Category Archives: Metaphysics
An aggressive poke at materialism
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.
Hyperorder metaphysics
I remain enamored with Habermas’s framing of system versus lifeworld.
It seems to me that our popular philosophy seeks to project a semi-concealed systems-metaphysic beneath our lifeworld. We want to uncover the secrets of this system in order to understand finally how this semi-chaotic lifeworld emerges.
The philosophers I gravitate toward do the opposite. They like me, see the lifeworld as primary, and that systems are what we humans abstract and formalize from this semi-chaos in order to locally and temporarily order it for ourselves. There is no secret system behind the mess, but a hyper-ordered reality that affords many potential but always-partial orderings.
According to this broad school of thought, science is an organized, intricate, precise collaborative lifeworld activity that generates systems meant to explain the lifeworld as comprehensively as possible, and which appears to transcend the lifeworld, while never actually transcending, except in the metaphysical imagination of the scientistic faith.
By the way, I view chaos as hyperorder, not disorder. Hyperorder is what happens when diverse possibilities of ordering coincide so densely and incommensurably that we are unable to pick out an ordering to make sense of whatever concerns us.
My metaphysic is a metaphysic of chaotic hyperorder. Reality is inexhaustibly surprising. However much order we find in it, that order is the furthest thing from ultimate truth.
A prettier way of saying what I’m trying to convey would be to reverse Camille Flammarion’s famous woodcut “L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire” so that he when crawls up to the edge of a uni-ordered universe and pokes his head through its outer edge he beholds myriad overlapping uni-ordered universes in psychedelic communion.
Or maybe the protagonist keeps on crawling, and thrusting his head through successive spheres of reality, once, twice, myriad times — until reality finally thrusts itself through his head, and he finally realizes that all these experiences of transcendence were just varieties of immanence — an ontological kaleidoscope.
Totality : Infinity ::
Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.
Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.
Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.
Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.
Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.
Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.
Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.
Taste of infinity
When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.
We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.
But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.
But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.
And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.
Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.
I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.
Exnihilist Manifesto
In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.
I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.
What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.
It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.
But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.
In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.
The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.
We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.
Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.
If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.
If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.
If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.
If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.
If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.
As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.
If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.
If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.
If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.
If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.
Nothingness is dreadful.
It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.
Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.
If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.
It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.
How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?
The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.
This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.
Oblivia
Inside every soul is a blot of unique obliviousness: an incapacity to conceive some truth that is obvious to all other beings. And this one truth is so obvious to all others that, to them, it is inconceivable that such an obliviousness could exist. And so the world is oblivious to the obliviousness, unable to locate to precise origin of this particular world-bending nothingness.
Religious vs spiritual
My friend asked:
What would you say are the differences between religion and spirituality?
My answer:
Religion is commitment to the reality of God, and to the community and practices that allow one to continuously participate in God’s living reality.
Spirituality focuses only on experiences associated with divine encounters. The reality of God is unimportant.
Campagna
I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.
My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is superficially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-system of our age. A reality-system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose worldmaking activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.
His reason for writing this book is addressing today’s nihilism epidemic.
…the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ’emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?
This double questioning — a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change — led me to consider the problem through another angle.
And now here’s the good part:
Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/ social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes — and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.
As with most books I’m drawn to these days, the joy is mixed with terror of being scooped. His diagnosis is identical to mine.
The ingrained hopelessness of so many contemporary intellectuals is not in the contents of what they believe, which was summarized charmingly by Woody Allen in Annie Hall:
There’s an old joke.
Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”
Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.
The complaints and anxieties change generationally, but the form is constant. It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” And the most constant element is “this time it is different.” It is always “this time is different.”
I agree with Campagna, and Heidegger that this recurring, shifty nihilism is a metaphysical malady that goes by the name technic, technik, technicity.
With Campagna, I see our relationship with language as central to our problem.
Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there will always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom.
Scooped.
But then, maybe that’s what ought to happen when your story is truth.
Pragmatic metaphysics, continued
I’m having a fruitful conversation with Digitalap3 in response to yesterday’s post, Pragmatic metaphysics. It inspired one possible answer to the question I posed: What pragmatic difference is there between pantheism and panentheism?
I think the “difference that makes a difference” (to put it in Rortian terms) may be that pantheism sees nature as a stable, intelligible order, and panentheism does not.
Pantheism conceives both nature and God to be available to us through reason. We can expect linear progress in knowing more and more deeply and thoroughly.
Panentheism, on the other hand, expects deep, epiphanic disruptions to our understanding. Reason is always tentative, and its stability is never long assured.
By this understanding, Thomas Kuhn’s innovation was the introduction of a panentheistic conception of science!
I’ve said before that mine is a metaphysics of surprise. Maybe this gets at it:
Pantheism is a metaphysics of radical reason.
Panentheism is a metaphysics of radical surprise.
Pragmatic metaphysics
I have a philosophical problem fermenting in the back of my mind: Is there any pragmatic difference between pantheism and panentheism? In other words, if we trace what follows from believing pantheism (the faith that sees the universe as identical to God) versus what follows from panentheism (the faith that sees the universe as part of God, in other words a subset of God), do the consequences diverge in any significant way?
Pragmatic metaphysics
Obviously, we cannot conceive something inconceivable prior to acquiring the capacity to conceive it.
But so what? Some realities are inconceivable. Some realities are incomprehensible. Why should we care? Is it such a problem that some things elude our understanding?
It would not matter if it were not for this truth: the as-yet-inconceivable attracts our attention and energy, and gives our lives purpose. The problem is not that we should already conceive or comprehend what we do not yet understand, but a living, active relationship with being who is beyond our understanding is a fundamental condition of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Understanding is a valuable by-product of such a participation in transcendent being.
This is where the Pragmatic Maxim is indispensable.
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
When we reach toward the inconceivable or incomprehensible, we cannot grip the “object” of our awareness (the ungrippable reality beyond our reach) but we can, in fact, work out some of the consequences of this incapacity, as well as some of the consequences of the possibility of acquiring a new capacity to comprehend what has been, so far, incomprehensible.
Strange. I wrote the passage above two days ago. Today, I was looking for an old post and stumbled upon exactly this same thought, which I’d forgotten.
I’ve never thought of pragmatism as something opposed to ontology, or as a methodological alternative to ontology, but this morning I am seeing it that way. I think mine is a pragmatist metaphysics, interested less in what transcends us, than in how a finite being (like each of us) interacts with being understood as transcending its finitude, and how such interactions are experienced. It is metaphysical because it concerns itself with transcendent being, but it chooses to not fruitlessly speculate on what is “behind the veil” but instead the properties of interactions that take place across the veil-line, especially the ones that surprise the anticipations, expectations and norms that comprise mundane existence.
Pragmatic panentheism
When I trace out the pragmatic consequences of panentheism they weave themselves into something I recognize as resembling the reality in which I participate.
Panentheists seem, on the whole, to be a pretty unaggressive lot. We don’t like to prescribe doctrines. I am starting to believe, however, that unexamined metaphysical assumptions are behind much human misconduct. I have developed a strong metaphysical preference, not only for myself, but for others. In other words, it is no longer a matter of personal taste, but of morality.
I might write a Borgesian book review of the nonexistent title, Panentheist Pragmatic.
Metaphysics matters
The way we conceive the boundless whole of reality (ein sof) inhibits and weakens some conceptions and perceptions while emphasizing and reinforcing others.
Anyone who understands metaphysics as a purely speculative and inconsequential opining on unknowable matters does so as a consequence of a metaphysics that encourages this (mis)conception of metaphysics.
Figure-ground
I’m reading Fritz Perls. What he has to say about gestalts is mostly familiar but with some extremely interesting differences from how I’ve been thinking about them. The most interesting difference is in his use of figure-ground. For Perls, the field against which gestalt figures form is a function of the organism and environment together.
…the wholes of experience are definite unified structures. Contact, the work that results in assimilation and growth, is the forming of a figure of interest against a ground or context of the organism/ environment field. The figure (gestalt) in awareness is a clear, vivid perception, image, or insight; in motor behavior, it is the graceful energetic movement that has rhythm, follows through, etc. In either case, the need and energy of the organism and the likely possibilities of the environment are incorporated and unified in the figure.
The process of figure/background formation is a dynamic one in which the urgencies and resources of the field progressively lend their powers to the interest, brightness and force of the dominant figure. It is pointless, therefore, to attempt to deal with any psychological behavior out of its socio-cultural, biological, and physical context.
Any designer will find that last sentence resonant. It is also pointless to attempt to deal with any social behavior — and this is what designers are hired to do! — out of its socio-cultural, biological, and physical context.
I’m enjoying the idea of metaphysics as the ground against which the figure of life events happens. It changes the resonance of Voegelin’s famous expression “divine ground”. Figures that emerge from a ground of pregnant, infinite, inexhaustibly surprising nothingness might never emerge from a ground of matter, space and time.
Esoteric ranting at work
Since 2020, and expecially since October 7th, 2023, I have been feeling a level of betrayal and grief I’ve never experienced before. Something vast and horrible is happening, but those perpetrating it — as always — see themselves as saving the world.
I just had what I think is a pretty eloquent outburst on Slack, at least by Slack standards. It started as a conversation about brand and design materials, but immediately veered into dark depths. Obviously it is ridiculous to talk this way at work, but I do believe I have — and not for the first time — become careericidal and unconcerned with what happens to me.
Here’s the lightly edited and redacted transcript. I’m S, A is Arjun, P is Parc:
S: Brand is a phantom intentional object of an organization.
S: Everything we experience directly and indirectly causes an idea of some “thing” to congeal in people’s minds, with which we have some kind of relationship, now and potentially
S: The reason brand is so seductive and magical seeming is 1) they are ideas of something that transcends the person perceiving and conceiving it… but 2) the specific way we must think in order to make clear sense of brands is outside most people’s philosophical range
P: So the material of brand design is what? Ascribed meaning?
S: I love this question!
S: This is where it is so terribly important to be clear on (to use the popular formula) “when we talk about materials, what are we talking about”?
S: I’d say that intentional object — and ascribed meanings — is NOT the material of branding. It is an outcome of it.
S: The material is that which we directly shape in order to get to that meaning or intentional object
S: Intentional object is a phenomenological concept. Not sure if y’all are familiar with it, or not.
S: So, everything a person experiences has an object of that experience. When we see, there is what is seen: an object of sight. When we hear we hear a sound. Same with thought. We think thoughts, and the thoughts — the content — is the intentional object of the thinking.
S: To put it simply: there is no perception, conception, or experience that isn’t a perception, conception or experiece of something. That something is the intentional object.
S: People who finally “get” phenomenology sometimes report a deep disorientation, like a religious conversion. Husserl talks about this in his last book.
S: To actually inhabit life phenomenologically changes literally everything all at once.
S: People resist it.
A: I think there is overlap with Advaita.
S: It is the same
A: Oh then I am familiar. Swami Sarvapriyananda talked about when he was in ATL. I will share a good talk for others to hear an example from him.
S: That’s why I take religion so seriously.
S: Religious people understand the world phenomenologically.
S: So, to finish my TED talk here — our metaphysics is our ultimate intentional object — the object of all our experiences combined which gives us the world as we know it.
S: Common sense is our everyday life as the intentional object of our living.
S: Brands are the intentional object of an organization in the minds (and bodies) of those who encounter them.
S: And like all intentional objects, they don’t match what we experience when we inspect them close up. Nothing ever does.
S: Branding is an organization’s attempt to manage that intentional object.
S: Dig, daddy-o?
A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?
S: If you examine your ideas of things, they will not bear much scrutiny at all. The more distant the phenomenon, the more we ourselves fill in gaps and try to make them into other, more familiar things
S: Reality and phenomenon are nowhere near alike. Knowing this as mere fact does zero to help us overcome it.
S: To think you are no longer naive realist because you’re aware of naive realism makes you an even worse naive realist. To think you have overcome bias because you are aware of some of your biases and corrected for them leaves your deepest biases unchecked.
S: To be able to empathize with others only where your own group says empathy is needed, and to feel free to diagnose and condemn wherever your own group claims that’s a good thing to do — that is not empathy at all, but exercise of an ideology.
S: I believe the only thing that will help the world come out of its tribal prejudices and hate is not imposing ideological prescriptions (which are themselves tribal) but to go radically phenomenological
A: I think similar to what we were chatting about the other day. You can influence how a moment is experienced via the materials – but that still leaves open for debate things like touchpoints – there is both an absolute form and an experienced form. Are those materials?
S: I know what you mean. But there is no absolute form. There are forms we all can align around more easily.
S: If we want to bring Advaita into it, we could frame this in terms of prakriti and purusha. In fact, I do. Prakriti and purusha are not really different in absolute terms. They are aspects of a single reality, unified beyond our usual conception of things. It is a relative dualism, not an absolute one. Am I getting this right? I’ve only read a few books on Advaita, by one author who was actually a Sufi.
S: And he was claiming a transcendent unity of all esoteric traditions, so that his sufism was an expression of the same inexpressible truth as advaita, taoism, kabbalah, christian mysticism, etc. He may have mangled or force-fit it
S: These universal “givens” of experience — those experiences we can assume to hold in common with all other people — those are what I tend to want to call materials.
S: Those things that we ourselves make of what we are given, our interpretations, our understandings, etc… those i want to separate from materials. Those are the experiential outcomes that we try, through materials, to inspire, induce, convey, etc.
S: Frankly, I only care about design because it is such a wonderful way to engage this kind of truth. When design does not put me in touch with it, I become bored, miserable and totally unmotivated.
S: So thanks for allowing me a few seconds of pleasure. They’re further and further apart all the time in this weird political climate of pervasive political and religious fundamentalism.
S: People confuse religion with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is what happens to religion when it falls under the control of people who cannot or will not understand phenomenologically. The blind lead the blind. Fundamentalism is not religion taken to extremes — it is extremism caused by an appropriation of religious symbols by people who confuse their own tribal beliefs for the Transcendent.
I bet your mother would know EXACTLY what I’m saying here and would agree with it.
S: Wisdom is awareness of what is unknown and unknowable and living in relation to it. But it takes time, horrible mistakes and pain to develop this awareness. It takes years and years, and up to that point, you are the smartest, most self-aware, most moral kind of person who ever existed. Afterwards, you’re none of these things, but at least you’re wiser. “Sadder and wiser.” They go together.
S: Please be sure to include that last bit in what you send to your mother.
Some happy weirdness
I’m reading flaky stuff these days. The exact material is nobody’s business, but it’s even more shocking than you’d guess. It inspired the following spew.
I just found a parallel between two of the books I’m poking around in and my own sacred pamphlet, which is more or less visualized enceptions of my personal faith. (It was not easy to find my genre.) …
In the first book, it is suggested that our worldviews naturally close in on themselves and form vicious logical and interpretive circles. To open the the circle is to form a holy spiral. The opening of that circle is Shabbat. In my tradition it is understood that Shabbat punches a 24-hour diameter hole in time, through which flows Eternity and the Shekhinah (a feminine facet of the Divine), and establishing, for those with the senses to perceive it, Malchut, the Kingdom of Heaven. In this space we are invited to suspend the cranking of our automatic thoughts and behaviors and to open out to the world in its glorious profusion of overlapping orders.
In the second book, a figure is presented, a triangle with a center point. Each point is a letter of the Tetragrammaton. Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. Yod is the active principle, the potential to do. The first Heh is the material upon which Yod may act. Vav is the result of the action upon the material, the child of the Yod-Heh intercourse. The second Heh is the center of the triangle , the entirety of the triangle rooted from the center, which I am inclined to understand as the transcendent being of the triad. This transcendent being of the second Heh then becomes the Yod of another triangle. I am inclined to understand Yod as a transcendental subject whose being is only manifested when it acts upon the first Heh. But the action of Yod and its result ultimately produces the second Heh, which is a transcendent subject. In my understanding then, the triangles are linked by transcendent subjects who found new transcendental subjects.
Some old insights that feel feel alive to me today: Opening the circle into a spiral not only allows it to open onto what transcends its outer limits — to extend outwardly to embrace more and more reality — that same opening permits the spiral to intend inwardly and enter into its own heart, at the center of which lives the divine spark. But some of this reality is the reality of other people. Two spirals can coil together as a double spiral, as can three, four … myriad. A closed circle implies the question, who contains whom? Spirals are egalitarian.
A new Jewish thought. Torah famously ends open-endedly. Moses never enters the land. The Torah is several essential loops of the spiraling story of the Israelites. Past Torah, beyond Deuteronomy, outspirals Talmud, the application of Torah to practical and communal life. But the inward coiling of Torah beneath Genesis, further into the weird heart of the faith inspirals Zohar.
The opposite spirality, who self-referentially thinks about thinking about thinking, and experiences the experiences of our experiencing, is the self choking beast, the Gorging Ouroboros.
Bite!
A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me: “Bite! Bite its head off! Bite!” Thus it cried out of me — my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry. … The shepherd, however, bit as my cry counseled him; be bit with a good bite. Far away he spewed the head of the snake — and he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human — one changed, radiant, laughing! Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed!
Metanoia and the triad
A problem is coming into view for me.
For the last two decades, it has seemed true to me that we have three fundamental factors that shape our being:
The first factor is intuition, and intuition’s “object”, everyday, immediate givens — those real entities we encounter and interact with in the course of our practical lives. Do we have a clear conception of these givens, that allows us to relate this particular given to other givens? Or is our intuition purely tacit recognition that lies dormant in oblivion until it spontaneously recognizes and responds to some given, and then recedes back into oblivion? All encounters with entities around us, whether conceived or merely recognized, are given to experience. Intuition is the faculty of immediate givenness.
The second factor is will — our own motivated response or nonresponse to what we experience. Do we ignore or attend? If we attend, do we merely observe or do we respond? If we respond, do we respond subjectively by adjusting our understanding or attitude, or do we try to respond objectively by changing that which we experience? Or do we do both at once, and interact — alternating fluidly between acting upon and being acted upon? All response, whether ignorant or attentive, whether observational or active, whether inward, outward, or both is will.
The third factor is metaphysical attitude — our sense of reality and our own place in it and our relationship with it, to it, within it. In fact, it might be the essence of our metaphysic what preposition we prepose when relating self to beyond-self. This metaphysical attitude is an implicit faith, which might or might not be articulated as a metaphysical doctrine, and that articulation might be a faithful expression of the implicit faith or it might be in conflict with one’s implicit faith, which means it is held in bad faith.
This is my best understanding of the great triad. The source of intuitive givens is Earth, who is Prakriti, who is Shekhinah, who is the Virgin. The source of reality within whom we exist is Heaven, who is Purusha, who is Keter, who is YHWH. Between is Man, who is the Ideal Person, the polycentered heart of the world, and the schlub who is each of us.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught: “Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: ‘I am a speck of dust,’ and on the other : ‘The world was created for me.’”
If we manage to change our metaphysical attitude, it changes also our intuition and our will. I am talking here about metanoia.
This is not the same thing as coming to authentic articulation of a faith that was misrepresented in bad faith.
Nor is it that more common, much worse reverse case, where we adopt a bad faith that allows us to make coherent articulates sense of things, and share it with others around us — but at the cost of fidelity to our implicit faith and our intuitions. We gain the world(view) but lose our soul (our intuitive and metaphysical connection with reality). This bad faith dooms us to clearly and compellingly positing things rooted neither in our experience nor in our sense of reality.
I am talking about shift in how we tacitly situate ourselves in reality, due to a shifted tacit understanding of reality, a shifted tacit understanding of self and a shifted tacit understanding of relationship between this new self and new reality.
My problem is: In the metanoia experience of rebirth as a new person in a new reality, is it better to think of it as new conceptions — new receptive faculties affording new realities to which, before we were oblivious due to lack of receptive faculties? Or rather, is it registering novel ordered stabilities emerging from the chaos and instability of unordered experience, which we did receive but could not order?
Is metanoia more like being blind but now seeing? Or is it more like becoming able to make out murky forms we see in the shadowy fog? I’ve been inclined to see it as the former.
Protected: Wisdom shock
On halos
If you know what to intuit for, the world is infused with halos of every possible tone. As with light, the gamut of intuitions trail off into the analogue of inperceivable nothingness of infravisible infrared and ultravisible ultraviolet. Intuitions, though, trail off into inconceivable nothingness of infraintelligible sub-ipseity and ultraintelligible super-alterity.
Or try another anomalogy: Just as layers of cool air and hot air produce shimmering mirages over sun-heated ground, halos are intuitive ripples that form at the boundaries of enworldments. Halos are opalescent membranes separating differing universe-sized modes of givenness — differing everythings, differing “ontologies”. But these everythings overlap, or, better, interlap. Each everything coincides, shares its objects in divine commonality. So boundaries or membranes are not spatial or even temporal, but intuitive, which is also a dimension.
If time is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening right now,” and space is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening right here,” intuition is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening to me.”
Space is strangely nebulous; it constricts and expands for us. Sometimes it is a point as small as a subatomic particle, but sometimes it expands to embrace galaxies. Time is strangely nebulous. Sometimes it is focused on this exact instant, but usually time is roving about anticipating and recalling, constricting and expanding, stretching to an imagined moment of origin or terminus. Self is strangely nebulous. Sometimes it is one tiny, simple spark of consciousness — an intuition — but usually it is inter-blending with fellow intuitions, harmoniously or cacophonously, somehow creating a richer more complex sense of self. But self is also intuition, much as sparks unite as flames and flames unite as fire. The self roves across a field of moving intuitions who are sometimes I and sometimes excommunicated from I. And sometimes the I expands beyond the confines of the body. Sometimes the self moved by forces beyond itself, yet this movement seems voluntary. Self is also dimensional, containing the other dimensions as all dimensions do, by definition. Time contains space and self. Space contains time and self. Self contains time and space. Present I, present here, present now — our existential coordinate is the center of All, but everytime, everywhere and everyone is the center of All. “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” …whose circumference is irreducibly nebulous.
To intuit halos is the precise analogue to intuiting spans of time and depths of space.
Artifacts from enworldmants beyond our own bear halos. Halos of benevolence, halos of sublimity, halos of uncanniness, halos of dread — halos of every tone in intuition’s infinitely variegated palate (sic).
These artifact were engendered elsewhere, belong elsewhere, promise elsewhere and — if one allows it, they can effect elsewhere.
Halos are and must be purely intuitive — the spiritual response of the unique within a self encountering the unique beyond the self. Halos defy prefabricated language. If we wish to name the types of halos we would have to assign each one its own proper name.
A genuinely haloed artifact carries the potential of reenworldment, and we intuit this.
But to actualize the potential — the promise — we must brave the perplexity of disenworldment.
If we are attentive every halo is permeated by dread. Sublimity is what gives halos their brilliance. Pure sublimity is blindingly brilliant.
Art intentionally intensifies halos to the furthest point of bearability.
Consumer entertainmentment mutes halos to their dimmest — to unthreatening, playful novelty.