Category Archives: Esoterism

Obscurity ensues

Biography, Esoterism, Judaism

There is a time to make sense to others, and a time to make sense for oneself.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time for war, and a time for peace.

After 14 years of relative stability, changing again.

I cannot understand, integrate and develop radically new ideas and translate them into terms accessible to sane, intelligent people. That happens later.

For now, expect relentless obscurity.

Kabbalistic reflections on Guenon

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Guenon:

The Self is thus the principle by which all the states of the being exist, each in its own proper sphere, which may be called a degree of existence; and this must be understood not only of the manifested states — whether individual, like the human state, or supraindividual, in other words whether formal or formless, but also, though the word “exist” then becomes inadequate, of the unmanifested states, comprising all those possibilities which, by their very nature, do not admit of any manifestation, as well as the possibilities of manifestation themselves in their principial state; but this Self subsists by itself alone, for in the total and indivisible unity of its innermost nature it has not, and cannot have, any principle external to itself.

This one-sentence passage is very dense and of the highest importance, so I want to break it down into its elemental components, and connect them with Kabbalistic concepts, which are rapidly becoming my native tongue. My own Kabbalistic connections will be italicized and parenthesized.

  • Self is the universal principle. By the principle of Self all other states of the being exist.
  • There is no principle by which Self exists. Self is the principle of all principles.
  • States of being exist in various degrees of existence, which may regarded as spheres. (In Kabbalah, these spheres are articulated into “four worlds”, Olamot.)
  • The human individual state is formal. The supraindividual state is formless. (In Kabbalah, the formal and individual world is Assiyah. The formless, supraindividual world is Yetzirah.)
  • Manifested and unmanifested states is a different distinction from formal and formless. So far, we have spoken only of manifested states which can properly be said to “exist” (again, the actual world of Assiyah and the formational world of Yetzirah. Now we are transcending to the unmanifested worlds of Beriyah — creation — and Atzilut — emanation).
  • Of the unmanifested states some do admit of manifestation and are the possibilities of manifestation in their principial state. (The former is the world of Beriyah, which manifests by principle and in its lowest Sefirah — Beriyah Malkhut — creates the highest Sefirah in Yetzirah — Yetzirah Keter — from which the world of Yetzirah manifests, via the Yetzirah Sefirot).

(Those unmanifested states that do not admit of manifestation are only of Atzilut, but not of Beriyah. These are pure ineffable mystery, for the sake of which All is, and we feel this for-the-sake-of whenever anything matters to us. When we say “God is love” the truth of this statement is charged by Atzilut, and beyond Atzilut, Ein Sof.)

I have what might be an unusual understanding of Yetzirah is essentially supraformal, because it forms, but is not itself form, just as seeing sees but is not seen and hearing hears but is not heard.

I’ve come to understand the Sefirot of Assiyah as attempting, in human objective terms, to represent the worlds above, but by uppaya (skillful means to teach transcendent truths inexpressible in the terms of the present faith-state of the learner).

We try to indicate the forming of Yetzirah by the conceptual forms of the Sefirot Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Gevurah and Chesed. Those are formal indicators of supraformal manifested being, formal fruit by which we know the tree of formation.

(The Hod-Netzach pair in Assiyah, incidentally, is the locus of uppaya.)

By my understanding The subtle (or astral) plane is not Yetzirah itself. The subtle plane is only these non-material objective entities that belong to the Sefirot who objectively represent Yetzirah.

The entire point of my weird term “enception” is to establish a distinction between capacity to form, formation and form, capacity to conceive, conceiving and concept! A capacity to form — to conceive or perceive — or most generally, to receive (the literal meaning of the word “kabbalah”!) is created from Beriyah, manifests in Yetzirah as a action — forming — and then actualizes in Assiyah as forms, concepts, sensibly recognized (perceived) material objects, etc.

So an enception is the analogue to the faculty of sight, hearing.

Without the requisite enception, one remains oblivious to what one would otherwise receive. When a person exclaims “I was blind, but now I see!” this is the annunciation of enception. It is by this — disoblivion, anamnesis — that we experience Beriyah.

And it is by this that we can never again take nihilism at face value. Everything can, at any minute irrupt from oblivion and bathe the world with overwhelming meaning. Nothingness is where this meaning enters, and so nothing is no longer an argument against anything. Exnihilism annihilates nihilism!

None of this is meant to suggest these worlds are not metaphysically real, only that our attempts to make them objective is uppaya.

Reification is different from objectification. This Kabbalistic ontology hyperreifies and disobjectifies the worlds beyond Assiyah.

Everso and the four worlds

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil

I understand that most of my recent philosophical focus has concentrated in Yesod-Malchut within the world of Beriyah, which corresponds with Keter-Da’at within the world of Yetzirah. This is where the plurality of Yetzirah’s forms converge and are constrained by the supraformal Absolute.

(The closest thing we can have to “absolute truth” are truths which are faithful to the supraformal Absolute as they grasp whatever content they comprehend. We can clearly and consistently comprehend all kinds of forms, but only some of these help us maintain our roots in transcendent reality. Many, in fact, sever these roots, in order to grasp more comprehensively, clearly or consistently. This is what Technic systematically, methodically does, in fact.)

Prior to this, I focused on Yesod-Malchut within the world of Yetzirah and Keter-Da’at of the world of Assiyah. This is where the “Everso” eversion occurs. This is where subjective potential “concavity” manifests in actual grasping of “convex” objects of experience — where intentionality finds intentional objects. Those material objects we call “objectively real” are the entities of Malchut in the world of Assiyah. And the truths we call “subjective” are, in fact, the imaginative and emotional objects of Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tif’eret, Geverah and Chesed. The purely conceptual, abstract objects of modern philosophy reach up into Beriyah and Chokhmah within Assiyah. Modern theology extends to Keter within Assiyah.

Assiyah is objective top to bottom, and even what it calls “subjective” (meaning “nonmaterial”) is, in terms of form, objective.

Yetzirah, though essentially formal, is formation — the act of forming — the How of formation. We cannot understand formation in direct formal terms. New terms — new How and new What — are needed to get at this level of truth. The Tree of Yetzirah is known by its objective fruits in Assiyah. Yetzirah conceives and enwords, and manifests an enworldment of Assiyah.

When it seems that we inhabit different worlds, this is because we enworld Malchut by different states of Yetzirah.

And when it seems that some of these worlds are nihilistic, alienated and alienating (or to themselves, uncompromisingly scientific, rigorous, and fully in touch with objective reality) and others of these worlds are saturated with meaning and divine light (or to others subjective, irrational, fantastical, retrograde, woowoo or dogmatic), this is because some enworldments are focused solely on Assiyah, where others are focused primarily or exclusively on Beriyah.

Judaism tries to enworld transparently between Beriyah and Assiyah. A transparent Yetzirah is angelic, in its proper sense. A Yetzirah that attempts ultimacy and autonomy (from Beriyah) is ideological.

Yetzirah, alone with Assiyah, without Beriyah, seems pluralistic. The question is only what conceptual systems — Kuhnian paradigms — can adequately organize our material actualities so we can understand and control matter.

Things get considerably more complex and constrained if we consider the subjective effect of our paradigms. Do they flood reality with meaning, beauty and hope, or do they drain it of meaning and drown us in despair? This is a function of Yetzirah’s relationship with Beriyah. Now the question is whether our conceptual systems organize our material actualities together with a relationship with the Divine One of whom we are an organic part.

One way I have expressed this is that, since the Enlightenment, we have focused exclusively on the What and the How of our experience, and bracketed the Why. Scientific method excludes all Why considerations. Liberal-Democracies proceduralize public life, and relegate all meaning to the private realm of home, business and faith community.

This moment in history witnesses a popular implosion of nihilism. It seems most people cannot find meaning in the condition we’ve created for ourselves — the enworldment of Technic, the enworldment that capitalism and communism alike enworld and inhabit — both uncritically, unconsciously and with pseudo-divine omniscience.

The everted present

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star

Ray Cummings: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once.”

“…And,” someone adds, “space is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening everywhere all at once.”

“…And,” another offers, “self is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening to everyone all at once.”

Presence is God’s way of distributing Godself through time space and consciousness.

But within God, everything does happen all at once, everywhere to everyone.

Adonai echad.

The present is the Absolute everted within Itself.

Contemplation

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

A passage from Plotinus reminded me of another passage from Brothers Karamazov:

The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator: it depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is “contemplating” something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It’s true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it — why and what for, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both.

There are a good many “contemplatives” among our peasants. And Smerdyakov was probably one of them. And he was probably greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.

From Plotinus, who might very well have inspired the above passage:

If [nature] were asked why she creates, she would reply — if, that is, she were willing to listen to the questioner and to speak — “You should not have questioned me, but understood in silence, just as I myself keep silent, for I am not accustomed to talk. What is there to understand? That what comes into being is the object of my silent contemplation, and that the product of my contemplation comes into being in a natural way. I myself was born of such contemplation; this is why I have a natural love for contemplation. My contemplation engenders the product of my contemplation, just as geometers draw figures by contemplating. I, however, do not draw anything, but I contemplate, and the lines of bodies come into existence, as if they were issuing forth from me.”

(This is an English translation of Hadot’s French translation.)

Etymonline’s entry on contemplation:

contemplation(n.) —

c. 1200, contemplacioun, “religious musing,” from Old French contemplation and directly from Latin contemplationem (nominative contemplatio) “act of looking at,” noun of action from past-participle stem of contemplari “to gaze attentively, observe; consider, contemplate,” originally “to mark out a space for observation” (as an augur does), from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + templum “area for the taking of auguries” (see temple (n.1)).

It is attested from late 14c. as “reflection, thinking, thought, act of holding an idea continuously before the mind.” The meaning “act of looking attentively at anything” is from late 15c.

In cogitation the thought or attention flits aimlessly about the subject.

In meditation it circles round it, that is, it views it systematically, from all sides, gaining perspective.

In contemplation it radiates from a centre, that is, as light from the sun it reaches out in an infinite number of ways to things that are related to or dependent on it. [Ezra Pound, 1909, recalling in his own words ideas from Richard of St. Victor, 12c., “De praeparatione animi ad contemplationem“]

Perhaps to con-temple something is precisely to refrain from com-prehending it.

The last passage in Daniel Matt’s Essential Kabbalah is taken from the Sefer Bahir

Whoever delves into mysticism cannot help but stumble, as it is written: “This stumbling block is in your hand.” You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.

This recalled a passage from Aryeh Kaplan’s Inner Space:

The Kabbalists teach that this is the concept of God’s most sacred name, theTetragrammaton, YHVH. The Tetragrammaton consists of four letters Yod, Heh, Vav and Heh. These four letters have a very special significance.

The Tetragrammaton is related to the past, present, and future tense of the Hebrew word “to be.” In Hebrew, “was” is Hayah, “is” is Hoveh and “will be” is Yihyeh. Therefore, when one reads the Tetragrammaton, one should have in mind that God “was, is and will be” all at the same instant.’ This indicates that God is utterly transcendental, and higher than the dimension of time. God exists in a realm where time does not exist. At the same time, the Tetragram

At the same time, the Tetragrammaton denotes that God is Mehaveh, “the One who brings all existence into being. It is in this sense that the Tetragrammaton refers to God’s causal relationship with His creation. He is the source of all being and existence and His essence permeates creation.

We can understand this on the basis of an ancient Kabbalistic teaching which states that the four letters of the Name contain the mystery of Charity. According to this teaching, the first letter Yod can be likened to a coin. The letter Yod is small and simple like a coin.

The second letter, Heh, represents the hand that gives the coin. Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet also represents a number. Since Heh is the fifth letter of the alphabet, it has a numerical value of five. The “five” of Heh alludes to the five fingers of the hand.

The third letter, Vav (t), which has the form of an arm, denotes reaching out and giving. Furthermore, in Hebrew, the word Vav means a “hook,” and thus Vav has the connotation of connection. Indeed, in Hebrew, the word for the conjunction “and” is represented by the letter Vav prefixed to a word.

Finally, the fourth letter, the final Heh (n), is the hand of the beggar who receives the coin.

And every mention of the together-grasping comprehending mind always recalls Kosho Uchiyama’s beautifully titled Opening the Hand of Thought:

I use the expression “opening the hand of thought” to explain as graphically as possible the connection between human beings and the process of thinking. I am using “thinking” in a broad sense, including emotions, preferences, and all sense perceptions, as well as conceptual thoughts. Thinking means to be grasping or holding on to something with our brain’s conceptual “fist.” But if we open this fist, if we don’t conceive the thought, what is in our mental hand falls away. Our universal self, jiko, also includes that which lets go. Sleeping at night is a natural expression of your life with the hand of your thinking mind wide open. Nodding off while you are awake is something else entirely, from the perspective of the self. While you are awake, opening the hand of thought isn’t dozing or thinking, it is the fine line between them where you really are right now.

The self of Western psychology is the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am.” But actually, we are, whether we think so or not, and behind the conscious self your life continues even when you are unconscious or unaware. And precisely because of that we are alive with a life that includes our thinking self. In fact, it is because we have this actual ongoing life that the thought can occur that we are only our thoughts. So our true or whole self is not just an abstract self made of thoughts. Our whole self is the force or quality of life that enables conscious thought to arise, and it includes that personal, conscious self, but it also includes the force that functions beyond any conscious thought.

The whole or universal self is the force that functions to make the heart continue beating and the lungs continue breathing, and it is also the source of what is referred to as the subconscious.

This inclusive self is at heart the creative power of life. It is related to what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls the creative power of God.

That power — what is immediately alive and also what is created — that is self too. If you want to use God as your referent, it is crucial to receive God as pure creative power, as being fresh and alive and working in and through yourself: no matter what I do or think, God is in all things and is working through me.

Whatever is alive — that is jiko, or universal self. All of this — thoughts and feelings, the and desires, the subconscious and the beating heart, the effort that enables other lives to function and the creative power of life itself — is what I mean by the “self.” Saying “whole” or “true” or “universal” self is a way to try to include all the actual reality of life, and what I am saying here is that the actual reality of life is not something separate from the actual reality of your own life.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Pluralism

Esoterism, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.

I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.

But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.

We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.

But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?

Belimah

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

Chaos is relative to an order-comprehending mind.

To comprehend, a mind must have a capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) a given order within increasingly comprehensive comprehensions of order. All these interrelated, inter-comprehending comprehensions are themselves ordered within a grounding and orienting relation to absolute reality. Metaphysics is what we call any grounding, orienting relation to absolute reality — again, within which all comprehensions occur.

Where the capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) order-within-order is lacking — where an enception is lacking — only chaos can be apprehended. We cannot comprehend what the chaos is, only apprehend that the chaos is.

(((Incidentally yesterday I leaned a new Hebrew word, used in the Sefir Yetzirah: “belimah“. According to Daniel Matt’s footnotes:

The word belimah, also obscure, can be read as two words: beli mah, “without what.” It appears once in the Bible in the book of Job (26:7): “He stretches the north over chaos and suspends the earth over belimah,” meaning apparently “emptiness” or “nothingness,” the cosmic void. The sefirot are without whatness, they cannot be grasped. A few paragraphs later, we find belimah followed immediately by the imperative belom, “bridle, restrain”: “Ten sefirot belimah. Belom, Bridle your mind from imagining, your mouth from speaking.” The phrase sefirot belimah conveys a sense of concealment and mystery.

I will translate belimah as whatless or whatlessness. It is any reality that defies objective understanding. And if to you understanding necessarily entails objectivity, and if to you objective and real or objective and true are synonymous, I’ll say it plainly: You are missing an entire class of enceptions. This condition is analogous to spiritual blindness and deafness, lacking “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” certain crucial religious truths. Your religious common sense is missing a dimension, but you are as unable to miss it as a birth-blind person is unable to miss sight. But I will also say it plainly: if you find a way to allow these religious sights and sounds to become visible and audible to you, it will be the most glorious shock of your life. You will feel like a new person in a new, infinitely meaningful world. And I know you cannot believe me, but that does not make it any less true. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.” You will see.)))

The intuition that real order is present, but intellectually inaccessible, generates apprehension. This apprehension intensifies with the intuited importance of the intellectually inaccessible intuited reality. A crucial whatless thatness inspires excruciating apprehension, a minute spark of the dread of the infinite, which to us is Ayin, nothingness. This nothingness is the outer surface of myriad surfaces concealing Ein Sof. The Kabbalists call these concealing surfaces garments. Ein Sof is clothed in Ayin, and if it were otherwise, our finitude would exfinite into the infinity to which it belongs and we would be whatever the eversion of annihilated is. I suppose “exnihilated” is as good a word for it as any.

How can we account for enception? Enceptions are determined by possibilities within a comprehensive conception.

Enceptions crystallize from the multistable possibilities of soul.

Some possibilities of soul harmonize essential orders essential to human existence and relate them to what surpasses all understanding, but at the cost of practical competence. Other possibilities of soul grasp the objects of scientific understanding at the cost of understanding social or biological epiphenomena like love or morality. Other possibilities permit deep attunement to people and groups, but at the cost of clarity and self-confidence.

When we understand one way, within one metaphysic and one comprehensive comprehension, it enables some enceptions and disables others. It produces a distinctive vision with its own regions of intuitive sensitivity and oblivion, and its own way of filling in oblivion with its own imaginative productions.

Some metaphysics give us unshakable certainty about a great many unimportant matters, leaving us free to fill in the vast void of truth with our own constructed ideas. We can freely invent whatever reality we wish to inhabit. The only cost is that we are haunted by the whatless thatness of the absolute, and almost everything induces excruciating apprehension. We are disoriented, ungrounded and gripped in anxiety, neurosis and depression. Love is impossible, because other people intensify our angst — to the degree they are personal and non-identical and refuse to cooperate with our language games. But at least we are masters of our own domain, free to construct according to our whim. “Neither God, nor master.”

Truth circulates only when the ladder of Yetzirah stands firm on the rock of Assiyah and penetrates the heavens to Beriyah.

Kabbalistic Geometric Meditations

Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Metaphysics, Star

In my weird little hermetic pamphlet, Geometric Meditations, the stanzas illuminating the star diagram follow a regular pattern. Three levels of indent indicate three levels of reality across three dimensions of being.

First, a dimension is named.

Within that dimension, we encounter reality in a particular way, within a polarity of behind and beyond.

And this encounter is given in a modality of immediate presence.

I now believe that each element of this pattern corresponds to one of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah:

The dimension itself is Atzilut, the realm of pure emanation.

The polarities are Beriyah, the realm of intelligibility.

The structure of encounter is Yetzirah, the realm of ideal form.

And the raw present is Assiyah, the realm of the actual.

Talking at my designer friend

Design, Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

An edited version of a comment to a friend at work who is reading Campagna’s Magic and Technic:

My concern with the state of service design is this: The whole power of design is that it goes to the rough ground of apeiron — to true material, as opposed to scientistic thought-about material — as a way to circumvent the wordworld of social construction that many people inhabit and mistake for reality.

At a certain velocity and altitude of generality, we lose contact with the apeironic ground and detach into the realm of pure form (subtle plane / yetzirah).

It seems to me that this is happening to the field of service design, just as it happened to UX when it underwent radical acceleration, standardization and metrification under the Lean Startup regime. As we work at ever increasing velocity, to think and communicate more explicitly in the compulsively quantifying, abstracting, operationalizing language of management, as the time we have for reflection shatters into tinier and disarrayed shards, we become alienated from designerly ways and the kind of contact design makes with unprocessed reality.

Under technicity / technik / technic this always happens. A Marxist, of course, will blame it on capitalism (and that is partly valid) — but it is important to remember that Marxism is at least as technicity-dominated as capitalism, and equivalent alienations happen under their order as well. In fact, Marxism is even more alienated, as its aggressive-compulsive breaking with the past severs it from vestigial non-technic attitudes that remain in capitalism and provide minor relief.

Capitalism and marxism are puppets on the right and left hand of the same technicity puppeteer, who stages a bloody, century-long Punch and Judy tragicomedy.

 

An aggressive poke at materialism

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Star, Taoism

It is entirely possible to take science seriously and to respect science as the ultimate approach to generating valid knowledge and technological know-how in its own very important sphere, without succumbing to the temptation to make science (or even the ideal object of scientific inquiry) our metaphysical foundation.

In fact, as Thomas Kuhn beautifully observed and articulated, scientists can function better as scientists if they do not confuse their physics and their metaphysics. Why? Because the most important and consequential scientific work challenges our understanding of the ultimate substances and dynamics underlying reality as we know it. When this understanding collapses and then reconfigures itself in radical and inconceivable ways (as they do during scientific crises and revolutions) those whose entire personal integrity and sanity stand upon these understandings cannot maintain themselves during these disruptions. They cannot avoid clinging to these ideas as if their life depended upon them, because, spiritually, this is literally the case.

The best scientists stand on something else as they work on their basic notions of physical reality, even if that something else is never thematized or analyzed. And frankly, scientific analysis and objective thematization is the wrong form for metaphysical understanding. Such attempts are practical category mistakes of the lowest order, which lead directly to fundamentalism, the objectifying of what must be subjective, the containment of what contains, the eversion of being into thing.

I know very few metaphysical materialists who seem fully aware of the difference between a scientific understanding of matter and the givenness of matter and its source. That source is dark and even darker, where darkness is imperceptible — the glaring mercurial chrome behind sight itself.

What metaphysical materialists worship as ultimate is the scientific understandability, not material mystery, not the materially-inflected transcendence known as apeiron. They cannot know it, but they are, in fact, metaphysical idealists.

Today’s scientistic fanatics could be viewed by material mystics as alchemical fundamentalists.