If you think being right is a matter of avoiding being wrong, you’ll neglect a more important and more interesting challenge: trying to be even more right than you already are.

The deepest religious conversions do not have the structure of mere reversal, negation or inversion — they change the terms such that one’s old understandings are seen as simply missing the mark, being beside the point. It is less, “I was wrong, but now I’m right,” and more “I wasn’t right enough, and now I’ve become more right.”

Understandings, by the way, should not be confused with the doctrines we affirm as true. The strongest and least noticed effect of an understanding is what we see when we look and what questions arise from what we see, and these are limited by what questions we know how to ask.

If we use the optical metaphor of a perspective, the lines of inquiry are the perspectival grid that draw our eyes to a vanishing point on a horizon, suggested in the general thrust of our questions, defined by our standpoint but appearing to belong to the scene itself. Only movement around the scene reveals the relationship between seer, seen and scene.

I’m no fan of Plato, but:

Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.

Peripatetic philosophy entails actively getting up and seeing from many angles.

I’ve called my metaphysic a “metaphysic of surprise”. To get what I mean by this, it is helpful to keep in mind the basic terms of my metaphysical conceptualization, which are 1) metaphysical reality versus 2) our understanding of reality which is truth.

In my view truth is an adequate-as-possible person-reality interface, true to the degree that it affords effective interaction, and never an exhaustive symbolic representation of reality as naive thinkers (at least in our culture) seem to reflexively assume. Truth is more like a well-designed, well-made tool than it is a tiny symbolic duplicate of reality we carry around inside our heads. Not to exclude tiny symbolic models, since maps are among our most useful tools, just that a map is only one of many useful tools, and maybe not even the most typical one.

This way of thinking about truth is what Dewey called “instrumentalism”. As a designer, my ears prick right up at this notion: tools ought to be designed, but all too often they are only engineered, with the result that only fellow engineers can master them. Is this not the case with philosophies? Philosophy needs a Steve Jobs to barge in and demand that we design our philosophies intentionally to be useful, usable and desirable for the people who use them, and understand the world through them, and (if the tool is well-designed and well-made) will become such a fine extension of our own being, we will forget we are using them at all and simply experience reality as our philosophy presents them, as self evidently what it is.

But no matter how solid our craftsmanship we can never avoid the reality or reality. Reality will always glow beneath the surface of what we make of it, through the seams, the worn spots, the flaws, the cracks that form from careless use. And reality can also erupt through truth and shock us with both its reality and with how our truth cannot deal with it. We get truly locked up because we don’t think about using truth, we think with our truth, and when reality breaks our truth, thinking simply can’t work. We can’t even talk about what is happening unless we have tools for accounting for such breaks. We can even experience total breaks where our entire truth is experienced as broken, which paradoxically allows us to know the truth about truth. We never know truth better than we have none. This is when religion happens. This is when mystery is here.

This is when the conceptual schema that give us the sense the world is comprised (com+prise, together-grasp) can be seen in its provinciality, as something (literally) incomprehensibly vast, defying not only quantity but quality — in other words, infinity — is known in the most non-comprehending way. Should the word be suprehended? At any rate, we can be utterly certain that we are surrounded by a reality that defies our current understanding and expectations. Etymologically, surprise means beyond–grasp which has a fine double-meaning of being beyond one’s grasp or of being in the grasp of the beyond. Being surprised can be viewed as comprehending turned inside-out.

Magic is wisdom splattering against the inner wall of a philosophy.

Ritual is performed symbol.

Metaphysically, I am a mystic.

Ethically, I am, at bottom, and maybe only at bottom, Reform Jewish.

Somehow, not exactly epistemologically, I am a Deweyan pragmatist, an Instrumentalist. I suspect I believe epistemology is one huge category mistake. Maybe my ontology of truth is pragmatist. My politics certainly are pragmatist. If you are asking “and therefore…?”, the pragmatic consequence of my pragmatism — its cash value — is that I analyze the meaning of beliefs using pragmatist method.

Oh! Epistemologically, I am scientific. But this is less a matter of “how do we know” and more an ethic of what must be done in order to expect to have one’s beliefs considered true by others.

Ontologically, I suppose I am a phenomenologist, as long as the fact that I am a mystic realist is kept in mind.

Anthropologically, I am Nietzschean.

*

I do a lot of thinking, and I think hard about all my doing. I’m a reflective practitioner funhouse. Most days, it is wise to think thrice before asking me a simple question.

It is hard to live with me, especially before noon.

Some lusts are nothing more than impersonal appetite. Some lusts are nothing less than a profoundly personal drawing into otherness.

Was it (only) insatiable greed or was it (also) need to sail over the map’s edges?

To reduce the latter to merely the former is to obsolete the possibility of genuinely new life. The biting flies of irritability can drive you here and there, but never over into anywhere truly new.

Of all objects of envy, inspiration is the most enviable. Of all kinds of envy, envy of inspiration is the most damaging, to both the envying and the envied. “If I cannot be the light, let there be no sight.”

*

“Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?” said a hated and jovial voice. “Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn’t pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?” Carlos Argentino’s feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, “One hell of a — yes, one hell of a.” The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on. “Did you see everything — really clear, in colours?” At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one — believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.

J. L. Borges, The Aleph

At the beit din for my conversion one of the rabbis asked me “do you even believe in God?” I gave an ironic but completely sincere answer. I’m Jewish now, so I guess they bought it, but that question has stayed with me since, and I suppose that is because maybe I didn’t accept my answer. I did not nail that question, nor did I nail several other key questions, especially not “How would you explain Judaism to someone who doesn’t know what it is?”. I hit these nails sideways and bent them all up. I want a do-over, but I think you only get one shot. But somehow I perceive this lingering dissatisfaction and feeling of lost opportunity as a good thing. I believe this might be a Jewish attitude along the lines of “there is nothing fuller than a broken heart.” In that anxiously optimistic spirit, I will put my unease to work and try to unbend the “do you even believe in God” nail. Here it goes…

Being a devout Pragmatist, I will go directly to the Pragmatic Maxim and ask what the practical consequences are to a statement to understand what it means. This is what William James called the “cash value”. My friend Mónica has an even more pragmatic version of Pragmatic maxim, which she expresses not as a maxim or a concept but, in a profoundly Pragmatist manner, the practice of asking: “AND THEREFORE…?”

So I believe in God, and therefore we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. We must live as a part of a reality that includes and exceeds us, and expects us to do so.

The evidence is all around us, and inside us. When we encounter a person who views us egocentrically as merely what we are to them — either useful or useless to their purposes, amounting to what they’ve deduced from their beliefs about us — apparently missing the fact of our own reality, purposefulness and autonomy we feel indignation. The indignation intensifies if we realize they prefer the imagined role they’ve assigned us to the more surprising, resistant and disruptive reality of who we are, and they seem resistant to noticing otherwise. And if they are in a position to enforce the role they have assigned as so we must cooperate and perform it, indignation can devolve to resentment or wrath.

Despite what many are currently saying, every person has this experience. It is intrinsic to the human condition.

Also intrinsic to the human condition is inflicting this indignation on others, by reducing others to roles we have imagined. (Sometimes we even pull this off by reducing them to mere reducers — people who have no experience of being reduced to a category not of their choosing and forced to play it, and who therefore are ignorant of the matter, incapable of understanding, unable to be reasoned with, and who can only be reformed through counter-domination. To meet this with indignation is not “fragility”, nor is it rage at having to share power. No: this is normal human indignation at being reduced to an imagined category, and then having one’s indignation reduced to vicious ignorance.)

So, when we do the same to others and take them as nothing more than what we imagine them to be — and, again, every single one of us constantly does this to others! — we are met with indignation. We are called upon to do something about it, to converse, to hear, to rectify and reconcile: to make teshuva. To return to a state of mutually acknowledged reality that includes each of us while infinitely exceeding each and all of us. I see teshuva as attempting mutual atonement. The infinite is no longer infinite to us if we exclude anyone from it, so full atonement is impossible without teshuva.

To believe as I do that this indignation is legitimate and warranted by more than utilitarian self-interest, biological drives or cultural norms strongly implies a reality that wants something of us. This wanting-from-us is the difference between a Godful and Godless reality. That is my “and therefore.” Therefore we must perpetually atone with God by atoning with all fellow-participants in the at-one God’s being.*

(Note: lately I am including non-humans in this process of perpetual atonement. Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Tim Morton and Graham Harmon have me worried I have been “objectifying” objects!)

Any person subjected to the categorial disrespect we call bigotry will experience indignation. A self-respecting disrespected person is likely to protest the bigotry and attempt to reason with their persecutors.

If the indignation of the disrespected is also disrespected, their appeals to reason are ignored, condemned or mocked, and the rejection of the protest against bigotry is itself justified by the logic of bigotry, the indignation will be compounded, and the conflict will escalate beyond reason, because reason cannot function in the absence of respect.

By reason, I do not mean mere logic. Reason is deeper than logic in that it includes the possibility of dialogical epiphany, which reveals new grounds for new understandings, new beliefs and surprising new logical conclusions.

As long as we refuse to entertain and act on the possibility that we might experience an epiphanic insight, we cannot respect, nor can we reason, nor can we reasonably hope for peace.

Back in 2003, when I began to wade out into philosophy and enjoyed the new philosopher’s humiliation of rediscovering obvious truths I came up with some names for self-other orientations. A position of solipse looks out upon reality from an explicit self-to-other orientation, sort of a principled egoism, which analyzes existence in terms of relationship to subject. Eclipse is just the opposite of solipse. A position of eclipse looks out upon reality from an explicit other-to-self orientation, which attempts to factor out ego in order to get objective knowledge.

The reason I bring this up is I just wrote some irritated notes in the margin of page 119 of Hyperobjects, where Morton starts positioning Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) against what he calls “sensual objects”, objects as they are for an observer, what Harman calls “as-structure”. Of course, phenomenology is pretty much just rigorous study of as-structure, and Heidegger was a phenomenologist, so using phenomenology as a foil against OOO makes sense. But OOO does a weird move that, to me, seems extremely typical of today’s version of “leftness”: he seems to believe that he can transcend his first person position altogether by extremes of altruism, by equating himself and his own existence to that of all objects. In fact, had I thought of it, I’d have scribbled “object altruism!” In the margin. Instead I wrote “so eclipsistic!”

So, if being solipsistic means behaving as if one’s own subjectivity is the ground of all reality, being eclipsistic means behaving as if one’s own conception of objectivity is the ground of all reality. So a person with a reductive materialist philosophy who imagines that his own experience of consciousness emerges from the workings of material dynamics, and that somehow this raises him out of his first-person perspective into a third-person perspective is being eclipsistic.

If you don’t know what intellectual depth means, you’ll think it means thoroughness. But thoroughness is not depth, it is density within a given breadth and depth of knowledge.

Both excessive breadth of knowledge (how many things one has knowledge of) and excessive density of knowledge (how much one knows about a thing) will be gained at the expense of depth of knowledge (how many ways one knows how to know). And alas, vice versa. Dilettantes, pedants and nomads.

I am reading Tim Morton’s Hyperobjects by day and listening to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now by night. It is interesting how both thinkers, as different as their philosophies are, come down against “Nature” (in the Romantic sense of a deified, pristine, virginal being who can only be defiled by contact with Humankind) for the sake of ecology (ecology being something in which we actively participate, constructively or destructively).

I see these structures as being identical to the structures of marriage, and for that matter, all sacraments.

The “Nature” model views the sacred as Other apart from us, and demanding from us self-sacrificial acts of altruism, which is the ideal of morality: For You; Not For Me. A tragicomedy repeated endlessly on TV screens: The altruistic lover tells his beloved to leave him forever, because he cares more about her happiness more than his own. What a lovely, heart-rending act of intellectual stuntedness. If he bothered to exercise intellectual independence and reflected on his own experiences of love, he’d see very clearly she’s leaving him because he’s a sentimentally passive moron who doesn’t know how to love because he doesn’t know what love is, because he spends too much time in his soft warm pink heart and far too little in his clear, cold head, and he probably thinks he’s to be congratulated for it.

The ecological view views a sacred Other as co-embedded within something both immanent and transcendent, both participatory and mysterious, and that this embeddedness is the key to relationship and potential immediacy. We experience discrete otherness with a degree of immediacy through the medium of shared realities to which we belong. When we get married, we enter into marriage and abide within it with another, who is in part mysterious to us, but also familiar as a member of the marriage “body” we participate in. Love is a commitment to both the familiar, the mysterious and the occasionally harrowing being in which we are participants when we relate to our spouse as the one to whom we are married. We draw being from our marriage being and we are changed by it, and that is the point of it. We must think and feel in some pretty unusual ways to exist this way and to understand what we are doing. We must think religiously to participate in real marriage with a real other person. We cannot be merely individualistic, but we must be individuals who want both individuality and relationships.

I believe Morton would call this “being ecological”. I’ll go along with that, but I’m going to keep hammering on our collective ignorance of religion.

Too many people worship their own fancies, notions, concepts, symbols and moral algorithms as if they worship God, and being a good Jew I want to remind them of third commandment, and emphasize it with some astonishing wisdom of one of our most best Jews, who joined love of neighbor with whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-bodied love of God and presented them as two facets of a single supreme commandment. We must love toward realities and within realities, not love experiences-of, or ideas-of — or anything that is essentially features of our own being. We must love others through the shared medium of otherness in which we participate as beings.

Two reflections on suffering from Nietzsche, the first from The Gay Science and the second from Twilight of the Idols:

Knowledge of distress. — Perhaps nothing separates human beings or ages from each other more than the different degrees of their knowledge of distress — distress of the soul as well as of the body. Regarding the latter we moderns may well, in spite of our frailties and fragilities, be bunglers and dreamers owing to lack of ample first-hand experience, compared with an age of fear, the longest of all ages, when individuals had to protect themselves against violence and to that end had themselves to become men of violence. In those days, a man received ample training in bodily torments and deprivations and understood that even a certain cruelty towards himself, as a voluntary exercise in pain, was a necessary means of his preservation; in those days, one trained one’s surroundings to endure pain, in those days, one gladly inflicted pain and saw the most terrible things of this kind happen to others without any other feeling than that of one’s own safety. As regards the distress of the soul, however, I look at each person today to see whether he knows it through experience or description; whether he still considers it necessary to fake this knowledge, say, as a sign of refined cultivation, or whether at the bottom of his soul he no longer believes in great pains of the soul and reacts to its mention in much the same way as to the mention of great bodily sufferings, which make him think of his toothaches and stomachaches. But that is how most people seem to me to be these days. The general inexperience with both sorts of pain and the relative rarity of the sight of suffering individuals have an important consequence: pain is hated much more now than formerly; one speaks much worse of it; indeed, one can hardly endure the presence of pain as a thought and makes it a matter of conscience and a reproach against the whole of existence. The emergence of pessimistic philosophers is in no way the sign of great, terrible states of distress; rather, these question marks about the value of all life are made in times when the refinement and case of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malicious, and the poverty of real experiences of pain makes one tend to consider painful general ideas as already suffering of the highest rank. There is a recipe against pessimistic philosophies and excessive sensitivity, things which seem to me to be the real ‘distress of the present’ — but this recipe may sound too cruel and would itself be counted among the signs that lead people to judge, ‘existence is something evil’. Well, the recipe against this ‘distress’ is: distress.

and

Christian and anarchist. — When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the declining strata of society, demands with a fine indignation what is “right,” “justice,” and “equal rights,” he is merely under the pressure of his own uncultured state, which cannot comprehend why he actually suffers — what it is that he is poor in: life … A causal instinct asserts itself in him: it must be somebody’s fault that he is in a bad way … Also, the “fine indignation” itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched devils to scold: it gives a slight intoxication of power. Even plaintiveness and complaining can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a fine dose of revenge in every complaint; one charges one’s own bad situation, and under certain circumstances even one’s own badness, to those who are different, as if that were an injustice, a forbidden privilege. “If I am canaille, you ought to be too”: on such logic are revolutions made. — Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one charges one’s misfortune to others or to oneself — the socialist does the former; the Christian, for example, the latter — really makes no difference. The common and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be somebody’s fault that one is suffering — in short, that the sufferer prescribes the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The objects of this need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere occasions: everywhere the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his little revenge. If he is a Christian — to repeat it once more — he finds them in himself … The Christian and the anarchist are both decadents. — But when the Christian condemns, slanders, and besmirches the “world,” his instinct is the same as that which prompts the socialist worker to condemn, slander, and besmirch society. The “last judgment” is the sweet comfort of revenge — the revolution, which the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther off … The “beyond” — why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world? …

Responding to feedback from my friend Leafy, I added some transformative comments to “Eroding to Wisdom”. I sort of wish I’d entitled it “Progressive Tradition”.

I can tell rewrites are on the horizon. I may want to elaborate on what I mean by the disgraced word “wisdom”. I see wisdom as simple fundamental conceptions upon which all our other conceptions rest. Or to use a word I’ve been seeing a lot: Wisdom is the small set of simple conceptions which subtend all our other, more complex concepts and hold them together as an immediate meaningful unity.

Never, ever forget: Human beings reliably choose the death of other human beings over the death of their own philosophies. And the worse the philosophy, the more unconditionally and violently it loves itself and esteems its own Truth over reality and real living beings.

New word alert!

mereology
noun – The formal study of the relationship between the parts of a system and the whole
ORIGIN: Gr meros “part”, and -ology

The well-known saying “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” has a corollary: “If every problem you see can be solved by pounding nails, every tool around you looks like a hammer.”