“…Real relationship to God cannot be achieved on earth if real relationships to the world and to mankind are lacking. Both love of the Creator and love of that which He has created are finally one and the same.”
Category Archives: Philosophy
I do not care what you think
It is easy to disregard what someone thinks if that person lacks the resources to make you feel the consequences of your disrespect and disregard. We only say “I don’t give a shit how you feel” to people who are powerless either to help us or to harm us.
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A person or a group we treat as a powerless nobody will seek opportunities to return and confront us as a powerful somebody — as somebody who can command our attention, or our respect, or — and God help us if it comes to this — to make us feel what it is like to be a powerless nobody.
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Perhaps the biggest difference between left and right comes down to the question: Which segment of the poor and powerless mass deserves to be courted and which deserves to be despised?
Liber’al
I like to see the word “liberal” as a contraction of Liberty for All: liber’al.
Galut
New favorite word: galut. It names the pit in my stomach.
On Jewish conversion
I’ve been asked: “If your faith is essentially Jewish, why would you need to go through a formal conversion? Aren’t you already Jewish?”
My answer is: “Because that very Jewish faith tells me that I will be Jewish only when Jews recognize me as Jewish.”
A Jewish faith is not a faith of comprehension of truths. Judaism is not essentially a “belief system.” Jewish faith is orientation toward what transcends one’s own finitude in time, in space and in understanding — calling for a whole-being response: whole mind, whole heart, whole strength. And the faith is oriented toward reality that responds back. Judaism is radically and actively mutual.
I’ve been asked: “Why undergo all that arbitrary ritualistic rigmarole of Jewish conversion?”
My answer is: “Undergoing conversion is my way of honoring the priniciple that the most important things we can learn are arbitrary until suddenly and miraculously they stop being arbitrary to us. These rituals might have enormous meaning that I will understand and re-understand later. Until then, participation in these rituals is, for me a ritual of demonstrating my teachability. That’s the first part. The second part is the blunt fact that this is what it takes to recognized as Jewish by the Jewish community, and even if I do not understand the requirement, I respect it as something I do not understand. In undergoing conversion I am making a sacrifice of intellectual self-mastery to the transcendence of other understandings and to other people. Compared to what was asked of Abraham, it is a minuscule sacrifice.”
Diagnostic code
If someone tells me that they are distressed, I tend to believe it.
If they tell me why they are distressed, I tend to question it.
If I catch myself believing that I know why they are distressed before I talk with them, I make myself disbelieve it.
Humility
We people are sparks inclined to mistake ourselves for galaxies. There is truth in the indentification of spark with galaxy, but a truth is true only when its limits are observed. Humility is the observation of this particular truth, the fundamental truth of relationship between finite part and infinite whole.
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Humility is proactive humiliation. Do it yourself or it will be done to you.
Torn
What do I think about this or that controversy? I’m torn — on principle. If I am not torn yet, I have more learning to do.
Going first
Being morally responsible means going first. Trying first. Opening first. Listening first. Repenting first. Giving first. Disarming first. Showing goodwill first. Seeking forgiveness first. Acting first.
We can speculate on how others will respond — whether they will or won’t reciprocate, cooperate, collaborate, exploit or humiliate us — but we cannot really know what is possible until someone actually makes that first move toward mutuality.
Being morally responsible means being that person.
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Being morally responsible means acting on faith that other people do not live inside our own minds. They can shock us with the reality of who they are and how much it differs from our ideas of them.
The varieties of othering experience
Othering occurs in a variety of forms which can look highly dissimilar or even opposite.
There’s a complacent incurious othering: Those others are not really part of my life. I don’t know them, they’re not my problem, I don’t know how to help, and I don’t even know if I can help.
There’s an objective othering: Those others have different characteristics from us, which can be studied and comprehended factually.
Another objective othering: I have studied those others and concluded that their problems are self-inflicted. They must solve their own problems.
There’s a smug and superior othering: We, unlike those others, are moral or talented or informed or enlightened, etc.
There’s a hostile othering: Those others want to do us harm, and will do so if they get the chance.
There’s a resentful othering: The principle pain in my life would not have happened if I were one of those others.
Resentful othering can evolve into a vengeful othering: The principle pain in my life, which is the pain of my people, would not have occurred if it were not for those others.
There’s a post-liberal othering: Those others engage in othering me, and I have found that I cannot avoid doing the same — at least as long as they persist in their othering. Perhaps othering is unavoidable. Perhaps the conceit of overcoming othering is a tactic for preserving the status quo.
These are dissimilar in ways: they are the products of different power relations.
However, they are alike in that they all lead away from mutuality, further from dialogical understanding and toward reciprocal dehumanization, force and dehumanizing counter-force.
Mutuality
It is important to distinguish between feeling as though you are member of a community because you share its values and beliefs, and actually becoming a member of that community by mutually acknowledging shared values and beliefs with fellow members. This is true of communities of dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions, and it is true of communities as small as two, such as friendships and marriages. Community is essentially mutual.
Similarly, there is a difference between forgiveness that involves making peace with estrangement with an alienated friend or loved one and the deeper forgiveness of mutual reconciliation. Most feelings of alienation come from a sense that one’s reality has not been acknowledged — from a sense that mutuality is lacking. Reconciliation is restoration of mutuality. Sometimes this is not possible (yet), and we do have to make peace with that fact in unilateral forgiveness, but we should know and feel the difference between this and true mutual forgiveness.
Mutual relationships transcend individuality and that’s what makes them sacred.
This view feels Jewish to me, and when I articulate it I want to be Jewish.
The responsible and the free
It is easy for those who accept responsibility, especially those who feel unable to avoid accepting it, to resent those who have embraced irresponsibility and who consequently experience an ecstatic freedom. For the latter, “the free”, this is an accomplishment, a liberation or redemption won through courageous insight; but for the former, “the responsible”, this is a seizure made through ignorant luck, willful contempt, or both fused in complacent incuriosity — all subsidized by the responsible.
It is hard to get outside of these two ethical perspectives, or rather this one ethical perspective composed of two interlocked conflicting judgments. From any point between these two poles, the two poles define the ethical gamut.
Micro-omniscience
Micro-omniscience: because knowing very little is the surest way to know everything.
Dunning-Kruger, in other words.
Political orientations
Does the world need another political categorization scheme? Nope — so here’s one I just thought up:
Political orientations can be categorized according to two original social experiences:
- A) early feelings of membership in one’s society;
- B) early feelings of alienation from one’s society.
From the original feeling, political views can develop a variety of ways.
With respect to one’s own pursuit of membership/alienation:
- C) pursue increased degree of membership in one’s society;
- D) pursue increased degree of alienation from one’s society;
- E) maintain current degree of membership/alienation.
With respect to cultivation of membership/alienation feelings:
- F) toward intensifying feelings of membership for those who feel membership;
- G) toward intensifying feelings of alienation for those who feel alienated;
- H) toward deintensifying feelings of membership and alienation.
With respect to enlistment of actors into belonging/alienated camps:
- I) toward increasing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging, while reducing the number of people who feel alienated;
- J) toward increasing the number of people who feel alienated, and reducing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging;
- K) toward maintaining the numbers of those who feel belonging and alienation.
And finally, with respect to attitudes toward change:
- L) hope – optimistic belief that one’s life can be changed for the better;
- M) fear – pessimistic belief that one’s life will be changed for the worse;
- N) resignation – belief that things will happen however they happen and that one has little or no control over it;
- O) skepticism – things can be changed, but the consequences are radically unpredictable.
My own classification would be B.C.H.I.O.
I might need to make a political quiz.
Value of models
The field of sociology appears largely to have given up on discovering great universal theories and models. Whatever it is that these ideal forms give us, it does not appear to be truth (at least not truth as popularly conceived). My question is: do they give us something else, and, if so, how important is it, and can we do without it?
Are understandings tacit?
Concepts, prior to articulation, exist as hunches that some elusive but relevant similarity exists, then as analogies. From there, things get more explicit, but the root of every concept remain tacit — a spontaneous capacity to recognize likes and differences which can be stated in conceptual terms. I would argue, though, that these articulations are still articulations of something — something tacit, without which the language loses all meaning. In other words, concepts are not themselves constituted of language, but inform language. From this perspective, conceptual (know-what) understanding more similar to practical (know-how) and moral (know-why) knowing than if conceptual understanding is assumed to be essentially linguistic in nature. I’m not even sure if factual (know-that) understanding is necessarily linguistic.
Wanting to be wrong
If we want to live in relationship toward any transcendent reality, we must be prepared to be surprised by it, we must work to see the difference between our ideas of reality and the realities themselves, and we must desire to be taught new and better ways to think. If we want realities to exist independently, beyond the current limits of our knowledge we must also want to be wrong.
Narcissism is cardioid-shaped
When bodies in orbit around a center (x) are drawn as if they are in orbit around one of the orbiting bodies (i), i is situated at the center, x appears to move around i in an elliptical path and all the other bodies appear to move around i in a cardioid path. Only displacing i to orbiting x permits all the bodies (of which i is only one) to move in an elliptical path.
So, let’s be flaky and play with symbols: if i is viewed as I (ego); the other bodies in orbit around x are viewed as Others; the centering of i is narcissism; and the displacement of i from the center to orbiting about x is the Golden Rule… what is x?
Moral types
Some people listen carefully to others, learning from them how they perceive, think and act, and try to hear beneath it who this person is, what kind of life they live, what kind of world they inhabit, what might interest and benefit them.
Some live by the rules of reason. They look for compelling logical arguments and if they see that they have been overpowered, they proudly yield.
Others live by the rules of their ethos. They do what they ought to according to prevailing norms, in loyalty to that which gives their reality structure, substance and meaning.
Yet others follow rules for practical reasons. They avoid breaking rules in order to avoid the consequences of breaking them. They answer primarily to coercive social forces.
Finally, there are those who know only physical force. Everything that seems coercively social is only a few degrees away from physical force. They are barely removed from a state of war.
Each of these types represents a different relationship with transcendence.
Interliminal vacuum
Between conceptual understandings that describe the same phenomena lies a gap of unintelligibility: an interliminal vacuum.
Within this space we do not know how to make sense of what we experience. We don’t know what is what, we don’t know what to make of things or how to respond, and our feelings are unstable and conflicted. Our sense of what, how and why is upturned and scrambled, and no definitions, methods or moral codes are available to guide us out. In fact, we do not even know if a way out exists, and intrinsic to this experience is the profoundly anxious immediate certainty that no way out does exist! Indispensable is a faith trained to refuse to accept this certainty of impossibility at face value, and to rather accept it as one landmark of this interliminal vacuum.
As we come out — if we come out (many turn back) — we realize that each conceptual understanding reveals and conceals, clarifies and confuses, questions and suppresses different aspects of observed reality. We understand that tradeoffs must be made. Certainly, we have been pursuing truth, but it is not The Truth as it Really Is. We were after a finite truth better suited to our finite purposes. This truth must explain reality as we experience it — rigor is required — but this rigor is no longer a comprehensive objective truth capabable of answering every objection thrown at it. This notion of truth is a damaging fantasy — a misnorm that interferes with finding new truths. The only truth that is possible is a best-we-have-right-now-for-where-we-are truth, that emphasizes and deemphasizes different facts and knows the truth that this is what is required to have and share truth with other, finite human beings.
Success in this strange field (interconceptual navigation) requires at least three capabilities:
- A tolerance for distress intrinsic to traversing the interliminal vacuum,
- An understanding of what truth is, how truth works and why we need it,
- A surefooted sense of when we ought to stay put in a truth and when we must leave the truth we know to puncture the horizon and into the vacuum to find another more suitable truth, and
- Recognizing new truth when it is found, even though unsettled truth feels unsettlingly wild, swampy and soft and unsuited for settlement.