Category Archives: Enworldment

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.

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.

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.

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

Worlds, selves, givens

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Philosophy

In the lifeworld dwells vital soul, to whom literal truth is given.

In the world of form-and-order dwells spirit, to whom figurative truth is given.

In the world of creation-revelation dwells intellect, to whom intellection is given.

In the world of emanation wells the source from whom being flows forth and returns.

The lines above are a summational response to a hymn by Nachmanides, translated in Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:

From the beginning of time, through eternities

I was among his hidden treasures.

From Nothing he called me forth, but at the end of time

I shall be reclaimed by the King.

My life flows from the depth of the spheres

Which give order and form to the soul;

Divine forces build it and nourish it;

Then it is preserved in the chambers of the King.

He radiated light to bring her forth,

In hidden well-springs, right and left.

The soul descended the ladder of heaven,

From the primeval pool of Siloam to the garden of the King.

Scholem then proceeds to discuss the three “spiritual agencies”, which in my Jacob’s Ladder “reference sheet” I labeled “subject”, but which I might simply call “self” in future editions.

The psychology of the Zohar shows a peculiar mixture of two doctrines held by certain schools of mediaeval philosophy. The first distinguished between the vegetative, the animal, and the rational soul — three stages which Aristotelian doctrine regarded as different faculties of the one soul, while the mediaeval followers of Plato were inclined to think of them as three different entities. The second, which was generally held by the Arab philosophers and popularized among the Jews by Maimonides, is based on the conception of the “acquired intellect.” According to this view, the rational faculty latent in the mind is actualized in the process of cognition, and this realization of the intellect is the sole guide to immortality. To this doctrine, the Zohar now gives a Kabbalistic turn. It retains the distinction between three spiritual agencies: Nefesh or life; Ruah or spirit; and Neshamah or soul proper, but abandons the idea that they represent three different faculties of the soul. Rather all three are already latently present in the first, Nefesh, and the higher grades correspond to the new and deeper powers which the soul of the devotee acquires through the study of the Torah and through meritorious actions.

Neshamah is the intellective self in Beriah, to whom reality is given in intellection.

This term, intellection, is a concept I learned from perennialists (followers of Schuon) and it concerns a kind of gnosis invited (never caused) by spiritual effort, which yields spiritual fruit, but which transcends spirit and vital soul. It transcends objective reason and subjective ontology.

Intellection is the true telos of philosophy. It is here that we receive gifts of immortal life from others and bequeath it to others willing to receive it. Here we move and are moved by the tossing of the golden ball.

Intellection is known solely by its fruits in figurative and literal givenness — enworldment.

A footnote in Scholem gave me another jolt of recognition this morning.

It referred the Zohar’s spiritual diagnosis of origninal sin.

He joined below and separated above, when it was necessary to separate below and to join above.

I consulted the Zohar for context:

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.”

“The fourth commandment: to realize that YHVH is ha-Elohim, God, as is said: Know today and take to heart that YHVH is ha-Elohim), God (Deuteronomy 4:39). To include the name Elohim in the name YHVH, realizing they are one, indivisible. This is the mystery written: Let there be me’orot, lights, in the expanse of heaven to shine upon earth (Genesis 1:14-15), that the two names be one, with absolutely no division — that me’orot, lights, spelled deficiently, merge in the name of heaven: one together and indivisible, black light with white light, indivisible, and all is one. This is the white cloud of day and the cloud of fire in the night, as they have said: ‘Quality of day and quality of night’s — to be arrayed by each other to shine, as is said: to shine upon earth.

“This is the sin of the primordial serpent: he joined below and it separated above. So he caused what he caused to the world. For one should separate below and join above. The black light should be united above in a single bond, then united with Her forces of unification and separated from the evil side.

“Nevertheless one should realize that Elohim YHVH is entirely one, indivisible. YHVH is ha-Elohim. Once one realizes all is one and does not impose division, even that Other Side will disappear from the world, not be drawn below.

“This is the mystery written: Let them be me’orot, lights. The shell rises in the wake of the kernel. The kernel is or, light; the other side, mavet, death. Or [light] in letters joined together, mavet [death] in separation. When this or [light] disappears from there, the letters of separation join together. …”

This understanding of sin as reversal of proper relationships reminds me of the animating insight of a poem I wrote twenty years ago in a metanoiac outburst and continue to edit and revise:

In the end,
the trees will grow like snakes,
splitting and sloughing bark,
bending in coils of green heartwood.
And the snakes will grow like trees,
stuffing skin under skin,
and in their turgid leather casings,
bury the ground with broken branches.

Volume titles

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Works

I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.

The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.

Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.

My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.

I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.

But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.

So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.

So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.

For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.

But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.

In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.

The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.

If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.

And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.

Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.

Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.

And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.

I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.

I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.

The most interesting, important thing in the entire universe

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

An appendix Thomas Kuhn added to later editions The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has had a continuing influence on my understanding of design. In this appendix Kuhn explained that scientific paradigms should not be viewed exclusively in terms of thought. A paradigm is not just theoretical, or theoretically guided practice or practice informed theory (praxis of science, considered apart from the scientific knowledge the praxis generates), but also in terms of the physical instruments used in experimentation and observation. He used a vivid example of how a paradigm of electricity as a fluid shaped jar-like electrical containers, which the later electrical charge paradigm rendered naive.

So a paradigm shapes concept, concept system, language, behaviors and tools all together as a mutually-reinforcing system.

Years later, Lucy Suchman, one of the founders of modern design research brought ethnomethodology to the nonhuman actors in the office environment.

Ethnomethology is a branch of microsociology that locates social meaning-making as a function of mostly tacit symbolic performances, which are called ethnomethods, thus the name ethnomethod-ology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. (Many designers casually believe that design research is a less formal and thorough version of ethnography, which is not entirely wrong, but slightly confused. Our roots are more ethnomethodological than ethnographic, and that root was sunk by Suchman.)

Suchman’s mind-blowing practical insight was to treat a copy machine as a social actor, and to see her own design task as equipping that copier with ethnomethods required to participate gracefully in its social setting. This shows a strong family resemblance to Kuhn’s materialized paradigm.

It could even be said that Kuhn described unusually explicit and disciplined ethnomethods of science. Within the overarching principles and practices we call scientific method are multiple scientific ethnomethods, which are paradigms. Or it could be said that ethnomethods are looser, less explicit, more implicit paradigms.

Both paradigms and ethnomethods tend to focus themselves within specific spheres of social activity, as does the close study of either, or in the case of Actor-Network Theory, which began its expansive life ethnomethodologically studying human and nonhuman actors who populate and constitute laboratories.

But these approaches themselves all outgrew their humble origins, and became something resembling their own objects of study. The study of paradigms induces a meta-paradigm that seeks paradigms in any community of activity, even ones that are not communities of rigorous scientific activity. Ethnomethodology could easily study the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists, and without even looking into it, given the kind of metaweirdo attracted to this field, I am unable to doubt that this happened within minutes of the establishment of ethnomethodology. There is no way at all this did not happen unless every ethnomethodologist automatically assumed what I am automatically assuming and decided not to bother. And anyway, why do something so obvious that it automatically occurs to everyone?

All this innovation happened at a time when flatness was fashionable. It was a daring and disarming move to say that Kuhn’s paradigm of paradigms was just another paradigm among paradigms, and not something belonging to another plane of metastudy. The ironic move of studying the ethnomethods of ethnomethodologists would be, ironically, an ethnomethod symbolically acting the unexceptionality of what ethnomethodology does.

But are these acts of principled, humble reflexivity truly innocent? What if there is a shade of benevolent bad-faith in it, an artificial doubt, a violation of Peirce’s principle: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

We choose to investigate paradigms or ethnomethodologies or to live a life of design because these things seem to us more expansive, profound and universal in important ways than even what they investigate. If they do not start out that way, they mature in that direction, and precisely because they are so expansive, profound and universal — because they overgrow their initial content of study, and then their own praxis, and culture and human condition, and, potentially, the metaconditions of the human condition (aka metaphysics), I call these all-encompassing meta-ways enworldments.

I might be wrong in my conceit that enworldments operate on a higher metaphysical plane than their objects of study (the knowledge they generate), than their subjects of study, (in the academic sense of subject, the shared praxis, the body of reciprocally-developed practice-informed theories and theory-guided practices of the discipline), than even their materialized praxes (tools, supplies, environment and other material supports).

I might even be stupidly wrong to believe in metaphysical planes at all in order to see such assignments.

But I am a person, and I am allowed to be stupid. That is my right as a relatively unimportant being! Why shouldn’t I confidently assert metaphysical truths that are absolutely true, as far as I can tell? If others see problems I miss, let them make their own counter-assertions. Let them catch me by total surprise if they can. I can’t squander my personal resources, anticipating every possible attack, or compulsively re-acknowledging that such attacks might be effective. Of course they are, and so what?

I prefer to be faithful to my true human beliefs than to be cagey in an attempt to avoid being caught and ridiculed for insuffient caution, humility and self-skepticism, or to make myself a less enticing target. I cannot help wondering what inclines people to spend their lives lurking about, looking for mistakes to catch and ridicule.

Ironically, false humility can be hubristic, and disingenuous hubris can be humble.

I think I am onto something of enormous importance and interest, I cannot doubt it, and I refuse to pretend to doubt it. If there is anything more fascinating and important in the world than the phenomenon of enworldment and its related phenomena (especially instauration ex nihilo) and the role design plays in it, it is entirely beyond me. So I intend to stand here within my own abilities and limitations and work this out in intense, innocent inspiration.

And when I look out into the world, what seems most lacking is inspiration, meaning, excitement and hope.

It seems to me that what blocks all these good, needful things is a fear of being caught making mistakes or showing our personal limits. Our negative goal of eliminating imperfections leads us to neglect the positive goal of doing things that are deeply and powerfully right.

The nihilism pandemic we are in might be the result of a misguided attempt to be tiny flawless gods according to narrow and mostly unexamined standards of what is better and worse, instead of living as imperfect, incomplete, interdependent vital organs of something greater than any or all of us, toward whom metaphysics reaches with all our being — mind, soul, body and all our myriad designed extensions of being.

We must get right with being wrong.

“Why philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Existentialism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, can be simplistically stated in a diamond-terse Basque saying and its negative corollary:

“What has a name is real.”

“What lacks a name is unreal.”

What is meant here by “real” and “unreal” is relative to us in our first person plural.

What has a name is (taken by us as) real; what lacks a name is (taken by us as) unreal.

In order for something to be unreal to us, however, it must already be given to us in some way, in order to be denied as unreal. Otherwise, it is ungiven, and, to us nothing, and, as nothing, can be taken neither as real or unreal.

In every age, most of all now, some of our most important givens are rejected as unreal to our deepest detriment. And some of our key given truths are ideas and only ideas, mistaken for intuitable realities, also to our detriment.

The designerly task of the philosopher is to identify these rejected, nameless unrealities, and name them, so they can become real to us.

To quote Eric Voegelin, “Why Philosophize? To recapture reality!”

Etymology will provide us some basic ideas required for the work of restoring reality to crucial ideas that are unreal to us. They will root and anchor our work.

Etymologically, the word “datum” means given; “data” is multiple givens.

Etymologically, taking is what we do when we receive something as given to perception or conception. The root “-ceive” refers to the act of taking, and “-cept” refers to that which is taken.

This etymologic frames a set of give-and-take questions:

Given how? Given by or via what mode of giving?

Taken how? Taken by or via what mode of reception?

In order for us to take something (through sensory perception or intellectual conception), it must, in the first place, in some way, be given.

Otherwise, we are oblivious, and the datum remains ungiven and is, to us — not unreal, but, rather, nothing at all. Whatever it is, however real, if we are oblivious to it, it has entirely escaped our awareness, and it is nothing to us. It remains submerged in pristine nothingness, until it itself penetrates our awareness, or someone else directs our attention to it.

A brief ecstatic interlude: At this very moment, I am directing your attention to nothingness. Nothingness, however, is only given to us by the experience of revelation ex nihilo, the radical surprise of the irruption of something from nothingness. Whatever the reality, it was there all along, but not to us, until the moment of epiphany. Sometimes such irruptions introduce a whole new mode of being, requiring everything (as we have it) to be re-understood. This is the most fascinating truth of the human condition: the omnipresent possibility of revelation ex nihilo, and the inspired reunderstanding of everything-all-at-once, which transforms the world and our place in it, on the whole and in every part, in literally inconceivable ways. Nothingness is not what it seems, and to know this exnihilates nihilism. Nothingness is eternally pregnant preexistence, the furthest possibility from dead nonexistence. Exnihilism is the best news a soul can enceive.

The mode of givenness that concerns us most is the direct, unmediated givenness known as intuition.

Intuition, as we are using it here, is the immediate awareness that something is, without reason or language recognizing what it is. Intuition apprehends being, prior to comprehension. Intuition apprehends with know-that.

Notice the “media” words: “unmediated”, “immediate”. “Medium” is another. “Media-” means middle. Something that comes between. Here the medium is reason, often, but not always, via another medium, language.

When our intellect comprehends it adds “know-what” to an apprehended “know-that”. It links this known what to a vast network of other whats and whys and hows, and makes sense of it in the context of everything else.

Etymologically, comprehension means “together-grasp”. To comprehend means, first, to grasp-together the intuited object in all its complexity as what it is — as an object of comprehension — and, second, to grasp what it is in the context of everything else, as part of a comprehensive totality we call “everything”.

But “everything” is relative, in ways unphilosophical folks seldom appreciate. When we say “everything”, we mean everything as given to us, and everything is given to each of us quite differently.

Some everythings are larger, denser and subtler than others. In order to avoid the strange pluralization of the normally singular everything, let us refer to any given everything as an enworldment.

An enworldment is everything, as given to some particular subject.

Let us understand that each enworldment appears to the enworlding, enworlded subject as the one and only everything. We naturally confuse “everything” with infinity, but infinity is infinitely more inclusive than what any of us can mean when we try to speak of infinitude. We are made in the image of the One, but we, alas, are and can only be one, unless we accept our place as organs of the infinite, what we Jews indicate when we say Adonai Echad.

When we comprehend, always with our intellect, we integrate some datum into our own given everything, which is our enworldment.

The data we are most prone to reject as unreal are given by intuition. We intuit that something is, but we do not recognize what it is. We apprehend that but cannot comprehend what. “Our reach exceeds our grasp.” We become apprehensive. In these situations we may explain our intuition away, by comprehending our apprehension as an unreasonable response to something “nonexistent”. “It was nothing real.”

Is this explaining away bad? Heavens no! We do this rejecting of misfit intuitions to preserve our enworldment. It is normal intellectual hygiene, required to maintain subjective health. Not every intuition should be admitted and integrated within our enworldment.

Which intuitions ought to be named is a matter of personal judgment, not criteria and rule.

But the judgment should revolve around matters of alienation. That is, they should consider where we are obstructed from participation in realities that matter most to our own lives together.

When the way we enworld ourselves preclude love, community, belonging, selfhood, beauty and value in general, that enworldment might need philosophical intervention.

Here is a quick litany of alienations: The positivistic limitation of real entities to objects of physics. The reduction of all meaning, including love of others, to emergent properties of purely physical processes, to evolutionary psychology. The reduction of identity to social categorization. The reduction of religion to scientistic explanation. Not to mention the reduction of science, itself — science being the disciplined systematic interaction with, observation of and understanding of matter under various conditions — to scientistic explanation! The cynical suspicion of every spontaneous conception as bias, paired with the gullible acceptance of expert claims as the remedy to bias!

Across the board, what is nearest and dearest and most concretely present in any human life is explained away as “subjective” or imaginary or distorted, in favor of far more distant, abstract and depersonalizing notions, many of which are not rooted in any possible intuitive immediacy.

These are features of an alienated and alienating enworldment shared by perhaps the majority of young members of the lower-overclass. It is responsible for a growing nihilism, manifesting in self-destructive politics and collective and individual mental illness.

If we manage to exnihilate this enworldment, we will emerge on the other side into a renaissance ex nihilo.