Category Archives: Religion

Jesus as Jewish missionary

Judaism, Philosophy

A friend of mine said “…so basically, Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes. My attempts to understand Jesus’s teaching without the overwhelming influence of Paul’s interpretation led me to sharing Jesus’s faith, which precludes idolizing him as a god, a mistake which I am certain Jesus would have found alarming and abhorrent.

It also precludes any notion of Jesus descending from heaven to radically interrupt or to complete or perfect the Jewish tradition. The tradition was always and still is constituted of disruptions, breaks, repentance, atonement, redemption, rebirth — and it takes a highly partial (and in my opinion, grossly distorted) view of Judaism to pick out one episode from this long story and view it as a radically new first chapter of a new story.

That being said, I do feel that I share a degree of faith with some Christians I know. But that is despite their beliefs, and most of all the belief that their beliefs are the crux of their faith.

 

George Soros

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

I’ve been hearing such dark and incredible tales about George Soros’s depravity and deviousness I felt I’d better look into who he is. And what better better place to start than to go directly to the source and read one of their books?

It turns out Soros is a philosopher — a Popperian. Not only does he have a well-developed liberal ethic, he has developed a profound and liberal metaphysic, which is not something I normally expect from an investor.

The profundity of his metaphysic is what makes him truly exceptional, and I suspect it is also what triggers such violent paranoia in far-right circles. This is what happens when souls who know everything because they need to know everything encounter a soul who knows a much bigger everything.

If only the far-right conspiracists weren’t deluded about Soros’s goals and the extent of his power! If Soros were in a position to actualize his political vision we all would be better off.

I intend to continue reading Soros, and to study Karl Popper’s political writings. This might be the re-fortified liberal philosophy I’ve been looking for.

Four sides to every conflict

Ethics, Hermeneutics, History, Judaism, Philosophy

In conflicts, there are four sides to every story: there is my side, there is your side, there is what I think your side is, and there is what you think my side is.

If you want to know a person’s soul, don’t be distracted by how that person represents himself in a conflict. You’ll learn far more about who he is listening to what he has to say about his enemy.

If you hear dark and incredible tales of depravity and deviousness, take extreme care. Being on the side of good, facing such enemies, the righteous man might be forced to do evil things to defend himself and his people. If he has foresight and strong resolve he might even take preemptive action in order to avert an inevitable catastrophe.

 

 

What isn’t religion’s purpose?

Judaism

What isn’t religion’s purpose? Here is a partial list:

  • Religion’s purpose is not to give us true beliefs.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to get us to act some particular way.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to make us feel some particular way.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to comfort us.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to help us form a personal relationship with God.
  • Religions’s purpose is not to put us in contact or communion with higher being or beings.
  • Religions’s purpose is not to bring us to a different state of consciousness.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to inspire us to serve our needy neighbors.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to provide us a supportive community.
  • Religion’s purpose is not to give us a sense of meaning.

These things are all means to another end, another purpose.

Why our ideas diverge

Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

What are the personal differences that produce pluralism? Here’s a list off the top of my head:

  1. What is our stock of life experiences, which serve as points of reference and call for explanation?
  2. What is our schema of relevance (which determines what draws our attention and what remains unperceived)?
  3. What is our conceptual repertoire (which limits the questions we know how to ask, the answers we can conceive, and which ideas are inconceivable)?
  4. What are our prior conceptual commitments (which limit the range of philosophically acceptable answers to the questions we ask)?
  5. What questions do we habitually ask?
  6. When faced with competing criteria of theory choice, which are given relative precedence?
  7. What is our perplexity tolerance (which limits our appetite for novel questions and philosophically unacceptable answers)?
  8. How do we approach the unanswerable questions of metaphysics?

 

Tragedy-fortified process theology

Judaism, Metaphysics

I think my view of life is more tragic than the process philosophies I’ve encountered so far. I’ve found myself writing “lacks tragedy” in the margins of passages such as this one, from Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy:

It is vital to emphasize again and again that God’s power is not omnipotent unilateral or coercive power. Quite the opposite. God cannot coerce any creature. Every creature has its own freedom. Rather God is the persuasive ground of freedom. So God knows what we may choose and are likely to choose, but not what we will choose. God is omniscient (all knowing) in the sense that God knows everything there is to know, but since the future does not exist it is not there to be known. Only the possibilities for the future can be known perfectly. Nor can God remain unaffected by the world: God is the only one who has the strength, the ability, to be open to every single experience in the world. God is the only one who can take every thing in, integrate it with God’s own infinitely ancient wisdom, and create God’s self out of that relationship in each moment. God is the only one who can then feed back to every creature in the world a lure and call toward those possibilities that are best for it. All the possibilities are there, good and bad, but they come to us, Whitehead says, with God’s call toward the better.

I see no reason why God should always offer a win-win for both the participant and the whole in which it participates. In fact, I think the role of religion is to help us affirm the whole even when it requires us to make sacrifices or even be sacrificed. Attempts at claiming that there’s a possibility of individual benefit built into every crisis lacks credibility and sublimity.

I do believe in “the lure”, and in fact it is the basis for my own belief in God, but I believe this lure demands transcending love from us, and is not itself an act of love of our individual selves. The lure demands that we live from ourselves toward that which includes and exceeds us. 

The miraculous emergence of unfreedom

Metaphysics, Philosophy

Reading Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, I just had an epiphany: for the last few centuries we have been asking the question of free-will from a base-norm of unfreedom: “how does freedom emerge from the dynamics of unfree materials?” If you adopt Process Philosophy’s metaphysic, it makes much more sense to ask “how does unfreedom emerge from the interactions of free-willed particles?” This is a fascinating way to reinterpret reality.

Myth of the Rise

Judaism

If you believe Earth was created as a paradise meant to remain perfect, but made imperfect by human wickedness, every flaw will be viewed as an example of corruption that should never have happened.

If you believe Earth was created brutal but has over time raised itself out of brutality in a semi-steady process of development toward something better, every flaw can be viewed as a project for improvement.

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Some people look at the United States of America as a place where the Civil Rights Movement was able to happen, and this is one more reason to honor and love it.

Some people look at the United States of America as a place where the Civil Rights Movement was needed to rectify inexcusable injustices, and this is one more reason to despise and condemn it.

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I have always instinctively disliked the myth of the Fall.

Last week’s pasha was Bereshit. (Happy Simchat Torah.) The rabbi who facilitated Torah Study commented that Judaism has never read the story of the Edenic exile as a catastrophe or a matter of regret. For Judaism, the book of Genesis is stage setting for the main act, Exodus: a story of liberation from bondage, a cause for perpetual celebration.

Two points of departure: an Exile and an Exodus. Two trajectories: a Fall and a Rise.

Ancestors and siblings of process thought

ANT, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Extended Self, Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics, Holarchy, Judaism, Symbols and diagrams

While I’m scanning passages from C. Robert Mesle’s Process-Relational Philosophy, here are two more that inspired me.

The first passage appeals to my designer consciousness:

Descartes was wrong in his basic dualism. The world is not composed of substances or of two kinds of substances. There is, however, what David Ray Griffin calls an “organizational duality.” Descartes was correct that rocks and chairs and other large physical objects do not have minds, while humans do. In Whiteheadian terms, rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them. In living organisms, however, there can be varying degrees to which the organism is structured to give rise to a single series of feelings that can function to direct the organism as a whole. We can see fairly clearly that at least higher animals like chimps and dogs have a psyche (mind or soul) chat is in many ways like our own. This psyche draws experience from the whole body (with varying degrees of directness and clarity), often crossing a threshold into some degree of consciousness, and is able in turn to use that awareness to direct the organism toward actions that help it to survive and achieve some enjoyment of life. The self, or soul, then is not something separate from the body. It arises out of the life of the body, especially the brain.

The mind/soul/psyche is the flow of the body’s experience. Yet your body produces a unique mind that is also able to have experiences reaching beyond those derived directly from the body. We can think about philosophy, love, mathematics, or death in abstract conceptual ways that are not merely physical perceptions. Without the body, there would be no such flow of experience, but with a properly organized body, there can be a flow of experience that moves beyond purely bodily sensation. Furthermore, your mind can clearly interact with your body so that you can move, play, eat, hug, and work. There is a kind of dualism here in that the mind is not only the body but it is, in Griffin’s phrase, a hierarchical dualism rather than a metaphysical one. There are not two kinds of substances — minds and bodies. There is one kind of reality — experience. But experience has both its physical and mental aspects.

To my ears, this is a beautiful dovetail joint waiting to be fitted to extended cognition. “Rocks are simply not organized to produce any level of experience above that of the molecules that form them” but if a human organizes those rocks in particular ways, for instance drilling and shaping them into abacus beads, or melting them down to manufacture silicon chips, those rocks can be channeled into extended cognitive systems which in a very real way become extensions of our individual and collective minds. It is ironic to me that even at this exact instance, in typing out this sentence, a thought is forming before my eyes with the help of rocks reorganized as silicon chips which are participating in the “having” of this very thought. And if anyone is reading this and understanding it, my thought, multi-encoded, transmitted, decoded and interpreted by your own intelligence — rocks have helped organize this event of understanding! Humans help organize more and more of the “inanimate” world into participants of experience.

And now we are wading out into the territory developed by Actor-Network Theory, which asks, expecting intricately branching detailed answers: How do humans and non-humans assemble themselves into societies? I think the commonality within these harmoniously similar thought programs is their common rootedness in Pragmatism. It is no accident that Richard J. Bernstein saw pragmatism as a constructive way out of  the unbridled skeptical deconstruction of post-modernism, and that Whitehead, who acknowledged a debt to Pragmatism, is said to offer a constructive postmodernism.

The second passage appeals to my newly Jewish hermeneutic consciousness. This is a quote by Whitehead:

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

This, of course, is a description of the hermeneutic circle, the concept that we understand parts in terms of the concepts by which we understand them, but that our concepts are often modified (or replaced) in the effort to subsume recalcitrant parts. We tack between focusing on the details and (to the degree we are reflective) revisiting how we are conceptualizing those details. These are the two altitudes Whitehead mentions: an on-the-ground investigation of detail and a sky-view survey of how all those details fit together.

This is an ancient analogy. The Egyptians made the ibis, an animal with a head like a snake (the lowest animal) and the body of a bird (the highest animal) the animal of Thoth, their god of writing, the Egyptian analogue to Hermes. Nietzsche also used this image in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and that is where I first encountered it.

An eagle soared through the sky in wide circles, and on him there hung a serpent, not like prey but like a friend: for she kept herself wound around his neck. “These are my animals,” said Zarathustra and was happy in his heart. “The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun — they have gone out on a search. They want to determine whether Zarathustra is still alive. Verily, do I still live? I found life more dangerous among men than among animals; on dangerous paths walks Zarathustra. May my animals lead me!” When Zarathustra had said this he recalled the words of the saint in the forest, sighed, and spoke thus to his heart: “That I might be wiser! That I might be wise through and through like my serpent! But there I ask the impossible: so I ask my pride that it always go along with my wisdom. And when my wisdom leaves me one day — alas, it loves to fly away — let my pride then fly with my folly.”

And I have seen the Star of David as an image of the synthesis of atomistic ground-up and holistic sky-down understandings. And this is one reason I chose Nachshon (“snakebird”) as my Hebrew name when I converted to Judaism.

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(Eventually, I’ll have to try to connect process thought with my extremely simplistic and possibly distorted understanding of chaos theory. Eventually.)

Process Theology

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Pragmatism

I’ve been poking around in several books on Process Philosophy/Theology to see if my own homegrown theology isn’t in fact some version of Process Theology. So far I’m finding some closely matching concepts. (Two big ones: Panentheism and “the lure”.) That is not surprising: it turns out Whitehead was influenced by Pragmatism (which not long ago I considered my religion). Process Theology appears to me to be the religious implication of Pragmatism.

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For awhile I’ve speculated that Fundamentalism is actually a religion of its own: a distinctive way to interpret scripture and to practice religion. Fundamentalisms are more like one another than they are to other denominations within the same religion. I’ve come to see Mysticism and Humanism as similarly connected. (Note Oct. 3: and the book I’m reading reminded me, also Scholasticism.) There is considerable similarity across Mysticisms and Humanisms (that is, attempts to fit religion inside the Enlightenment framework).  I’ve been calling them “lateral traditions”. I’m sure this is not a new concept, and when I find the language others are using to talk about this idea I’ll adopt it.

I believe Process Theology represents another lateral tradition.

Yom Kippur dream

Biography, Fables, myths & parables, Judaism

Last night after we broke the Yom Kippur fast, I fell asleep and had a vivid dream. I was in a yard behind a suburban ranch house where two trees were growing. One tree was nearly barren. It had already flowered and given fruit and had shed most of its yellow leaves.  The other tree had strong limbs and was bursting with green leaves. But as I stood admiring it, I noticed the soil at its base was rippling. The tree began shaking violently and the ground heaved a boiling swarm of beetle-worms, which were devouring the tree’s  roots. A large section of the tree facing me calved off and crashed to the ground. Within two minutes the young tree was reduced to a flat pile of wet sawdust. Both trees were gone, and thick grass grew over where the trees had stood. There was no sign they had ever existed on the rectangular lawn. “Perfect space for a swimming pool,” observed a woman standing behind me.

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Was this dream a response to yesterday’s Torah portion?

God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.

This displeased Jonah greatly, and he was grieved.

He prayed to the LORD, saying, “O LORD! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment.

Please, LORD, take my life, for I would rather die than live.”

The LORD replied, “Are you that deeply grieved?”

Now Jonah had left the city and found a place east of the city. He made a booth there and sat under it in the shade, until he should see what happened to the city.

The LORD God provided a gourd plant, which grew up over Jonah, to provide shade for his head and save him from discomfort. Jonah was very happy about the plant.

But the next day at dawn God provided a worm, which attacked the plant so that it withered.

And when the sun rose, God provided a sultry east wind; the sun beat down on Jonah’s head, and he became faint. He begged for death, saying, “I would rather die than live. ”

Then God said to Jonah, “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” “Yes,” he replied, “so deeply that I want to die.”

Then the LORD said: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight.

And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well!”

Critical reverence

History, Judaism, Politics

In Torah study my fellow students regard our heritage with a distinctive attitude that can be characterized as critical reverence. We are horrified by much of what the Israelites did in God’s name, but we know that this is where we, who now judge, learned our judgment. Without them, we would not be in a position to see how we would prefer them to have behaved. And we can only hope our children and all of posterity will regard us with the same attitude, gratefully accepting what we bequeath but — even better, refusing to repeat our mistakes.

*

The Left and the Right seem to agree on at least one thing: they both think that criticism and reverence are incompatible. If you revere, you cannot criticize. If you can criticize, you can no longer revere. This is a side-effect of philosophical impoverishment. True reverence and criticism are mutually dependent. Criticism without reverence (or respect) is condemnation. Reverence without criticism is delusional fanaticism.

When the Left learns to revere as it criticizes, and the Right learns to criticize as it reveres we will be prepared to reconcile and recommence our national project.

Esoteric summary

Biography, Judaism, Philosophy

The heart of morality is the call to transcendence: we are meant to exist as ourselves toward reality that is not us (alterity). These are the proper terms of transcendence: self transcending toward alterity within a shared ground of infinite reality. This is very different from that common conception of transcendence that opposes a mundane natural world and a divine supernatural one. The fact that I cannot deny the existence of this call to transcend is the primary basis for my belief in God. Such a call has no authority in an essentially meaningless universe.

Alterity (reality that is not us) is infinite, meaning that it is not only quantitatively limitless, but qualitatively limitless as well. This means it can only be thought-toward in an open-ended way, not comprehended. Thinking-toward qualitative infinity encourages existing-toward reality in a way that invites the kind of radical surprise intrinsic to qualitative infinity, a prerequisite of transcendence, and is therefore an ontological foundation of moral life. An aid for imagining the directions of this existing-toward is along the trajectories of time, physicality and mind. These can be seen as the basic “objects” of transcendence, but they are everted objects which enclose us, involve us, and exceed us. (Another word for an everted object is a subject, and this is another tributary to my belief in God.)

The heart of transcendence is metanoia: a tacit conceptual/moral/practical shift in being that changes why we exist, how we exist and what we perceive in the world. These three kinds of being can be imagined as the self who exists toward infinity, the subject of metanoia.

Metanoia is a process that can be encouraged and discouraged, which sometimes even ought to be resisted. To navigate the metanoetic cycle, it is important to be able to read the waters of experience and to recognize the significance of moods, feelings and other psychological states that indicate one’s situation and help orient action and moral interpretation.

(Above was a sketchy summary of the diagrams in Geometric Parables. The moral ideal is diagramed as a spiral, qualitative infinity is diagrammed as an asterisk, the subject of metanoia is diagrammed as a trefoil, and the metanoetic cycle is diagrammed as a wheel. I did another half of a sketch yesterday, where I tried to explain each of the parables from the perspective of the others. I am going to finish that and publish it on this blog ASAP.)

Syllabus Listicalis

Judaism, Philosophy

Today, I feel a need to make an arbitrary list of consequential reconceptions. These are some of the core ideas I want to put in one of the several pamphlets I have planned. I’ve named two of them: Geometric Parables and The Ten-Thousand Everythings. Maybe this is the start of a third pamphlet, Syllabus Listicalis.

  • Blindness is like rippling mercury that nullifies sight with glare and camouflage. The equation of blindness with darkness is profoundly misleading. Anyone who expects blindness to be highlighted with shadows is blind to blindness and consequently to sight. The disperception of blindness sees precisely where it doesn’t.
  • A soul is an everything among myriad everythings. It is natural to imagine a person’s soul as a body-shaped ghost, but this is an intellectually and morally corrupting confusion. Souls are better imagined as radiating into the world from a person’s physical being. The soul’s radiance continues to travel after it leaves its source and it illuminates those aspects of the world the soul finds important. Everywhere I look I see the souls of people I love: this is the root of my compulsion to give gifts. I could continue on to the subject of immortality, but let’s not.
  • Objectivity is a type of subjectivity. The idea that subjectivity is a distorted reflection of some all-encompassing objective world has catastrophic consequences. The best way to understand a person’s subjectivity is to examine its objectivity. When we speak of human “subjects” and school “subjects”, in both cases we ought to mean the word “subject” in the same sense.
  • Transcendence is entirely about the relationship between I and Other. This idea that transcendence refers to a supernatural reality behind or beyond the mundane world, is an elaborate failure to recognize otherness beyond one’s own I. Many, if not most — (and possibly all!) — notions of magic are the splatterings of souls on the walls of solipsism.
  • Tacit knowledge is not articulated, it articulates. Everything explicit, everything formed, emerges from implicit being. That which is least sayable is not passive silence, but an active capacity to say. Here speech is a metaphor for all making, all poiesis.
  • Love and dread together signal transcendence. Only dread reveals the reality of the beloved. These are not “choices”, they must be taken together, always.
  • Love is not only a matter of heart, but also of soul and of might — not separately, but always all at once. Love is done with the entirety of our being. To love God is to love the entirety of reality with the entirety of one’s being.
  • Pluralism means that even when we avoid being wrong, we are never as right as we hope.
  • Religion does not have to be conceived as it often is: the activity of an individual communing with God. Religion can, and in fact must be, broadened to comprise the continuous struggle of finite beings to relate vitally to infinite being without suppressing its infinitude. By this definition, sciences are religious activity and fundamentalisms are anti-religion.

Meditation on V’ahavta

Judaism, Philosophy

While I traveled the last two weeks I finished memorizing the V’ahavta.

V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

You shall love Adonai your God
with all your heart,
with all your soul,
and with all your might.

*

For the purposes of this meditation, morality will be defined as immediate valuing: discerning (or mis-discerning) what is good or bad, or both at once, or neither. It is not the same as ethical codification, or deliberation over what is right, or even the resolve to submit to what is good. It is value as we have it, as “experienced”.

*

With our being — with our moral heart, with our knowing soul and with our active might — we live within our world, a finite portion of God.

With all our being — all our heart, all our soul and all our might — we love beyond our world toward God, a finite speck of whom is each of us.

The beyondness, toward which our finite being exists in relation with God’s infinitude, extends from immediate presence of self, time and cosmos into inconceivable nothingness of Spirit, Eternity and Apeiron, which are dimensions of One: Echad.

(These dimensions might not be the only or even best way to conceive extensions toward infinity from immediate presence, but they are the ones most natural to me, personally, in this place, time and state of existence.)

With all our being entails more than simple feeling or simple knowing or simple doing, or even each of the three in turn. With all our being means simultaneously valuing knowingly and actively, knowing actively and valuingly, and acting feelingly and knowingly.

And loving with all our being means preferring a beloved beyondness more than preserving the particular being with which we presently love, our own self. It means allowing love to change who our self is, in response to loving a beloved.

This change of love, in every case, draws us toward the nothingness of infinitude despite our anxiety, into it despite our dread, across it despite our despair, and to the other side where love is consummated and prepared for the next traversal.

Anyone who cannot face being changed for love by love, who understands God to be found where bliss points and away from dread, will confuse God with the being of one’s own existence, not the One toward which love draws more than dread repels.

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The misinterpretation of experience toward God is the corruption of religion in this time, and maybe all times.

What is religion? Religion is the conscious effort to situate ourselves within a reality that involves but infinitely exceeds us conceptually (soul), practically (might) and morally (heart).

It is not a merely physical reality that is, nor a merely spiritual reality who lives, nor a mere story unfolding, but all of these, and others we might one day come to experience and others no finite being can experience. God comes to us as constancy, as fate, as shock, as longing — as the destiny of going-toward-God-despite — as insistence wrestling with existence.

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I’m shocked I can say a public prayer and mean it, albeit in my own way, but in a public made up of individuals who are all expected to say things in one’s own way. In Judaism (at least Reform Judaism), saying words in unison does not mean saying them unanimously. It is a perfect resolution of my need to be who I am in my way, but to do so without being isolated.

Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.
Baruch shem k’vod malchuto l’olam va-ed.
V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha,
b’chol l’vavcha
uv’chol nafsh’cha
uv’chol m’odecha.

This is my understanding from the last decade, finally translated into my native Hebrew.

Mikvah

Biography, Judaism

Today is my mikvah.

Sometime around 10:45-11:15am EST other Jews will know me as a fellow Jew.

I cannot explain why this matters so much to me, but it does. And I understand why many people cannot understand how much this matters to me or why it matters, but I hope those who love me can respect where their understanding fails.

Rosenzweig and the philosopher-hybrid

Judaism, Philosophy

I get the same feeling reading Rosenzweig as I do reading Levinas: I begin to feel a little like a paraphrasing popularizer, or vulgarizer.

In a little over a day from now I hope I’ll just feel like a fellow Jewish philosopher attempting, yet again, to say the same impossible-to-say truth both these Jewish philosophers are attempting to say.

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One thing I love about Rosenzweig is that he seems to understand and respond to the same thing that matters so much to me in Nietzsche’s thought.

He says this about Nietzsche: “Poets had always dealt with life and their own souls. But not philosophers. And saints had always lived life and for their own soul. But again — not the philosophers. Here, however, was one man who knew his own life and his own soul like a poet, and obeyed their voice like a holy man, and who was for all that a philosopher. What he philosophized has by now become almost a matter of indifference. …  But none of those who now feel the urge to philosophize can any longer by-pass the man himself, who transformed himself in the transformation of his mental images…”

There have been countless philosophers wrote their philosophies in verse or poetic language, or who have philosophized while trying to live saintly lives. Many philosophers have philosophized about poets and poetry, or saints and saintliness. There have even been some philosophers have philosophized poetically about poetry or lived a saintly life philosophizing about saintliness. But strangely, none of these things conveys what a philosopher-poet or philosopher-saint does. With this in mind, I’ve been developing a another philosopher-hybrid ideal: philosopher-designer. This is not a well-designed presentation of philosophy, a philosophy about design, or a well-designed presentation of philosophy about design… but something else that feels enormously important (if not for the world, at least for me) and profoundly Jewish (if not for all Jews, at least for me).