Category Archives: Works

Crystallizing ring

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Religion

Faiths are profoundly weird things.

To start with, faiths are not things at all, nor are they made out of things. Faiths are not constructions, and they cannot be constructed.

The logic of a faith — and faiths always do have a logic — is a logic that emerges from it. The faith precedes and produces the logic.

This is true even when they express themselves as arguments, as they do in ideological expressions.

Hearing the testimony of a convert persuaded by an ideological or doctrinal argument, it rarely seems as though the logic of the argument was what compelled belief. The logic serves more as an adhesive for constructing an idea that, once assembled, can be recognized — conceived as a whole — a crystallizing ring that reorders all, centrifugally and centripetally. Or it is the processional order (seder, liturgy) of a participation that keeps moving after the ritual concludes. The logic does not prove, it animates one’s thinking, speaking, acting and feeling. One is moved by faith.

It seems that this animating conception, once conceived and in motion, takes the believer in. This taking-in reconstitutes the believing, the believed-in world and the believer.

The reality remains as it always was, but inhabited differently. And this inhabiting is not even primarily theoretical. It is practical. It is material. Such conceptions transform and re-enworld a person and that person’s relationship with the givenness of literally everything and every possible thing everything comprises.

Once moved by faith, belief itself moves by faith, is animated in faith.

An incomprehensible truth: The particular beliefs themselves are not the material of the faith or its enworldment, though they seem to be, but rather a product of the faith and an artifact of the enworldment. They are the fruit by which the faith is known, but they must never be confused with the faith itself, which cannot be grasped by the fruit. One does not possess a tree, much less an orchard, by eating apples.

To treat a faith as a belief-system, or to speak of faith as if it is a degree of strength of conviction that a belief-system is true — these indicate profound religious confusion. Religion is only expressed as doxa, it is not constructed from doxa. Anyone who tries to build a religion out of doxa is more likely to be buried alive in word rubble than to penetrate the roof of heaven.

In nature, conception initiates gestation. Cells grow and divide, differentiate and multiply, within a viable environment. In spirit, conception initiates an articulate gestalt within an intelligible All. Givens divide and grow, differentiate and multiply… eventually into constructible quantities. In both cases we are like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous joke. “How’s the amniotic fluid, embryos?”

How’s the faith, spirits?

What the hell is faith?

Be careful what you inhabit, for you will become of it.

All this is a reflection on a wayward mystic friend, addicted to online edgelord content, somehow in lockstep agreement with edgelord doxa. Anyone who comes to second-naturally despise India, Indians, Jews and Israel — two peoples of mystical genius — will cacophonize against my own faith. It’s all doxa, for sure, but its opinion on what is ortho is wrong — diabolically wrong. In ancient Hebrew it is the heart — lev — who thinks. Do not presume that abstract mourning is less felt.

Transcendental pluralism

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Transcendentalism across its varieties claims that experience, including thought, imagination and perception — in other words, inner and outer and everything between — has some necessarily a priori structure by which it is given, which conditions that given world.

I am what could be called a transcendental pluralist.

The psychic order by which experience is given can legitimately vary, sometimes radically, but these various orders are not arbitrary. Only some transcendental orders are possible.

An authentic transcendental structure clicks and crystallizes into an articulate sense of everything, to which experiences are given and conceived together. This is what a subject is, when understood properly, that is, nonobjectively.

The conditions of any possible transcendental order are the metasubject of metaphysics, and its truth is the furthest thing from objective. It is the source of subjectivity, and subjectivity is the condition of objectivity and the phenomenon of objects.

Transcendental orders can be induced to change. Such changes are conversions.

The event of conversion — whether a minor insight on some aspect of one’s life about which one (literally) changes one’s mind, a scientific paradigm, a philosophical turn, or a religious conversion — these are all top-down reorderings of transcendental organization.

Conversions are hard to understand and talk about. They are impossible to understand without reference to an actual experience of conversion.

But those without such experience go ahead and understand them anyway, by whatever understanding of everything they already have. These misunderstandings are the stuff of religious and antireligious fanaticism.

The strongest opinions on religion — for and against, alike — are held by people lacking all religious experience. Some have altered their belief systems, but only the irreligious can confuse belief systems with religion, or strength of conviction that these belief systems are true with faith. There is fervent emotional passion about beliefs — pro and con — but this fervor is not religious, but in fact the diabolical opposite.

Faith is transcendental organization, and faith “in something” is a function of fit between the articulate organs of faith’s essential organization and some conceptual, material or practical system.

What constructivists (and relativists) miss is the question of responsibility.

Any construction that aspires to truth must respond to matter and it must respond to transcendental authenticity. This does not mean that it must obey matter or transcendental authenticity, just that it must respond to them in good faith. It means that our belief systems are only authentically believed to the degree that they articulate what we actually experience both inwardly and outwardly. Mismatches can and always must exist, but good faith requires candid confession of confusion, unclarity, doubt, even local disbelief, and these mismatches are rarely clear or easy to pin down.

We tend to ignore or suppress these mismatches, because they all threaten to destabilize our transcendental order. They seem to be existential threats to truth, to our sense of identity, to literally everything — because they, in fact, are. But there is more to reality than any particular everything. And precisely this moreness is the essence of religion.

These perplexing mismatches between faith and system are where the light of infinitude shows through the cracks of finitude and threatens to submerge it in holy reunification.

Now I will speak religiously to the religious:

Yetzirah responds both to Asiyah — what materials will and won’t do — and to Beriah — the simultaneous plurality of all possible transcendentalisms.

In Yetzirah, we are Ruach, the transcendental formation to whom the world is given as an articulate, exteriorless whole, and by whom its given world and all its given truths, possibilities and entities are received in Asiyah.

In Asiyah we take what is given as given objects of perception and truth and construct from them. To the best of our ability, we construct systems that combine into interoperating units with emergent systemic wholeness.

These systems may or may not correspond with the articulations of Ruach’s articulate everything. If they do, they are experienced as meaningful, natural and might resonate with Ruach’s sense of personal purpose and at-homeness. If they do not, they will feel unnatural and alien.

When “modernity” is used pejoratively, often this refers to refusal to seek transcendental ratification for systems. If a system functions, that is sufficient. This fills the world with unnatural and alien systems, and makes reality itself feel overwhelmingly meaningless and complicated. When people stop expecting meaning and lose sight of meaning as a goal, or even possibility, when we stop expecting to feel at home and no longer believe we have a right to personal purpose, we succumb to nihilism.

Organism is the intersection of articulate everything without exterior and every thing systematized without interior.

Thing without interior is empty shell, klippah.

When we see an image of a tzadik, saint, bodhisattva or angel with a halo, it is natural to assume the light is radiating from them into the world around them. It is important, though, to understand this radiance a second everted way, for in Beriah relationships evert, and in Yetzirah, Asiyah and Beriah interpenetrate.

From Beriah, light radiates into its focus, centripetally. The halo radiates into the soul, before radiating back out into Asiyah.

The angels on Jacob’s Ladder ascend and descend, and this is the respiration of light.

The circular sefirot is sometimes depicted with a flame-like perimeter. It is a macrocosmic halo, and the flames are actually descending into finitude ex nihilo from the infinite Ein Sof, the infinite One.

Angelic being invites infinite light to concentrate ex nihilo in Ruach in order to reflect and refract into the world.

Diabolical being blocks everything from beyond Ruach and has only darkness to reflect or refract. Ruach envies the Infinite One and wants its quasi-infinitude to be absolute. It casts whatever defies it into nonexistence, and whatever will not perform nonexistence for it will be annihilated and made nonexistent.

Eversion reverses relations.

Totalitarianisms seek to displace and replace Neshamah (transsubjective selfhood Beriah) with themselves.

In Asiyah, you objectify reality. In Beriah, reality subjectifies you!

The Russian reversal joke performs this truth. In Soviet Russia, for example, television watches you.

Diabolical means thrown across. Dia– “across” + –bolos “thrown”. Diabolical means both throwing part of infinitude out into nothingness, and being thrown out from infinitude into quasi-infinite finitude without interior: klippah.

Being chosen, though, also means choosing to take one’s given place within infinitude.

Exnihilism is annihilation everted. Exnihilism prays epiphanic irruptions through the veil of nihilitude from inexhaustible infinitude. Birth is everted death; birthpangs and deathpangs are crossings between infinite and finite being.

One profound conversion may seem like a crossing from a false world to a true one.

Two profound conversions may seem like a crossing between two contingently true worlds.

Three profound conversions, something truer and realer than any true world may reveal itself.

Complacentia

Enworldment, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Asiyah is the objective dimension of nature and artifice.

Yetzirah is the transcendental dimension of soul (subject).

Beriah is the metaphysical dimension of spirit (relative infinitude).

Atzilut is the transcendent dimension of infinitude.

Objective reason is an inadequate mode of knowing beyond Asiyah. The attempt to grasp soul/subject and metaphysics objectively is the supreme category mistake, made by materialists, positivists, managerials, psychologists and metaphysical dogmatists, alike.

Objectifying the superobjective is the human species’s analogue to a dog chasing its tail.

Isn’t this framework objective? Yes, it is objective, but not merely objective.

This way of understanding things has become my latest and best naive realism.

I am unable to doubt it. I cannot avoid understanding everything in its light.

Worse, I find myself entirely disinclined to interrogate it.

This is an abject failure of philosophy, but a triumph of faith.

It is an enworldment to inhabit, a palatial sukkah.

…Palatial … palate … taste, sophia…

Saint Friedrich of Sils-Maria said:

Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).

Years ago I noticed that I asked Why only when I could not feel Why.

Design, enworldment and holistic orders

Design, Enworldment, Hermeneutics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Thinking out loud here…

I have been gnawing endlessly on a question of holism.

My thesis is that when people say the word “holism” they generally assume only one of two kinds of holism, reducing the other to the one they know.

I have given these holisms various names over the years.

  • Systemic wholes, belonging to a constructive order that constitutes wholes from assembled parts, bottom-up.
  • Gestalt wholes, belonging to a conceptive order that comprises parts articulated from wholes, top-down.

I believe that these two orders naturally diverge, like notes in scales of different keys, becoming less and less in tune with one another as they ramify, either upwards in ever-expanding systems or downwards in ever-finer articulations.

Further, I believe design is the discipline responsible for getting the two holisms to converge in a local, temporary and tentative unity. I call this unity of dual holisms “enworldment” and I conceptualize the effort of convergence as a “hermeneutic sphere”.

Not every system we construct — however perfectly integrated its functioning, and however much it generates emergent qualities (which makes the system a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts) — will be conceived as a meaningful thing within our sense of everything. A system can be meaningless or even induce nihilism, because it is incompatible with our overall sense of everything. This is fine if the system we are constructing is hidden, or handled only by specialists, but all too often these systems are allowed to damage cultural meaning. No matter how well physics accounts for the behaviors of particles in space, or applies this knowledge to build miraculous digital devices, none of it can make us feel the importance of our lives together.

Not every given thing we perceive as real or conceive as true — however self-evident, meaningful and important it may be to us or to our community — is a suitable part of a system. Some things cannot be integrated and interfere with the functioning of a system. A faith can be overwhelmingly meaningful and even the source of everything we care about, yet what it implies to be true cannot hold up under any systematic scrutiny nor is it helpful in any practical application. This is fine in purely symbolic spheres of life, for instance art or religion, but if they are applied beyond their sphere, they produce inadequately integrated systems. No religious scripture can explain electricity or help an engineer build a battery.

To get both, we must not only tack between parts and wholes in each order to get whole and part to reinforce one another, we must tack between the two orders of wholeness until both orders together form a whole reinforced equally by the wholes and parts of each order. Two hermeneutic circles, in a single hermeneutic sphere.

The question bothering me is whether there really is a “hermeneutic sphere” of two holistic orders, each with its own hermeneutic circle — or whether the plain old flat hermeneutic circle already accounts for both orders. What I call “construction” could just be the bottom-up side of the same hermeneutic circle, whose other side is top-down “conception”.

There is a fine line between playing with a structure (as we might play with a new tool) to see what can be done with it, versus going whole-hog Pygmalion with it. If only the line were only fine, and not also faint, snaky and nebulous.

In my defense, the truth of this framing does not have to be absolute. A physicist inclined to seek constructive wholes still faces the possibility of future scientific crises, challenging the entire conception of the problem that orients the work and shapes the instrumentation of physics as it is currently practiced. And even the most radical neoplatonist must admit that modern chemical engineers can do things with matter beyond the imagination of the most accomplished alchemist, even if those alchemists had superior metaphysical insight.

For all practical purposes, holism is dual, regardless of the ultimate unity, which could very well be beyond all human comprehension of any kind.

Design only cares about practical purposes, which most certainly includes questions of meaning and purpose.

Quasi-infinitudes

Enworldment, Philosophy

Let’s set Rorty spinning in his grave by appropriating, perverting and misapplying his concept of liberal irony to metaphysics.

A good metaphysical citizen exercises metaphysical irony by committing to one of myriad possible quasi-infinite everythings — one enworldment — which participates in the incomprehensible, all-comprehending Infinite One.

Knocked up

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah, Works

I have been pregnant with a book for a long time, literally decades. The embryo is massive and even more extensive and intensive. It has long outgrown the frame of my soul, and overflowed my universe-sized spirit. At times I have suspected I’m carrying twins, triplets or an unnatural litter, and I’ve even toyed with names — Enworldment, Exnihilism, Second Natural, Everso, Of Pearls and Shells, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah, The Ten-Thousand Everythings.

Today it is dawning on me exactly how weird this book might actually be. Really?: A neoplatonic philosophy of design? But one approached as a design? A designed articulate conception — each articulation named and thus made real — each a component of a constructed system? In other words, per Deleuze, concept design, but less an object than a subject, a human-reality interface. And of course, such a thing must have a suitable auditory, then visual, then material form. Such a thing demands beauty — dense, pervasive, radiant.

A designed philosophy of design …of philosophy of design of…

As of this morning, I believe this book is crowning.

Opening of Enworldment

Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In the constructive order, parts are composed into systemic wholes.

In the conceptive order, wholes comprise articulated parts.

In enworldment, conception and construction unify into one integral whole: a whole which is both an embodied soul and an ensouled body. An articulate gestalt is embodied by a system; a system of parts is ensouled by an articulate gestalt.

Enworldment establishes a vast finite one within the Infinite One. Each vast finite one is a quasi-infinite totality, which from within itself is interior without exterior: one everything comprising all conceivable things, bounded by nothing, for nothingness is essentially inconceivable, imperceptible and therefore incomprehensible — yet intuitible.

Intuition takes givens as given — immediately, spontaneously, usually with given form, but sometimes formlessly. Not all intelligibility comprehends. Intellection, nous, neshamah apprehends incomprehensibility and suprehends in it a call to take part and participate in what comprehends all comprehension.

To insist that either order — constructive or conceptive — is produced by the other precludes enworldment. To enworld, we must assume a present where unification of conception and construction requires conciliation of two orders.

Determining whether the conciliation is a reconciliation or whether the unification is reunification is unnecessary. The two may or may not share an original unity, but they certainly do not yet share a unifying destination, and it is the latter we must pursue.

Pursuit of enworlding unification must, in the beginning, acknowledge two: unformed matter and immaterial spirit. Two which converge to give us material forms and substantiated knowledge, neither of which produces the other.

Constructive-conceptive, another iteration

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy

The constructive order builds up systems of objectively comprehensible givens. The systems may be of material or ideal nature, but the structure is always small defined units combined into larger defined units, which, through their complex interaction, generate emergent behaviors at the larger scale. The understanding proper to these systems — systemic wholes — is construal, examining parts in their interactions, to see what the units are and how they function together to produce emergent behaviors. It is assumed: implicit in the behavior of any whole are implicit processes that, when explicated, account for it entirely, in terms of what units compose it and how those components interact. In the constructive order the smallest unit is primary and the largest is explained by the smaller.

But how are the given objects of the constructive order given?

They are received from a conceptive order that is subtly omnipresent, and therefore absent, in the constructive order. To the constructive order, reality itself is objective, but, in truth, objectivity is a subjective phenomenon.

In the conceptive order, the largest unit is primary and smaller units are significant as articulations within the whole comprising it. But this whole is not an object, but a subject, which is, among other things, an ontology, and a field of objectivity. Part of what prevents the conceptive whole from being comprehended as object is that it is all-inclusive, lacks alterity, and therefore has nothing against which it may be defined as a thing. The conceptive order encompasses literally everything, and each can be called an everything, the articulations of which define every possible thing that particular everything comprises — material, ideal or otherwise. The all-inclusive unit of a conceptive order is the subject, always, ultimately, one.

It is human natural to attempt to objectively comprehend and construe the meaning of anything problematic that raises questions. But conceptive difference cannot be understood in this way. When one everything-sized subject attempts to comprehend and construe another everything-sized subject as such, it finds itself perplexed, for there is no exterior by which a fellow subject may be grasped, only disturbing symptoms of difference in its sense of givenness.

To understand these differences requires very different modes of understanding — modes that include, while exceeding, objectivity. These extra-objective inter-subjective modes of understanding are the very heart of design work.

Designers (when/if they are functioning as designers) navigate subjectivity without committing the category mistake of trying to objectively grasp subjectivity. It seems irrational from the objectivity-constrained understanding typical of managerial social engineering.

These modes effect transfigurations in one’s own subjectivity which, only after the transfiguration is effected, reveal givens beyond those initially given prior to the transfiguration. These transfigurations reveal not only the “what” and “how” of another person’s objectivity but something of the “why” which animates it and invests it with purpose.

And this is what makes the conceptive order so important. It is the very source of importance itself. It is also the source of shared values and felt togetherness.

A transfiguration — or conversion experience — is a partial or complete change in first-person experience on the level of some significant gestalt whole, which spontaneously rearticulates a whole field of experience — of what seems true, why it is important and how one should respond. Transfiguration manifests objectively — as transformation — but the change is plainly prior to fact, method or moral precept. The change happens at an ontological level, top-down, and changes the order of “construction materials” — systematizable things. Such transfiguration often requires considerable deconstruction and reconstruction of systems.

Someone who assumes superior knowledge, who sees no reason to learn deeply and transfiguratively — someone who instinctively, habitually, neurotically or otherwise compulsively condescends from a position of superior insight or technical expertise might be capable of many impressive things, but such a person cannot design.

Such a person — individual or collective — will lose intersubjective consciousness and begin to inhabit and build a purely constructed world.

A purely constructed world is a world given only to one subject, and it is lonely, arid and eventually meaningless.

A world of systems constructed by a single objective logic necessarily induces nihilism.

Interworld alienation

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Allowing some ugly technical language better avoided, here is how it is.

Assiyah is lifeworld, plain and simple. It naturally takes givens as given — Pshat mode of truth — and constructs systems from them. Pshat is one given ontology and objectivity — one naive realism — in which individual being, Nefesh, exists as an object among objects.

Yetzirah is hermeneutic disposition to take some things (perceived or conceived) as given, to be passively oblivious to others and to actively reject or suppress others that threaten the coherence of one’s overall conception of everything. It is the transcendental ordering of any Pshat givenness, and it is normally entirely in the background of everyday life, manifesting only as Ruach — individual (I) and cultural (We) identity and nonidentity (Them). Drash is a mode of truth that attends to this transcendental ordering of Pshat in the background of how we and others understand reality in some particular way — that is, to subject proper, the source of objectivity. Often, this attempt to understand a subject is approached in inadequate Pshat modes of object-comprehension, thus everting it and causing profound and consequential category mistakes.

Ruach-being receives reality as a given all-inclusive everything (a given universe or cosmos), articulated (jointed, partitioned) as every possible thing everything can comprise, material, ideal or otherwise. These articulations are the intelligible forms of that Ruach, including the self-form with which Nefesh identifies itself as a thing among things. Again, an embodied I, an embodied we, an I within we.

For Nefesh-being (animal soul) is the size of a living object who embodies it. Nefesh essentially embodies and constructs systems from givens.

Ruach-being (spirit) is the size of an entire everything as given to one subject. The everything is absolutely particular but relative to Ruach, it is universal, and the very universe itself.

Every subject proper is Ruach, whether personal subject, academic subject, a historical subject (a people). Any I or we to whom reality is given in some particular way and taken-together as some articulate everything of all possible things is Ruach.

Ruach is rarely unidimensional. It contains multitudes of subjects-within-subjects. Any I might understand autobiographically, professionally, politically, mathematically, fictionally, scientifically, legally, psychologically, ethically, ethnically, maybe religiously, etc., but all these various subjects attempt to harmonize into a single, coherent way of taking reality as given as real. This is not always easy, and never perfectly achieved. Self-integration, if attempted, is a lifelong effort. This is true for any individual I, and this is the stuff of biography. But for any We of the scale of community, whose life might span centuries or millennia, self-integration is the stuff of politics and history.

And it is all profoundly complicated by the reality of matter, which cooperates or resists and forces adaptation from unformed matter, from which material givens are substantiated.

Both metaphysical materialism and idealism are right but neither is nearly right enough. Reality is neither top-down immanence nor bottom-up emergence, but both and neither. We are suspended in the between, matter below, meaning above, each alike, the aether inside the square and radiating from the edges of the Chinese coin.

Enworldment is given, embodied reality — given by Ruach and taken by Nefesh, spontaneously recognizing material and ideal forms — taking them and responding to them as given, and from them constructing systems. Systems suggest new forms, forms suggest new systems. And sometimes the systems Nefesh constructs clash with every available articulate form without suggesting any new form. Systemic wholes stand alone without any support from above. And sometimes Ruach imposes its forms upon materials which cannot accommodate them. The forms cannot be actualized in any system. They are out-of-touch ideals with little or no practical value.

In rude moods, I have talked about this coming apart of the conceptive and constructive order as “bullshit and chickenshit” — the impracticable impositions of Ruach upon Nefesh being “bullshit”, and Nefesh’s soulless and dispiriting systematizing being “chickenshit”.

And it is this problem of interworld alienation that drives some of us through the roof of Nothingness itself, into Beriah, the inexhaustible, eternally pregnant source of reborn Ruach.

Two whole-and-part orders

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

Below is another iteration on explaining the conceptive and constructive orders, and the importance of unifying them.

I have noticed that when I talk about “wholes” with service designers, they immediately go into systems thinking mode, according to which wholes emerge from systematized parts. This, to them, is what “holistic” means. Holistic means to look at all given parts together in their interconnectedness and to put them together in relation with one another, so that when they operate in a coordinated way, novel behaviors with novel qualities occur. The behavior of the integrated system is greater than the sum of each behaving part.

To me, however, this is still an atomistic conception of wholeness — one which assumes whatever is larger is constructed from smaller units, and that wholeness emerges as a secondary property of integration of parts within a system.

I believe there is another conception of holism, a more thoroughgoing holism that takes wholes as primary and parts as secondary. This holism sees parts as natural divisions — articulations, in the sense of “joints” — within this whole. What is the nature of this whole, from which all parts are articulations? The whole is the field of experience. The field of experience, of course, includes perceptions, but many other things, and in fact, all other things, besides. Experience includes also conceptions, both explicit and verbal, both intuited and wordless. It includes innumerable barely noticed interactions with materials of myriad kinds and shapes, trials, errors — each teaching our bodies lessons learned wordlessly. Experience also includes recollection of memories, sharp and vague images, and kaleidoscopically shifting stories and morals, all attended by the feelings these recollections evoke. It also includes anticipations of possibilities, some planned, some expected, all clouded by probability, and pervasive apprehension of likely surprise. And it includes what others have conveyed to us in various ways. We experience other people’s accounts of their experiences. And we socially experience trying to live with others who convey things to us that make perfect sense, some sense, no sense or things that seem totally wrong. We trust some people and mistrust others. And sometimes we don’t know where to place ourselves in the continuum of trust and mistrust.

But we must never forget, yet always do: the field of experience is not experienced as experience. It is experienced as objective reality. But, in truth, the objects in this objective reality are defined from this field of experience — objects against a ground of what is experienced as different — for there is absolutely no trace of reality outside this field. The field of experience is articulated, in the sense of jointed, and our verbal articulations follow from this jointedness. Our vocabularies and our language use seek to approximate the given articulation of given reality. And words that fail to approximate the given articulations of our experience of reality as given to us are experienced as meaningless and abstract.

Finally, and of the utmost importance: We experience our experiences as experiences of something beyond experience. And it is this “of” that drives us to objectivity. But objects are only how articulations are given to us. The object form, what defines it against what it is not, is least of all access to reality beyond the field of experience. Nothing is more purely experiential than objectivity.

But how can anyone know this? If we have no reality beyond our own field of experience, why would we believe anything else is there? Why wouldn’t we just accept that experience is ultimate and live happily inside idealism — a matrix simulacrum? Or why wouldn’t we just let experience fall out of the equation as extraneous, and just keep the content of experience as reality itself? As a matter of fact, this is exactly what most people do. They do it mostly as a way to deal with other people’s nonsensical accounts of their experiences.

But then, for some number of people — perhaps a few and perhaps a great many — one day, everything changes all at once. In an instant, the field of experience expands in a way that is impossible to convey to anyone who has never experienced it. Everything rearticulates itself into a new set of things, new objects, new significances, new possibilities and a new suspicion of apparent nothingness, for it is from nothingness that this rearticulation irrupts, ex nihilo. Everything is never the same and nothing is ever the same. We have now inhabited two fields of experience, and this draws attention to an inconceivable ground of experience that is the furthest possible thing from “objective”.

So much confusion about religion has been caused by convert talk. Those yet to experience conversion cannot conceive what is being spoken about, but cannot help conceiving it anyway within their own field of experience. They take it objectively, and believe their misconception is the truth, or they reject their misconception as false, or much better, and less commonly, as inadequately understood.

Now I am digressing.

I distinguish these two whole-and-part orders.

The atomistic one I call the constructive order, which, starting from the smallest givens, builds and integrates parts into systemic wholes with emergent properties.

The holistic one I call the conceptive order, which, starting from an all-inclusive whole, articulates distinctions into finer and finer parts, each with a wholeness of its own.

Why do I care about two whole-and-part orders? Because I am a designer who straddles the world of subject and object. We must construct systems that function as systems. But these systems should also fit into a context, and make immediate, meaningful sense to people. They must be attuned to and harmonious with an articulate field of experience, so people feel and intuit it without having to analyze what it is, how it works and how it might benefit them.

If they fail to do so — and these days they rarely do — they contribute to making the world more complicated, cognitively burdensome, meaningless and alienating. They fail to connect up with any familiar and immediate sense of a world where we feel at home — a world we can care about and want. They give us a world of inhuman things made of smaller inhuman things that build up into larger and larger units of inhumanity. And we long to dismantle it all, perhaps in order to reassemble the parts into a more equitable and pro-human systematization, never suspecting that it is our own impoverished sense of the whole that produced this state of inhumanity in the first place — which, if given the chance, we will resystematize into something equally dehumanizing.

We need to re-enworld this world together, this time paying close attention to what we perceive and conceive as meaningfully whole, and using these articulations to guide the formation of our systems. We must allow these two orders to inform one another, iteratively.

Subjectivity is far from arbitrary. It is none other than the articulate field of experience, the source of our objectivity. Subjectivity is the mother of objectivity. We must learn to hear her quiet voice and respect her acceptances and refusals of our gifts as we craft our offerings.

Enworldment revolves within a hermeneutic sphere whose center is everywhere and boundary is nowhere, which unifies distinct orders of wholeness and makes them whole.

As gestalt, so system; as system, so gestalt

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Design forms matter in order to make materials serve as an intuitive medium of spirit.

A designer develops two orders of whole-and-part — the articulate gestalt of spirit and systemic emergence of matter — ensouling materials and materializing souls on the middle plane of persons, Man.

Earth — matter behind material — ascends to wholeness, part-upon-part, generating functional modular units of increasing scale, each unit constituting its own emergent qualities.

Heaven — spirit beyond soul — descends to particularity, whole-within-whole, articulating meaningful gestalts of decreasing scale, each gestalt comprising articulate fullness of its own.

Each order is governed by its own iterative craft, each a hermeneutic circle. One constructs systems constituted of parts, each whole a part of something yet greater; the other conceives gestalts comprising articulate parts, each part itself a whole for something yet smaller.

Design conjoins both iterative crafts and brings both orders into unity. Design is the craft of the hermeneutic sphere.

Let other disciplines work one order or the other, thinking theirs the only one. Designers must see them in their difference in order to unite them as one.

A designer is neither artist-oracle nor technician-chemist, but each transmuted by the other in marriage, as they effect transmutation of materialized soul and ensouled material.

Let other disciplines subscribe to metaphysical materialism or idealism. The praxis of design reveals each inadequate alone and and both interadequate only together — always rooted in the mysterious ground of exnihilitive One.

A designer is a true artifex, making marvels of outward technological magic and inward miracles of life — an agent of enworldment.

Design Level Three

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Level 1. An order constructed from given elements. Wholeness emerges from systems composed of parts.

Level 2. An order of articulate wholeness. Parts articulate within a given whole that comprises them.

Level 3. An order of revelatory wholeness. Articulate wholes irrupt ex nihilo, given from an infinite ground that surprises all totality.

Level 4. The sole source of order, one infinite ground from which totality articulates as participant within.

Many designers I know operate exclusively at Level 1. It is assumed that once all elements are integrated in a system a whole will emerge — an emergent meaning sufficient to mean something to people. Or, that this whole will at least provide the bone structure needed for subsequent fleshing out. “Storytelling” or “brand” or some other sweet and decorative frosting is spread over a functional, as-yet-uninspiring system.

Many designers from arts backgrounds are sensitive to Level 2. They want to begin from a spontaneously meaningful connection, often in the form of a simple metaphorical concept, conveying what an artifact is to a person who encounters it. The natural consequences of the metaphor provide the design logic of a possible system. These are articulations within a meaningful gestalt, and they provide elements from which design systems may be constructed. Using a famous example, if a screen is given to a user as a “desktop”, then it follows that there might be “documents” that can be filed in “folders” and can be put in a “trashcan” for deletion. Level 2 pursues convergence of articulate gestalt understanding and integrated system. But the articulate gestalts rarely emerge after the fact from a constructed system. The constructed system and the conceived gestalt must be developed together as two orders of wholeness in one.

Few designers are aware of Level 3, and only when two conditions are in place. First, they must be committed to actualizing Level 2. Second, they must aspire to actualizing Level 2 among multiple people with diverse understandings. Working with this aspiration and commitment reveals a surprising truth: different people have different capacities to receive gestalt givens. A gestalt that inspires one person might be inconceivable and imperceptible to another. An even more surprising truth is that if we strive faithfully to find gestalts that resonate with everyone, we sometimes acquire new capacities, and these new capacities are transformative to all involved.

I have a whole book of things to say about this.

The infinite optical illusion

Enworldment, Philosophy

An optical illusion can give itself in multiple possible ways to a beholder, who, in any given moment, perceives it spontaneously in one of multiple possible forms.

In such give-and-take moments, we tend to focus more on the given object beheld rather than on the receptivity of the subject doing the beholding. Workaday language is optimized for comprehensible objects, not for the comprehending subjects, and even when we attempt to focus on subjects we distort them — evert them — into objects. When seeking the mysterious origin of our field of vision and the nature of sight, we find only eyeballs and eyeball parts, and we explain seeing by what we see, while sight as sight slips away.

Gestalt psychology speaks of perceived figures embedded in visual fields. Our language itself is a field, and it cannot speak about wherefore it speaks. Only a language of fields can do justice to subjects. Physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time. Metaphysics should tell us that two subjects cannot avoid overlapping in time and space. This overlapping of being is essential to subjectivity.

Let us call any given object a gestalt (“form”), and the subjective taking of the gestalt, which receives it in one of its multiple possible gestalts, a gestell (“enframing”). There is no gestalt without a corresponding gestell. Figure and field are a unity. Object and subject are a unity.

We can alter this unity — these unities — at various strata of being, at various scales of self.

At the lowest stratum, we play with optical illusions. We undergo a “click” and experience a duck becoming a rabbit, a stairway flipping, a ballerina’s spin reversing. Or we are punched by a punchline or shocked by a plot twist.

A bit higher we have paradigm shifts of science and other systematic methodologies.

Higher still, we have life-changing insights. We see that we were right to a degree, but not right enough. Distracted by the truth of our own truth, we were oblivious to the possibility of truer truths, and what was at stake in pursuing them. Lower truths eclipse higher ones.

There are yet higher strata, and higher clicks. These extend into fields of being so omnipresent and lacking any otherwise that when they shift, the initial shock is the revelation of their being, seen now only in the even more shocking reality of difference. Such being irrupts ex nihilo.

An optical illusion is one of myriad kinds of multistable phenomena.

An infinite optical illusion would show itself in myriad ways to myriad beholders, each of whom, in any given moment, takes what is given in some particular way.

Reality is an infinite optical illusion.

The multistable object is not arbitrarily imagined. But! …every given object is from stubborn noumena who shows their being in the gestalt taken by the gestell-receptive subject. It is instaurated. It is configured. It is material dialogue. It is craftwork.

Reality is infinitely multistable gestell-gestalt, against a ground beyond subject-object.

Here I am now — finite, delicate, suspended in space, time and self — draped in velvet of nihilitude, gently and fleetingly delaying my reabsorption into infinity.

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Contemplating aloud

Design, Hermeneutics, Kabbalah, Polycentered design, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

(Note 9/10/26: this post has been updated at least seven times since the initial publication, and the latest table has evolved out alignment with the account given below.)

Here is the latest version of the Well-Tempered Kabbalah.

 

This little one page-book of mine is sprawling out, with a fourth table column, “truth”. PaRDes is no longer covering understanding or truth. It is now “word” — meaning any communicative form. And I have reversed the order of Remez and Derash. I am intensely nervous to change the sequence, but it is right for my present purposes. If it is a mistake, it is an honest one, and it is a mistake I have to make all the way. My rationale is bobbing about in the prose below.

Truth is now the knowing essential to each world. I have found beautiful Hebrew and English words for each of these truths, and rather than translate they complement one another to convey meaning. Nitpas — grasped or captured truth — are the givens we use to construct truth in Asiyah. Hashkafah means roughly viewpoint or worldview, and I give it the English word “conceptive” — what enables and limits the perceived and conceived givens available to us for our experiences and understandings. If Nitpas are the grasped givens, Hashkafah is the receptive capacity required to do the grasping — a state of Ruach. If the Hashkafah of Ruach changes, Ruach itself changes, as do the givens it receives in Asiyah. Hitgalut is revelatory, which I call enceptive. Where Hashkafah does the conceiving, Hitgalut is aware that it is conceived within an encompassing intellect of which it participates, and this intellect is the ground and source of other possible conceptions. It is from here radically new understandings emerge ex nihilo from inconceivability. The etymological meaning of Hitgalut is “self uncovering”, and it shares a root with galut, “exile”. Hitgalut is welcoming home of exiled Ruach to the source of its self. And finally, there is Devekut (cleaving) — mystical union beyond thought — the goal of Kabbalah and all esoterisms.

What is slightly tragic about this work is that I am reducing Kabbalah for a focused purpose. Kabbalah is abundant with Remez, but this work is Derashic. I am choosing less evocative and open ended words, and it affords less multiplicity of interpretation. It is one application of something greater and richer and far more beautiful, to which it belongs, and remains loyal as an expression.

What I care about most is how communities may enworld themselves in shared truth, practice and artifacts.

What efforts must we undertake, what ordeals must we undergo, what resistance must we overcome to find more expansive and accommodating orders, when our own is sufficient for our own needs but insufficient for others?

This is what I want to distill as simply and beautifully as I can.

But before we can distill a truth we must mash it, mix it and let it ferment in the alembic.

I am struggling with the sequence of Remez and Derash.

I cannot avoid belief that Derash is the expression of an accomplished stability of understanding — manifested as lucidly understood content, but manifested by a spiritual “container” — which is a capacity for perceiving certain forms of reality, for conceiving their significance and implications, for expressing and insinuating these implications, and conversely, an inclination to be persuaded to belief by presence of certain conceptual articulate forms. I have called this structure of receptive capacity which does the believing of believed-in content, but does much more than that a faith. Increasingly I am choosing to call faith by the Hebrew word Ruach.

We know Ruach only by its words and actions, and so we tend to disregard everything except the fruit — the stuff we can see and grasp. We forget the tree, the roots, the soil, the whole spiritually environing garden and fixate on sensory and conceptual objects. All these forgotten origins of the objects of our objectivity and the subject by whom this objectivity exists is Ruach and the realm of formation in which Ruach lives is called Yetzirah.

To express its existence, Ruach presents concepts and descriptions of sensory objects and events (the graspable things of the actual world of Asiyah) in a way that galvanizes or reinforces or illuminates a particular way of experiencing and understanding — the manifestation of Ruach. When we participate in the life of Ruach in this way, — actively showing or receptively receiving — this mode of language is Derash.

When liberal arts managerial thought leaders sagely reveal that, they are, at bottom, essentially storytellers, and then extoll the power of story, this is Derash. When sociopolitical commentariat speak of “narratives” underlying news stories or other commenter’s ideological distortions and omissions, all this is Derash. When we notice the strangeness of the past, the awkward or graceful artificiality of its gestures and expressions, this is Derash of an alien Ruach of a past era, a zeitgeist. Romcoms are highly stylized Derash, which is why they have a short shelf-life — vividly accessible for a moment, before wilting and repelling all but the nostalgically enchanted. Scientific paradigms guiding theory choice and formation, and even the instrumentation and practices within a scientific program — the common pre-rational conceptions are scientifically disciplined Ruach.

Derash takes the standpoint of one particular Ruach, and coherently presents reality from where it stands, relating an event or unfolding series of events from its own perspective, according to its own field of relevance and interrelations, conveyed in language optimized to communicate its experience of truth, infused with its moral valences, its own sensibilities and tastes.

By my understanding Remez is the hint of significance in expressions that we, caught within the limits of our current Ruach, are unable to understand coherently or clearly. We sense tantalizing but uncanny signal in the noise, and we are drawn to it even as we are repelled by it. Remez is how transcendent possibilities of faith and understanding call to us from beyond our current limits. This is the voice of Neshamah, the Siren of Wisdom, our higher self, and her music is Remez.

Remez is destabilized polysemic chaos, belonging to a higher realm into which we may ascend. This is the realm of Beriah. This chaos is not a chaos of absence of order, but a chaos of too many simultaneous orders — an infinitely signal-rich static requiring filtering for reception by finite Ruach. Ruach ascending to Neshamah, may be reconfigured for more expansive formation, and this is newly manifested in Asiyah, narratable as new Derash.

New self, in a new world, with a new story to tell, with new responses and new responsibilities…

In my practical experience as a designer, everyone tries to understand one level too low.

People try to prematurely construct systems using current conceptual repertoires, and often they are out of tune with one another, or as Kuhn put it are unconsciously operating from incommensurable paradigms. Each misalignment is adjusted, bridged or fudged piecemeal, and consequently the system has no sense of wholeness however systematically sound its integration.

Or people use force to impose their own limited understanding upon all others, who must adopt that understanding or work with incomplete understanding. Or they go to war with other groups in their organization who see things differently with the intention of winning enough power to impose their views.

Teams rarely transcend Ruach. Their stories are Derash of their own Ruach, and the villains of Derashic stories are often those of other Ruchot.

Part of the problem is that many of our political ideologies are considered by its adherents to be ultimate truths. Whoever is outside of the ideology is outcast. All more local understandings must fit inside the ideology and harmonize within it.

I am trying to develop a framework for talking about these levels of understanding, the challenges of communicating across them, the difficulties in overcoming them, as well as the hope and importance of succeeding.

From the moment I began designing, this has been the ineffable Why driving my need to understand what I am doing when I design or when conditions obstruct my efforts to design.

I will repeat my definition of design. Design is the crafting of any kind of system in which people participate as intrinsic parts of the whole. Paul Rand was right: Everything is everything, even when those doing the designing are unaware. And when we do this we mistake the non-human systematic components for the whole, neglect the “people part” and leave the designed whole languishing in semi-oblivion.

Another random note on Remez. When an artist crafts, the art collaborates in its own making. The artist is moved to say or make poetic forms whose meanings are charged with mystery. The artist cannot fully explain the meaning intimated by these expressions, but the expression is intuited to be right. This intimation is Remez, and without Remez, the art is cut off — exiled from what gives art life and meaning.

This is why true ideologues are unable to produce art.

Ideology makes tidy fables with tidy morals.

Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping

Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

For the last 25 years I have been iteratively refining a set of technical distinctions. These are the heart of my philosophy and design practice. Kabbalah accommodate these distinctions and gives them language. Are these understandings already there in Kabbalah, waiting to be recognized? Or are the latent possibilities, realized by configuative instauration? I am suspending this question for now.

Construal belongs to the mode of system. We construe a logic of construction. We figure something out and comprehend the relationship between a set of objective givens and a systemic whole they constitute as parts, linked logically or causally. This is the objective understanding of Nefesh, in the objective world of Asiyah.

Conception belongs to the mode of gestalt. We spontaneously receive a given gestalt whole. We are given gestalts both perceptually through the senses and conceptually through the mind. Each whole spontaneously resolves into given sub-wholes. The sub-wholes do not constitute the whole; rather, each whole comprises sub-wholes articulated within it. This is the subjective understanding of Ruach, in subjective world of Yetzirah.

But we do not experience our own subjectivity. Our own subjectivity manifests as given sensory and mental objects, as reality as we know it, as “objective reality”. It is only when we notice differences in responses to or beliefs about “objective reality” that subjectivity is indirectly discernible. This is only possible, though, if we do not naively invalidate other subjectivities as mistaken or deceptive. If we take other subjectivities as valid, we learn that objective understanding is rooted in subjectivity, and that material reality constrains objective understanding but does not determine it the way naive realism assumes. This process is dialogue.

If we pursue understanding of other subjectivities, and persevere until we succeed, success manifests as acquisition of new gestalts in new forms of objectivity. We are able to spontaneously perceive and conceive new gestalt articulate wholes. This acquisition is insight.

Pursuit of insight into other subjects — fellow Ruchot — is not straightforward, however. It is intellectually, emotionally and existentially demanding, and this is why we neglect or actively resist doing it. It is easier to ignore or invalidate other subjects, and subjectivity in general.

The most difficult aspect of trans-subjective understanding is the challenge of loosening and overcoming our own subjective limits. Those limits are uncannily enforced by nothingness. Each Ruach has an implicit ultimate conception of everything, beyond which there is nothing. In pursuit of inter-subjective understanding we must become skeptical toward our own sense of everything and the apparent nothingness beyond it. Everything becomes only everything to me within my own Ruach, and nothing becomes only that of which I am as-yet oblivious.

This introduces an entirely new attitude toward reality that intuits reality as largely — and in fact, overwhelmingly — transcendent in essence. This is the world of Beriah — the world by which Yetzirah and, consequently Asiyah, are given ex nihilo from nothingness.

To find our way to fellow Ruach we must puncture the roof of oblivion, and ascend to Neshamah. From there we may descend back to Ruach who can accommodate my old understanding and that of my fellow Ruach. More important than the present expansion, though, is something else: an immediate intuition of the eternal inexhaustibility of ex nihilo epiphany. This faith is intellection, also known as gnosis, the root of both subjectivity and objectivity.

Intellection is revelatory-creative, epiphanic. In intellective faith we press into the outer limits of everything as we conceive it, through the oblivion of nothingness, and intuit that nothingness is eternally pregnant with infinite moreness. The insight into nothingness resulting from this intellection immunizes against naivety of nihilism, and I call it exnihilism.

Entirely beyond philosophy is the absolute in Atzilut. From here I will observe Wittgenstinean silence.

Truth of religion

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Wheel

Regarding religion, here is what I know, limits and all:

Our finite minds are inadequate to the relative infinitude of reality.

Whatever objective truth we craft from the raw givenness of reality, it is irremediably selective and approximate.

Our focus of attention and involvement determines our subjective being, and this, in turn, determines the objects of our perception and conception we receive as given, and this determines our focus and involvement, and so on, in the reinforcing cycle of subjectivity and objectivity known as the hermeneutic circle, universally symbolized by the mandala.

We have some degree of choice with regard to our givens, but it is far from an arbitrary choice. It is mysteriously constrained, and the craft of theosophy instaurates truth within these constraints. These mysterious but real constraints and resistances vary from subject to subject and material to material, but they must be observed and answered to, and the degree of faithfulness to these constraints is the degree of truth in what we do and say and are.

Over time we materially reform our environments in ways that require us to renegotiate the truths we adopt and live by. Our truth comes out of alignment from our social reality, and we lose our capacity to make sense of the world around us, to interact with it effectively and to receive and appreciate its value. Our enworldment loses its What, How and Why, and to recover it we must redesign our enworldment, starting with theosophical craft.

Why start with theosophical craft? The core problem is loss of clear, effective, sacralizing truth. If we allow the deteriorated former-truth to select our focus and direct our efforts we will only deconstruct and reconstruct new structures by the logic that made everything broken in the first place. We’ll re-institute the worst of the old, while thinking we are overcoming it. We must revive first the judgment that will guide the rest of the work.

We court this judgment by pressing toward the nothingness that veils inexhaustible moreness, forever pregnant with inexhaustible shock, and enduring the ordeals of aporia.

None of this is speculative. I have lived this year many times. Naive nihilism has been shocked out of me.

But this should not be taken as disparaging speculation. Speculation is an indispensable and unavoidable design device. Upaya is the interface between finitude and infinitude. It reveals, conceals and imaginally masks the essential oblivion.

Designing for counterbalance

Philosophy, Wheel

In monotonously over-ordered times, a handful of heretics find inspiration in transgressive, dissolutive ideas, while the conformist majority continues to extend and enforce ever-increasing order, believing correctly that this trace of defiant resistance is the seed of anarchy.

In cacophonously under-ordered times the philosopher’s situation reverses with the conditions. Now the majority automatically stampedes over any and every order, toward the maximum dissolution, decay, and liberation in the purest chaos — while a dissenting few seek order. The latter pursues shelter from storms and buoyancy against floods. This is done not from love of order or hatred of disorder, but from loyalty to the mean.

Because our time is an anarchic, cacophonic time, I am inspired to design countervailing philosophies of order.

And here I will discredit myself, as if I had credit to lose, by invoking Nietzsche.

In excessively Apollinian times, a Dionysian philosophy restores tragic integrity; but in excessively Dionysian times, an Apollinian philosophy is in order. Loyalty to the mean: this explains why my bookshelves are filled with apparent opponents to my ideals. Our deepest loyalties eternally transcend every contemporary stance:

…the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today.

So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, they betrayed what was their own secret: to know of a new greatness of man, of a new untrodden way to his enhancement.

Every time they exposed how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said: “We must get there, that way, where you today are least at home.” Facing a world of “modern ideas” that would banish everybody into a corner and “specialty,” a philosopher — if today there could be philosophers — would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of “greatness,” precisely in his range and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility. …

The last thing this time needs is more deconstruction, more defamiliarization, more disorientation, more strangeness and estrangedness, more arbitrary fantasy, more liberation, more disorder — to pour yet more buckets of chaos into the chaos in which we are drowning. What is most needful in this time is to bail out our boat before it capsizes, submerges and merges with its watery ground.