Category Archives: Works

Taste of infinity

Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we humans attempt to conceive or imagine the infinite we tend to focus on particular limits that are conspicuous to us. These limits are conspicuous to us because when we confront them we feel our limitations.

We imagine the removal of these limits and believe we imagine an experience of infinitude. Or we logically negate limits and believe we cognize infinity. The former is the stuff of religious fantasy, the latter is the stuff of scientistic rationality.

But both of these negating negatives takes us a single step toward the infinite. They both transpire within the realm of already-conceivable. Religious fantasy conceives immortality by removing a conceived feared event, death. Or it conceives omniscience by removing a conceived limitation of knowledge. Or it conceives clairvoyance by removing the confinement of inward thought to oneself. And so on. Most miracles are negations of natural limits. And scientistic infinity does the same thing — generally by counting endlessly. We never stop counting units of time. We never stop counting units of distance. Whenever we imagine an end to time of space — which is never really imagined, because an end of time or space is literally inconceivable — we close our unseeing eyes in order to not see what we don’t see anyway, and resume counting just a little longer, just to prove our power over the infinite.

But the infinite is precisely on the other side of countability. No amount of counting countable units can amount to infinity. It can get us just a little closer to infinity, qualitatively closer, if we start counting unlike units, producing what Ian Bogost named a “Latour litany”. Here’s a spontaneously invented example from Graham Harman: “neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.” A sincere effort to complete that series, which also must include the list itself at every stage of completion, will — while never producing anything even approximating infinity — induce a better conception of what infinity means. As will reading and internalizing the core insight in Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The closer we get to perfecting our theories, the closer we get to discovering that we must rethink that theory in some as-yet inconceivable way. Staring directly into the migrainescape of an undeniably real but as-yet inconceivable problem for one second gives us a sense of infinity that a lifetime of counting minutes cannot.

And an epiphany that changes everything all at once, followed by another epiphany that changes it again, each time bringing into existence, out of inconceivable nothingness, new species of conceivable somethingness — genesis ex nihilo — this helps us conceive the character of miracle.

Even the slightest taste of infinity, just barely enough to stop misunderstanding infinitude, is sufficient to induce exnihilism.

I’ve called mine a “metaphysics of surprise.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about this inexhaustible transcendent source of surprise is that it wants something from us, and it wants to give. We can opt out, but we should not. This is undeniably so, as our intensifying denials demonstrate.

Book Idea: Designing Hat

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ideas, Politics, Works

I have an idea for a book I will never write. I may just steal Borges’s beautiful move: writing a short story that is a review of a nonexistent book, outlining its key ideas. Or maybe I’ll add a new meta-level of laziness and just outline the Borgesian short story I will never write.

This never-to-be-written short story will be a fictional review of the never-to-be-written book Designing Hat, which is, of course, an allusion to DeBono’s actually-written pop-biz classic Six Thinking Hats. In this book DeBono advises strategic hat changes to address various situations. My book, however recommends putting on your one designing hat and never taking it off whenever approaching any problem involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything.

This single move, I’ll argue, can clear up all kinds of hellish nonsense we all detest. It won’t solve everything — no method can — but it can dramatically improve our chances of making real progress. In the process, it can reduce everyday hostility and nihilism while increasing solidarity and goodwill.

In the grand tradition of inflating the importance of design, I will insist that design thinking is effective far beyond its usual applications. Since almost everything we do is a variation on “problems involving human beings organizing themselves to do anything”, the advice is more or less to superglue your designing hat onto your head.

Political problems, from the pettiest household squabbles to international crises, should be addressed as design problems. Even if we are not hands-on participants in shaping domestic or foreign policy, our conversations about these issues will improve if we approach them in a designerly manner. And meetings, too… Ninety-five percent of meetings could be vastly improved if approached as design collaborations.

The review will offer a succinct summary of each chapter, showing how adopting designerly attitudes and practices makes everything better:

  • Segment people in reference to a clear purpose
  • Go to the reality you want to change and observe it for yourself
  • Ask people to teach you about their lives
  • Fall in love with problems, not solutions (I think Marty Cagan coined this?)
  • Win alignment; never resort to coercion
  • Do not argue if you can prototype and test
  • Do not debate; compare options
  • Make smart tradeoffs

There are definitely more chapters, and I’ll keep adding them as they occur to me. Please comment if you have ideas for chapters.

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

Design, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

This morning I am reflecting on the crucial difference between two words, clumsily translated into English as “repentance”, the Greek word metanoia (a transformation in how we think), and the Hebrew word t’shuvah (a turn to, or back to God).

Almost certainly, the word used by John the Baptist and Jesus in the Gospels was t’shuvah, which is actually (I think) closer in tone to the English word, even if it etymologically maps less perfectly. In t’shuvah, we are to turn back to God in every way — certainly in our thinking, but also in our feelings, and most of all in our behaviors. Or to put it Jewishly, in t’shuvah we turn with our whole being, heart, soul and strength. (Jesus did not invent this formula. This, and many other of his most famous utterances, referred to Torah and other Jewish scripture, and derived their authority from these references.) Metanoia, on the other hand, is more spirit-first — a change in thinking or worldview that effects a change in feeling and behavior.

I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I would be curious to hear if Paul’s works-versus-grace distinction was essentially a t’shuvah-versus-metanoia distinction.

The reason I am reflecting on this question today is I am realizing that in the book I am slowly developing, I have differentiated these two concepts, and placed them under different domains. (The three domains I explore are religion, philosophy and design.) I didn’t even realize until today that I was doing this!

I assign metanoia, not to the domain of religion, but to philosophy. I take it even further, even; I make a somewhat reckless normative claim that the essential purpose of philosophy ought to be metanoia.

I assign t’shuvah to the domain of religion. T’shuvah can involve engagement with thought, but it must engage with more than thought, and more likely will with behavior, and will always engage and change aspects of our own being outside our cognitive grasp.

(And, please, when I speak of engagement beyond thought, please do not modernize what I’m saying by shoehorning it into “the unconscious”, that iron lung of late modernity, which pumps artificial spirituality into unrespirating secular bodies. It is time to pull the plug. And I don’t mean making changes to our physical bodies. I care less than nothing about neurons or neural pathways or brain physiology. These ideas are valid in some contexts, but play no role in my thinking. People who must compulsively physicalize and psychologize and scientize ideas in order to make them compatible with their existing thinking will dislike what I have to say. I’m gunning precisely for their most sacred ideas, and they will not understand what I am saying until they undergo a metanoia that renders this scientizing unnecessary.)

The overlap between philosophy and religion consists of metanoia that effects t’shuvah, and t’shuvah that effects metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us to God. Most metanoia does not, though all metanoia experiences feel like “religious conversions” as moderns misconceive religion. Much metanoia turns us away from God’s infinitude, toward closed finite theory-systems, like Hegelianism or inverted Hegelianism (Marxism), or other closed theory-systems, such as Progressivism. These seal us off and insulate us all that exceeds the grasp of cognition.

I’ll tease one more tangentially important idea. Design (the third domain my book explores) is also concerned with material and social realities that exceed the grasp of cognition, and which can, through our thinking, feelings and behaviors, effect both religious and non-religious metanoia — and/or t’shuvah.

Exnihilist Manifesto

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

In a deep and consequential epiphany, the revelation comes from nowhere. What I come to know as given, prior to the epiphany, is inconceivable and, therefore, nothing. In a moment of epiphany, a new given emerges from nothingness — ex nihilo.

I, who could not conceive and was oblivious, and that which was inconceivable and submerged in oblivion, have been conceived together.

What has changed? The beholding subject? The beheld object? Both have changed — and something more. The relationship between the subject and all possible givens changes. Reality is now revealed to the subject through a transformed objectivity.

It is now a given truth that reality is always given to every subject in the form of some particular objectivity. This is as true of a personal subject, like you or me, as it is of an academic subject. Reality is given to mathematicians in one way and to historians in another. But to the subject of epiphany, reality is given in a pluralistic objectivity: an objectivity of myriad objectivities.

But yet something more — beyond subject, object and objectivity — changes too. This beyond matters most of all: our relationship with nothingness changes.

In epiphany, all that is epiphanically given appears out of nothingness — ex nihilo.

The nothingness from which epiphanies appear does not feel like nothing.

We sometimes conceive nothingness as a kind of darkness. But darkness is something we see. The analogy falls short.

Nothingness must not be confused with sensing no thing. Nothingness is the loss of sense itself, or the absence of sensibility.

If we lose vision, we do not see blackness; instead, we experience boiling chrome of sightlessness.

If we lose a part of our body, we do not feel of numbness; we are tormented by an aching phantom limb.

If we lose our hearing, we are not submerged in silence; we experience intolerable hypersonic ringing.

If we lose our sense of smell, the world does not become odorless; it reeks of burning rubber, sulfur and brimstone.

If we lose our sense of taste, our mouths and tongue are filled with bitterness.

As it is with the senses of the body, so it is with the sensibilities of the soul.

If we lose sense of purpose, we do not become care-free; we are paralyzed by ennui.

If we lose capacity to love, we do not become detached or objective; we are depressed.

If we lack understanding, we don’t experience ignorance; we become negatively omniscient, and know that there is nothing to know.

If we lose our sense of self, we don’t become selfless; we become self-conscious nebulae of resentment.

Nothingness is dreadful.

It is from dreadful nothingness that all epiphanies emerge — ex nihilo.

Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.

If epiphany happens once, it can happen again, no matter how dreadful and impossible it seems.

It will always seem impossible. It will always be inconceivable. It will always be masked in oblivion. It will always be dreadful. We will always be certain that “this time is different; this time it is final.” But is not.

How, then, can we ever again take despair or hopelessness at face value? How could we ever be nihilists? How can we not become exnihilists?

The nothingness that engulfs and pervades our given world an inexhaustible wellspring of surprise.

This nothingness is real. It liberates us from every omniscience, and frees us for God.

Psychic common sense

Enworldment

The body has five senses. The soul has a various and variable number of senses.

The common sense of the body is the material world given to us through the five senses. From what we see, hear, smell, touch and taste, the world is given to us. And this given sensory world is what we have in common with all persons and all peoples.

The common sense of the soul — psychic common sense — is reality given to us by the soul’s various and variable senses. This psychic common sense cannot be assumed to be held in common with all persons and peoples. But we need to have it in common with those nearest us. (A shared psychic common sense is what we mean when we refer to close relationships.)

As the soul’s senses emerge and die out, the psychic common sense reconfigures to reveal and conceal different realities and different actual relations among them. These realities and relations are, to us, the meaning of the world.

By the psychic common sense of our moment, we notice or neglect the people and things, significance and beauty, of what surrounds and environs us. And by the psychic common sense of our moment, we recall or forget, anticipate or suppress, believe or deny, value or dismiss the testimony of present, future, past, always and never.

The givens of our life, sensory and psychic, unconfined from the mind, transcendent of mere self, come to us or hide from us in the swirling chrome clouds of oblivion that forever envelop us in partial nothingness. The tone and color of the world’s meaning changes ceaselessly like seasons and weather.

Let’s call the various and variable emerging-dying psychic senses “enceptions”.

Let’s call the common sense arising among the enceptions “faith”.

Let’s call the world given by our sensory and psychic common sense “enworldment”.

People are hopelessly confused about what faith is, when they treat faith as a will to believe. Faith is nothing other than the common sense of the soul.

To be a faithful person — spouse, friend, community member, devotee — is to maintain ourselves in a stable psychic common sense, so that we stay continuously reliable and familiar to those around us who need to to be who we are to them. An unfaithful person can suddenly become strange to us and estrange us.

Don’t we all need room to grow and change? Yes, but we must instaurate a continuity, through justifications, accounts, explanations, stories and reconciliations.

The storyline threads in the experience mesh of our lives together are forever coming undone. We must never stop repairing and reweaving the fabric by darning our own storyline thread back with the threads who neighbor us.

Chord: Participatory knowing

ANT, Chord, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Star

Three related passages, all hinting at the kind of participatory knowing that enworlds (as opposed to knowing that produces mere worldview). The first is from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, the second from Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness and the last from Bruno Latour’s Irreductions.

1.

Every child that is coming into being rests, like all life that is coming into being, in the womb of the great mother, the undivided primal world that precedes form. From her, too, we are separated, and enter into personal life, slipping free only in the dark hours to be close to her again; night by night this happens to the healthy man. But this separation does not occur suddenly and catastrophically like the separation from the bodily mother; time is granted to the child to exchange a spiritual connexion, that is, relation, for the natural connexion with the world that he gradually loses. He has stepped out of the glowing darkness of chaos into the cool light of creation. But he does not possess it yet; he must first draw it truly out, he must make it into a reality for himself, he must find for himself his own world by seeing and hearing and touching and shaping it. Creation reveals, in meeting, its essential nature as form.

It does not spill itself into expectant senses, but rises up to meet the grasping senses. That which will eventually play as an accustomed object around the man who is fully developed, must be wooed and won by the developing man in strenuous action. For no thing is a ready-made part of an experience: only in the strength, acting and being acted upon, of what is over against men, is anything made accessible. Like primitive man the child lives between sleep and sleep (a great part of his waking hours is also sleep) in the flash and counter-flash of meeting.

2.

Two Finnish missionary ladies lived in a little apartment at the end of Ha-Turim Street in Mekor Baruch, Aili Havas and Rauha Moisio. Aunt Aili and Aunt Rauha. Even when the conversation turned to the shortage of vegetables, they both spoke high-flown, biblical Hebrew, because that was the only Hebrew they knew. If I knocked at their door to ask for some wood that we could use for the Lag Baomer bonfire, Aunt Aili would say with a gentle smile, as she handed me an old orange crate: “And the shining of a flaming fire by night!” If they came around to our apartment for a glass of tea and a bookish conversation while I was fighting against my cod-liver oil, Aunt Rauha might say: “The fishes of the sea shall shake at His presence!”

Sometimes the three of us paid them a visit in their Spartan one-room apartment, which resembled an austere nineteenth-century girls’ boarding school: two plain iron bedsteads stood facing each other on either side of a rectangular wooden table covered with a dark blue tablecloth, with three plain wooden chairs. Beside each of the matching beds was a small bedside table with a reading lamp, a glass of water, and some sacred books in black covers. Two identical pairs of bedroom slippers peered out from under the beds. In the middle of the table there was always a vase containing a bunch of everlasting flowers from the nearby fields. A carved olive-wood crucifix hung in the middle of the wall between the two beds. And at the foot of each bed stood a chest of drawers made from a thick shiny wood of a sort we did not have in Jerusalem, and Mother said it was called oak, and she encouraged me to touch it with my fingertips and run my hand over it.

My mother always insisted that it was not enough to know the various names of objects but you should get to know them by sniffing them, touching them with the tip of your tongue, feeling them with your fingertips, to know their warmth and smoothness, their smell, their roughness and hardness, the sound they made when you tapped them, all those things that she called their “response” or “resistance.” Every material, she said, every piece of clothing or furniture, every utensil, every object had different characteristics of response and resistance, which were not fixed but could change according to the season or the time of day or night, the person who was touching or smelling, the light and shade, and even vague propensities that we have no means of understanding. It was no accident, she said, that Hebrew uses the same word for an inanimate object and a desire. It was not only we who had or did not have a desire for one thing or another, inanimate objects and plants also had an inner desire of their own, and only someone who knew how to feel, listen, taste, and smell in an ungreedy way could sometimes discern it.

Father observed jokingly: “Our Mummy goes one further than King Solomon. Legend says that he understood the language of every animal and bird, but our Mummy has even mastered the languages of towels, saucepans, and brushes.” And he went on, beaming mischievously: “She can make trees and stones speak by touching them: Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke, as it says in the Psalms.”

3.

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

*

We could call this an apeironic materialism, as opposed to a scientistic materialism.

I almost called the latter “physicist materialism” except that Latour and his associates have helped me understand that physics-in-the-making is quite apeironic in its practical attitude. Physics-ready-made, consumed by nonscientists, is the belief content of scientistic materialists, which, ironically, apes materialism: Materials are a matter of bodily engagement and revelation.

Athletes are our most thoroughgoing materialists, and the material they know most is their own bodies in their own material context of action.

(Re)welcoming Buber

Biography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Philosophy

Last week I attended a class held by the Temple on Martin Buber. The class will cover Ten Rungs and The Way of Humanity, two of the many books Buber wrote in what I’ll call his “Hasidic mode”.

Buber’s interest in Hasidism will seem strange to people habituated to seeing Hasidim from the default Christian angle, as the ultimate “Pharisaical” Jews, who live in strict observance of a body of intricate, rigid and apparently arbitrary rules. There is significant truth to this image, but it is nowhere near the whole truth. It omits a fascinating dimension of Hasidic life that Buber emphasizes (and maybe over-emphasizes). What Buber finds inspiring in Hasidism is its rustic, vivid, lively but profound folk mysticism.

At the heart of this folk mysticism is a very simple and shifted vision of life, which is clearly Buber’s own (and since reading him fifteen or so years ago, also mine). Is it also the heart of Hasidism outside Buber’s idealized fantasy? I’ve seen evidence it might be, but I do not know.

But the Hasidic mode is only one expression of this vision. His other modes include two explicit prosaic modes, philosophical and theological.

The Buber who shocked me into a better life, and set me on my path to Judaism, was the one who wrote philosophically. My favorite book of his was always Between Man and Man.

But the mode I am contemplating today is the mode in which he wrote his most famous book, widely viewed as his magnum opus, I and Thou. My question concerns genre: what do we call this mode of writing?

I believe I and Thou is Buber’s hardest book. But it is also his most popular book. And it is also a poetic book. The language is beautiful and evocative. It is easy to enjoy aesthetically, allowing insights to come to us where they offer themselves, like ripe fruit falling from a tree. Jorge Luis Borges said of it:

But when something is merely said or — better still — hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination. We are ready to accept it. I remember reading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin Buber — I thought of them as being wonderful poems. Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book by a friend of mine, Dujovne, and I found in its pages, much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was a philosopher and that all his philosophy lay in the books I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments. I think that somewhere in Walt Whitman the same idea can be found: the idea of reasons being unconvincing. I think he says somewhere that he finds the night air, the large few stars, far more convincing than mere arguments.

This suggests that Buber is — like Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his primary inspirations — a philosopher-poet. Like Buber, Nietzsche’s magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was written poetically, and is viewed as his most impenetrable work.

We could follow Jan Zwicky who is also a master of this mysterious genre, and call it “lyric philosophy”.

I have noticed something fascinating about these books, conspicuously common to Buber, Nietzsche and Zwicky, and it makes me want to suggest another, simpler, less novel label. When I read their books, I am existentially different. And the difference persists and permeates my life as long as I stay engaged. And the difference is not only a change in mood. It changes my whole perceptual field. I notice different givens, and my noticing is different. (For instance, Zwicky’s writing made birds intensely present around me.) All three attune me to a kind of energetic, space-filling humming that harmonizes the sounds of home, nature, traffic (air and road, living beings and machines. The different noticing is infused with valuing. And people seem different to me, and I want to interact with them differently. In other words, I change and the world re-enworlds around me in a better way, and the entire Who-Why-How-What manifold glows and vibrates with significance.

The medium-message in books like these is peculiarly independent of the content. Often I cannot even remember the specific factual content. These books act on me through my efforts to understanding the content — but the content is not the point. It does not matter What Buber or Nietzsche or Zwicky believe. What matters is Who they are, How they intuit and think, and Why it matters. If you read them urgently, actively, attentively — in the spirit Buber calls I-Thou — the Thou of the writing changes the I who reads and responds.

Isn’t this the effect… of prayer?

I would like to propose that these strange books are long, complex prayers, and that reading them in the way they ask to be read is engaging in a kind of petitionary prayer. In this prayer we invite infinitude back into our lives, once again, to abide with us in our finite I-Here-Now.

And then we forget, and our guest departs. So we pray again, if we remember to pray.

I think I love this kind of prayer book. I want to write prayer books. Maybe that is what my first “book” was (if you can call a pamphlet with nine sparse pages a book).

*

So, anyway, in the first class, Rabbi Sperling gave an overview of Buber’s life and works, and I realized I could remember almost none of the details of I and Thou. So I picked it up and started re-reading it (both the Smith and Kaufmann translations, together) and now I’m in a prayerworld all over again. I love it here.

*

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”, Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Stephen Mitchell.

Campagna

Biography, Enworldment, Metaphysics

I think I’ve found my next book, Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality.

My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is supericially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-­system of our age. A reality-­system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world­making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.

His reason for writing this book is addressing today’s nihilism epidemic.

…the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ’emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?

This double questioning — a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change — led me to consider the problem through another angle.

And now here’s the good part:

Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality-settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/ social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes — and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.

As with most books I’m drawn to these days, the joy is mixed with terror of being scooped. His diagnosis is identical to mine.

The ingrained hopelessness of so many contemporary intellectuals is not in the contents of what they believe, which was summarized charmingly by Woody Allen in Annie Hall:

There’s an old joke.

Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life — full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.

The litany of complaints changes generationally, and what will bring an end to the misery changes with it.

It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” The sense that this time it is different is an element of what makes this time perpetually like all other times.

I, like Campagna, agree with Heidegger that this recurring, shifty nihilism is a metaphysical malady that goes by the name technic, technik, technicity.

I, like Campagna, see our relationship with language as central to our problem.

Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there will always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom.

Wow. And shit.

Back to this terror of being scooped.

I must get real about the metaphysical emergency we face. I need to care more about the success of the rescue mission than whether my role in the mission is ever acknowledged. I’m corrupted by the need for recognized originality.

Once again, like dozens of times before, I’m pretty sure I’ve been scooped.

Or.

Or maybe I am a truth-seeker who got so accustomed to swimming in boundless waters that I stopped hoping for land. Forty days and forty nights, forty years of swimming through watery wilderness toward something promised but ever unfulfilled, I gave up on landfall, or even a ship. I dreamed of some ideal ark we could build together, some firmness beneath our feet.

Could it be that I can’t even recognize the feeling of terra firma when I’m finally standing on it? That I imagine others built the boat I dreamt of building, when really, we have all just wandered ashore on the beaches of the same promised land?

If that land turns out to be the Pavilion at Brighton I am going to be pissed.

Trouble, divergence, alignment, diversity

Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Philosophy

In my field of human centered design, it is understood that before any group of people can collaborate effectively on anything, they must first align on the problem and then align on the solution.

What does this mean? Aligning on a problem means to share a conception of the problem — to think about it in roughly the same way. It is important to note here that until a problem is conceived, it is not even a problem — it is a troublesome situation.

And troublesome situations have the potential to be problematized in divergent ways implying diverging paths to a solutions. More often than not, groups confronting troublesome situations problematize the trouble in divergent ways, compounding the trouble, because now stubborn, troublesome people appear to block the way to a solution.

This happens for at least three big reasons.

Big Reason Number One is personality. Individual persons with different temperaments, sensibilities and capabilities understand and perceive the world differently in both subtle and dramatic ways, and notice different aspect of situations.

Big Reason Number Two is discipline. When people from different backgrounds confront a troublesome situation, they tend to notice very different features of the problem. Specifically, the notice symptoms of problems they specialize in solving. Different disciplines conceive problems in different and incompatible ways, and this is one factor that causes departmental strife in organizations.

Big Reason Number Three is the lived experience of incomplete information. Divergence of understanding is exacerbated by incomplete data. Given a smattering of facts, our habitual way of understandings (the combo of personality and expertise) fills in data gaps to complete the picture and perceive a gestalt truth. And we all have access to different smatterings and experience the smatterings in different sequences. Our early impressions condition our later ones. Being humans, a species with a need to form understandings, who prefer misunderstanding to an absence of understanding (perplexity), we immediately begin noticing whatever reinforces that sense, and tune out what threatens it. So the specific drib-and-drab sequence of data can play a role in shaping our impressions. The earliest dribs and drabs have “first mover advantage” in gestalt formation.

These three big reasons are not even exhaustive. It’s no wonder organizations are full divergent perspectives and controversy. (Contra– “against” + -versus “turned”). Generally, these circumstantial impressions and expert diagnoses of troublesome situations are not entirely wrong. Some are likely truer than others, but it is hard to determine which is truer than which. And it is somewhere between possible and likely that none are true enough for the purposes of solving the problem. As a matter of method, we designers assume none are right enough. (And if it does turn out that a preexisting truth turns out to be true enough, now we can support that truth with data and align the organization to it.)

Our job as design researchers is to go out and investigate real-life examples of the troublesome situation and expose ourselves to the profusion of data that only real life itself can offer. We see what emerges as important when we allow people to show us their situations and teach i\us how it seems to them.

This gives us a new, relevant conception of the problem rooted in the people we intend to serve with our design solutions.

Once an organization shares a common conception of the problem, they are better able to conceive solutions that they can align around.

And further evaluative research — getting feedback on prototypes of candidate solutions — allows teams to align around solutions that people consistently respond to favorably.

Aligned implementation teams can collaborate effectively on working out the solution in detail.

So, as I hope you can see, the designer’s task is largely a political one of cultivating alignment through collaborative research, modeling, ideation and craft.

I am unable to believe that this is not generally a better way to live.

When I am at my best, I conduct my life in a designerly way in accordance with my designerly faith.

Rapport as data

Design, Enworldment

Did I really never post this thought before? I’ve been saying it for years:

Rapport is the most important data we gather in research.

Rapport is attunement to the participant’s enworldment. We learn to speak with a participant fluently in their own context, understanding not only their vocabulary and the content of their speech, but also how that speech relates to their environment and activities. We get not only the parts but grasp how the parts interact as a system, and become organs within an organism within an organization. Until we understand these complex relations between part and whole all we have is a heap of facts that can be construed rightheadedly or wrongheadedly.

Researchers with strong objective inclinations like to believe that facts can speak for themselves. And they like to believe that the facts are best able to speak for themselves when we remove or neutralize subjectivity, usually by employing mechanistic procedures. In the absence of subjective interference, data can autonomously organize itself into patterns and themes.

I am a researcher with strong subjective inclinations, and I believe facts do not speak for themselves, at least not univocally. Our best bet is not to eliminate subjectivity from our analysis, but rather to bring the right subjectivity to the analysis. And that right subjectivity is the subjectivity that attuned itself to participants when rapport was achieved in the interview. When we analyze our data and then thematize it we build a body of knowledge that embodies this right subjectivity, and makes it more learnable by others.

(Esoteric side notes to take or leave: 1. Here we see how a personal subject is, like an academic subject, a specific form of objectivity. 2. We could say, with Marshall McLuhan that the medium, subjectivity acquired in rapport, is the message, even more than the factual content gathered in the research.)

When we approach design problems from this right subjectivity we find ourselves able to do things we couldn’t do before, back when we approached it naively, from our own everyday subjectivity. We now perceive the situation differently. We feel different emotions, values and weights in the situation, and sense different possibilities, opportunities and hopes. Our minds follow different logical paths through the shifted landscape. We produce different and more attuned ideas than we normally could, in greater intensity, force and volume.

I call this productive, shifted state precision inspiration.

Empathy is much more than simple feeling-with. (That is sympathy.) Empathy engages our entire being. For sure, it engages our hearts, but not just our hearts — not isolated, alienated, mindless hearts, divorced from our thinking and doing selves.

Empathy attunes us to the thoughts and actions of others and helps us see how feeling, thought and action converge as a situated, living person who might feel, think and act very differently from us… as different from us as a kidney is from a stomach or liver.

In an organism, the organs serve each other in different and complementary ways. Empathy is how we serve each other in different and complementary ways within organized groups.

The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World. — Black Elk

 

On the subject of gestalts

Enworldment, Holarchy, Philosophy, Synesis

Common sense is constituted of gestalts. It is shared gestalts that transmit being across scales.

If I experience some entity (of whatever kind), with my conceptual mind, participating body, and feeling viscera, as a unity, I become a unity in experiencing it fully. In experiencing the entity’s objective unity as real, I experience my own unified subjective reality, first-person singular.

And if I, as a unity, experience this entity with another person, who also, as a unity, experiences the entity, and we experience it together, we together become a subjective unity. We have a shared experience of reality and we are first-person plural.

I’ve stopped trying to be sane, so I see this new first person plural subject as essentially the same as the first person singular. Just as groups can align or conflict, a single self can align or conflict. An individual person can be self-estranged into dissociated “dividual” bits of clashing consciousness who cannot make up our minds, or are of two (or more) minds, or seized with inward conflict or chaos. And this state varies by context. In some situations we are divided against ourselves, and feel estranged not only from the context — where we are, who we are with, what we are doing — but within ourselves. In other contexts we feel at home and at peace with ourselves.

This is why I am always saying that a personal subject and an academic subject are a subject in the same sense of the word. Each is a system of gestalt-capacities that unifies itself around some particular subject-matter. An academic subject is a subject state attuned to make some particular kind of sense of some particular unities within reality. A personal subject that knows an academic subject becomes a participant in the academic subject when attuning to its gestalts with others with the same attunement.

The word I have used for a gestalt-capacity is enception. I’ve also used the word sensibility (ability to make a particular kind of sense) and arcanum to mean the same thing. If we apply enceptions (especially with others) to make a spontaneously experienced common sense, this application is what I’ve called synesis. And objective reality as given to any particular subject is what I have referred to as an enworldment. (This has also been called lifeworld by Husserl and his followers. I just like enworldment better.)

Endemic to this problem space is a confusion between subject and object. We tend to conflate subject-matter with subject, when, often subject-matter is only that by which a subject is acquired. The object is the means by which the subject is induced and animated. Doctrine is the means by which faith is summoned to life.

We can perceive or conceive gestalts of actual entities — systems that function as a unit.

But we can also perceive or conceive gestalts that seem to — but do in any way — function as a unit. We reify ideas corresponding to nothing beyond themselves, sometimes affording them agency they simply do not have.

Ideologies are the subject-matter of collective subjects who experience common social gestalts.

Ideologies can be in touch with reality (as Fritz Perls say) — that is, perceive, conceive and respond to actual entities that function systemic units. Such ideologies are in contact with reality. Liberal ideologies acknowledge that multiple gestalt systems can contact reality in divergent ways, and experience reality differently, producing different conceptions of what is true. That is, they are pluralistic. But some ideologies that are in contact with reality are not pluralist, and this can cause problems.

Other ideologies are driven by a compulsive need to form its kinds of gestalts, whether or not those gestalts correspond or not to any actual entities. These ideologies fall out of contact with reality, to some degree. Such ideologies can become aggressive and destructive in their effort to force reality into conformity to their gestalt schemas. They are sustained largely by social conformity, so nonconformity is experienced as an existential threat.

Whenever I seem to attack groups or members of groups, I attack them as subjects, and usually ideological subjects. I tend to attack non-pluralist ideologies, regardless of their degree of contact with reality.

My own passionate conviction is that the fullest degree of contact with the reality of other subjects brings us into contact with the ultimate reality of pluralism.

Yes, I am, in fact, moving toward a correspondence theory of truth! But it is a pluralist correspondence. This is new for me. Cool!

Designing our world(s)

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Politics

Most of our personal being is bound up in wordless, intuitive participation. Our easiest words are part of our social participation. Explicit thought enters the scene mostly where intuitive participation fails.

We see this very vividly in the field of design. When we craft an artifact that really works, people take the artifact up into their intuitive social participation and act through it use it without fully perceiving it or thinking about it.

So, if explicit thought is primarily a response to intuition failure, why would we imagine it desirable, or even possible to dismantle a functioning organically developed system, and replace it with an explicitly thought out, manually constructed social order? This is like trying to grow a body from wound tissue and scars.

Here it is time to trot out the finest quote Yogi Berry never uttered, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” We imagine we can engineer a better world, until we are faced with the urgent need to actually do it.

God forbid we are ever faced with a dismantled, or otherwise destroyed social order. Then we will realize that most of the kinds of people who have strong political opinions do not even understand what a political problem essentially is, namely a problem of e pluribus unum — a problem of aligning a diverse plurality around a unified understanding and course of action.

Technocrats think politics is figuring out what ought to be done and then doing it. Dissent and resistance, to them, is an obstacle to political problem-solving. They may be top-notch policy engineers, but as politicians, they very literally do not know what they are doing.

Take it from a designer, if your job is to persuade and inspire and win broad-based assent — that requires serious, arduous learning.

You must learn how people experience their lives, what is on their minds, what is important to them, what disturbs them, what they fear and what they hope for. You must know what a person’s world is like. Where do they live? Where do they work? With what people do they interact everyday? What tools do they use? By what media is the wider world beyond their environment given? How is their time spent? Where do they have control of things? Where are things out of control? Where do they feel controlled? Where do they feel empowered and respected? Where do they feel oppressed and humiliated? What do they experience as beautiful and good? What do they experience and ugly and bad?

We could call this a “worldview”, and many people do, but it is more than a view, both literally and metaphorically. It is a kind of involvement and a participation. Some have called it “lifeworld”, but, at least to my ears, this seems too biological, too passively received, too uncreative. People shape and reshape their physical and social environments, and they shape and reshape their understandings of reality. Received learning can change understandings, but so can one’s own trials, errors and successes. And only some of the understandings are explicit. Many more understanding are entirely intuitive, habitual and tacit. These understandings live in our bodies and souls, and never concern our heads. By this understanding, selves are not body-shaped. Selves stream out into the world through tendrils of action, influence, perception, communication, concern and they weave together into complex and sometimes chaotic meshes of being. The word I like best to designate this inseparable person-context hybrid is “enworldment”.

Even in simple design problems, this never involves fewer than two enworldments. There is always an enworldment of the provider of a design and the enworldment of the recipient, and normally there are many more than two.

When we finally understand an enworldment we can speak into it with respect and generosity. We are better able to persuade and win assent. In fact, we can invite people to collaborate with us to actively shape whatever solution we seek to win assent for. This is politics.

When I talk with young designers about politics, I recommend that they stop thinking about politics in the way they were taught to think politically, and instead to approach politics as a designer.

I cannot emphasize this enough: if you find yourself slapping your forehead and asking “how can those people believe this?” Or if you find yourself exasperatedly exclaiming “I just don’t understand why those people feel this way…” or do this action, or care about this thing or that, or have this or that passionate aversion… Understand that you are confessing ignorance!

People who are very, very clever and who made high marks in school and who are accustomed to understanding things effortlessly it is easy to succumb to a foolishness that afflicts smart people: the fallacy of argument from incredulity, which assumes that what is beyond their comprehension is incomprehensible nonsense. Instead of seeking comprehension, it diagnoses why someone espouses nonsense or delusion.

Who in their right mind would ever consent to be led by people who disrespect them, refuse to hear them and understand them?

We must relearn how to learn! And we must relearn how to respect others. Our liberal democracy depends on it.

Multistability

Biography, Design, Enworldment, Philosophy, Religion

All my interests concern psychic multistabilities — gestalts of perceptual, conceptual (hermeneutic), relational and behavioral kinds. My whole life is a story of successive stabilities, punctuated with perplexity, anxiety and chaos. Somewhere along the way it became a story of finding durable stability through understanding multistability.

Design is about forming multistable arrangements between persons and nonpersons — “hybrid systems’, as Latour called them. In a stable hybrid system, nonpersons become extensions of personal being and persons are able to participate in an order that transcends their awareness and understanding. This involves interplay between conceptual and perceptual gestalts — and with advances in service design, social gestalts, concerning personal and organizational behavioral.

Philosophy — or at least the kinds of philosophy I enjoy — concern the dissolution and reformation of stable cognitive systems. An understanding is skillfully taken apart (refuted), enough that that it no longer possesses the intuitive stability of a given truth. Thus, loosened (analyzed) the elements of a possible truth are freed for new arrangements.

These freed elements can be logically connected and built up into cognitive or social constructions and asserted as truth. These constructed truths are experiences as true by all who can construe them, that is, retrace the construction and show the soundness of the connections. We may now explicate truth — untangle or unfold it — or explain truth — lay it flat, two-dimensionally, or better, in a one-dimensional straight line of thought, so it can be followed. All this is construal of constructions. It’s analytic stuff, and, at least for me, a preliminary for something vastly more important, which is experimenting with of constructions to find and exploring conceptual multistabilities. A concept is a cognitive gestalt, and the capacity to perceive, conceive or participate in a gestalt affords us givens — given entities, given truths, given situations. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the more given-rich our experience of reality. To understand multistability from a first-person perspective, means to modalize stabilities. A mood is a modal stability — or lack of stability, in the angst of perplexity. Between continents of solid, stabile ground lie vast expanses of watery welter and waste…

Anyway — some folks maintain a very limited repertoire of conceptual capacities, and rely heavily on construal. My strategy is the opposite. I try to stabilize a dense conceptual system that affords intuitive givenness of those realities that concern me most in life. I am grateful that scientists and engineers of various kinds inhabit a world tuned to physics, or chemistry, or whatever enables them to perform feats of technological magic. But I cannot live a life in full contact with their givens. I live in a world of truth-mediated relationships, where groups of people try to conceptually and practically align on problems and solve them together. Daily, I witness firsthand how clashing conceptualizations induce anxiety, and how premature attempts to annihilate anxiety. discomfort, tension and conflict only suppress and pressurize perplexity and make it more explosive, while also obstructing progress and necessitating domination — ironically often by folks who believe they are protecting us from domination.

In other words, my philosophy of multistability is derived from my direct personal experiences with design multistability, and this philosophy helps me navigate stabilities and de-stabilities without losing my head — or at least not irrecoverably losing my head. I maintain a philosophical self above my practical self, and this transcending self acts as guardian angel over my hazardous pursuits.

Finally…

Religion — religion is the practice of maintaining one’s finite self within an infinitely multistable reality, in full skin-on-skin relation to its infinitude. The very infinitude of not only its quantitative extent in time and space (or whatever other dimensions physicists discover-invent-instaurate for us) is the least of it, because infinity is essentially qualitative. Infinity presents us with a limitless number of limitlessly countable things. Each time we re-stabilize, we notice new givens and we stop seeing relevance in old givens. We are inclined to focus on and count very different givens. Those who have destabilized once often feel elevated and awakened to truth. The scales of the old stability fall from their eyes. Now they know the true Truth. If they have power, they’ll set to work propagating and enforcing it, and no amount of argument can pop them out of their crusade — not even that they are latter-day crusaders. No, they are different, special and unique according to their own criteria, and in this, they are exactly the same as every crusader who ever lived, all of whom were benevolent, insightful and brave champions of whatever floats their boats. It is a tragicomedy of epic proportions that our most hopelessly naive and biased naive realists run around preaching against cognitive bias and naive realism, believing that this objective knowing about is a cure for an incurable subjective condition. I call this metanaivety. It is as old as religion itself. It is the fundamentalist dementia that commits the category mistake of treating subjectivity knowing as objective knowledge. God is not an existent nor nonexistent object, and until an intelligent fundamentalist overcomes the fundamentalist fetter, decency demands atheism.

To be religious is to know the stabilities are unending and that our relationships with one another within this infinitely multistable reality call for destabilization and restabilization, death and rebirth.

Religion is the practice of taking active responsibility for our choice of psychic stability, so we live in awareness of one another within God.

Block

Biography, Exnihilism

I’m really struggling. I have a sprawling multi-volume book in my mind and I can’t get it out. It’s that genre and voice problem again. It took me almost two decades years to get nine pages into an acceptable form. But I have 991 pages still jammed up in there.

Susan suggested that maybe I write what I have to say as chapbooks, maybe they’ll coagulate into an actual book. Or maybe they’ll expand into respectable-length essays that could be published as a collection.

I do find it inspiring, though, to think of what I’m doing as making pretty books — physical artifacts made out of ideas, words, letters, layouts, paper, ink and thread. I love the object-quality of books.

Three chapbooks I could get out are:

  • Exnihilist Manifesto
  • Shells and Pearls
  • Enworldment