actions of an organization.

Problems arise though if the supersubjectivity of an organization is unable to effectively address the subjectivities that the organization attempts to serve with its offerings (its systems of interconnected services and products). The organization’s way of making sense and responding puts it at odds with its customers. Other problems arise if the organization’s way of making sense and responding is so similar to its competitors that its offerings have little or no compelling differentiation. And yet other organizations have pockets of self-oblivion inside their own walls, subjects who have become alienated from the supersubjectivity of the organization in which they operate, playing no role in the overall organizational understanding, but compelled to perform tasks directed by others.

In these cases an organization might seek help from designers. Designers, if they know what design actually is and know how to do design – (and trust me, this is a live “if”) – work to understand the multiple subjects who participate in the common actuality of an organization, receiving, delivering or supporting its offerings, but who experience, understand and respond from different subjective centers. Designers seek better understandings capable of doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization.

By doing better justice to the subjects who constitute the supersubjectivity of the organization, designers address the three problems mentioned above. They find a higher-order supersubjective understanding in which customers are fully understood. The responses, informed by these better understandings, make customers feel understood and cared about, and this better understanding is innately compelling and often differentiating. And if an organization is wise – (another live “if”) – it will involve internal alienated subjects, often front-liners, who were poorly understood for the same reasons customers were.

But these changes to supersubjectivity are not easy, and this is a source of constant pain for designers. It is an intense and radical pain, but it is a good pain, a labor pain. Any change in supersubjectivity potentially changes the intersubjective order and hierarchy of the subjects who constitute it. And the pain is felt long before the final change state comes into view, because this change state transcends both the subjectivities of each person in the organization and the supersubjectivity as a whole. The whole organization suffers a collective “dark night of the soul” on the way to its transformative insights that reveal its opportunity to serve in radically better new ways.

And if an organization is led by people lacking awareness of realities beyond its own actual world, given by its own supersubjectivity – with the leadership’s own subjectivity fortuitously positioned at the pinnacle of the subjective hierarchy – these leaders will be perplexed by a focus on subjectivities (what are those? How do you objectively define, measure and track a subject?). The subjects get reduced to data objects. If designers speak of experiences, the experiences are also reduced to objects – the artifacts and events that get experienced. Perhaps subjects are mainly emotion-things person-things have, plus distortions (prejudices, biases and confabulations) or distortion-things to perception-things person-things have. Such people believe design research will give them objective data about people, and cannot even comprehend the possibility of research changing a subjective state – neither their own, nor that of their organization. If they are made to apprehend this incomprehensible possibility, they feel apprehension, perplexity, angst – and often become aggressive.

This confinement to the actual world, and the systematic efforts made to manipulate, control, leverage and monetize the actual world, are symptomatic of a supersubject known as technik, and it is common to all technocratic systems including managerial capitalism and socialism.

Technik precludes design even as it attempts to use design to further its dominance.

Design’s essential purpose is ascending from actual reality (and its systems) to subjective enworldments (and their divergent givens) in order to instaurate higher-order enworldments capable of reshaping actual reality in ways that reenworld us together in a shared world in which we all fully belong.

The technik-bound “design expert” serves this preclusive exploitation of design, and pretends to advance design while alienating and enslaving it. And such design experts are exactly as apprehensive, perplexed and aggressive toward real design as any other technocrat.

I grew up in a pseudoreligion that despised religion so profoundly that it denied any difference between its own parodic counterfeit and the real thing. It refused to acknowledge any essential difference, because it denied the very reality of “the difference that makes a difference.” “No, no,” it said, “All religion, despite its divine delusions, has a purely sociological function; and the only difference is that we know it, while our theistic inferiors do not.”

I know this move, and so I know exactly what pseudodesign is doing when it claims that its own managerial engineering is design and can dispense with the subjective essence of the craft.

“Design constructs object-systems of touch-point-objects, service-delivery-actor-objects and service-support-actor-objects (linked by processes, constrained by policies, enabled by technologies) that service-receiver-objects have good perception-objects, feeling-objects and thought-objects about — which motivate desired behavior-objects that drive objective business results.”

Do I care about design because of all the esoteric realities that emerge as givens in design work?

Do I care about esoterism because it helps me understanding the uncanny realities that irrupt into the deepest, most consequential design work?

I think both concerns are rooted in a common faith — a faith which long predated articulation, belief or practice, which drew me forward toward something mysterious and infinitely important, and continues to do so.

Systemic gift-rejection

Design, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Any service designer will tell you that value exchanges (or cocreation) are our core concern. At every point in the unfolding of service, value is exchanged or generated among those receiving, delivering and supporting that service. If the value exchange is solid, the service feels worth it to everyone, and everyone plays their part. If it stops feeling worth it, people stop participating, or they withhold full cooperation, and the service starts to unravel.

Typically we think of these exchanges as investments and returns. ?Everyone puts something into a transaction, in order to get something out.

But there is another element of value exchange that is neglected, if not rejected: those things we give because we need to give them. These are our gifts, and giving these gifts gives our lives purpose.

When we are given opportunities to give our gifts, life enters the services we serve, and invests our organization with purpose and consecrating radiance.

Few system-builders consider this crucial and infinitely renewable resource.

Most organizations are ready to squander everything in order to avoid wasting time and money.

Years ago I made a list of resources designers should consider. Somehow the original list got lost, but I found one record of it in a list of planned talks:

“Lean How?: How Design Methods Make Waste Tradeoffs” – Lean methodologies tend to emphasize efficiencies of time and money, but these are often gained at the cost of wasting other resources. This talk proposes looking at forms of internal waste (time, money, team morale, organizational credibility) and external waste (customer goodwill, innovation opportunities, attention and brand equity) and seeing choice of methodology in terms of waste trade-offs.

Volume titles

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Works

I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.

The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.

Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.

My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.

I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.

But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.

So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.

So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.

For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.

But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.

In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.

The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.

If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.

And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.

Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.

Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.

And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.

I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.

I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.