Category Archives: Exnihilism

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.

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.

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.

Philosophical-Kabbalistic mapping

Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth of religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Mapping olamot

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

An enception is a conceptual capacity, the ability to “get” a concept. Once an enception is established (by our enworlding neshamah to our conceiving ruach), its conceptual form can be received (whether intuitively perceived or intellectually conceived) as given wherever its corresponding form occurs in reality, both by our conceiving ruach in Yetzirah, and our constructing/construing nefesh in Assiyah.

Or so I think. I’m trying to map my own experiences to the experiences of others who seem to know this strange space I navigate. Today it seems that:

Assiyah is a world of actuality, where, using given objects of perception and truth, we (as nefesh) construct systems of materials and ideas and methods, and truth is understood pshat, construed objectively in terms of their place in a constructed system, but that objectivity is determined by the conceptual repertoire given by Yetzirah. Whatever is not in that repertoire is inconceivable and is perceived as senseless chaos. Assiyah actualizes an enworldment, giving it perceptible material and symbolic form.

Yetzirah is a world of formation, where pure concepts interrelate, harmonize or clash, overlap, attract, repel, stabilize, destabilize and restabilize at various scales, forming subjective patterns of receptivity, obliviousness, attraction and revulsion in us (as ruach) which determines what is and is not given as real and true in Assiyah. Ruach is organic enceptions within enceptions, a capacitive system in everse. Yetzirah defines the limits and terms of intelligibility within an enworldment. Ruach understands in the mode of remez, that is it recognizes and relates forms, thematizing, analogizing, discovering the connectable dots and associating them, within an enworldment. Yetzirah is concerned with carrying a possibility of enworldment into its development of integrated forms and developing, integrating and strengthening it to the point where the enworldment can be actualized in Assiyah.

Beriah is a world of instauration (creation and revelation) where a new enworldment can enter Yetzirah, always ex nihilo, effecting radical expansion and reordering of subjects (ruach), how they enworld themselves (nefesh), on the whole and in part, in actual life. Amidst this change to ruach and its enworldment, a higher self maintains its continuity in Beriah as neshama. Conversion experiences are of Beriah, and they are understood in the mode of drash, homiletically, in pure and spontaneous interpretive application without objective construal, disclosing everything as belonging within an intuited, given enworldment. Beriah is where enworldments differentiate themselves within an infinite field, where difference is possible in principle.

Atzilut is the world in which all being is rooted, regardless of degree of awareness of this rootedness, in whom all neshama is of common chaya. It is from here that all value flows, and when we feel a rush of intensely inspired gratitude and joy with an epiphany from Beriah, that is the light of Atzilut, the brilliant bloodflow of the world, and it is understanding in the mode of sod. I am almost entirely sure there is much, much more to sod than this, but this is what I have had of it, if I am not mistaken.

For many years, and with increasingly intense focus, instauratio ex nihilo is crucial to me as a designer, philosopher and mystical fanatic.

My live question is cartographic. It is bound up with Beriah, but I’ve wavered on “where” it happens. I think I am moving toward (or into) an understanding that takes Beriah as a holistic world conception that perfects at Malkhut of Beriah, and bursts whole into Yetzirah as its Keter. And what it bursts through is the veil of nihilitude demarcating the worlds. On the side of Beriah, the nihilitude is part of infinitude, but on the side of Yetzirah, it is the outer limit of existence, beyond which there is nothing.

I have learned never to take that nothing on the outer limit of existence at face value. As a designer, as a philosopher and as a mystic I have pressed against the nothingness, and punctured it, and I testify: there is very real, very beautiful being on the other side of it, and if we cross over we return with transformative treasures, the best of which is exnihilist faith.

I am writing this same piece over and over again. I am circling this problem like a GPS satellite, photographing what is below, sending geolocation data down to the surface so I can figure out where I am.

A few years back, my friend Jarrett, team alchemist, gave me a framed print of a Ptolemy, as hermetic cartographer, lunar compass in one hand, solar globe in the other. This demonstrates why I have always loved working on her teams.

A note on “Creation redescription”

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Philosophy

A note on “Creation redescription”: This was written in response to a question I’ve been intuiting in the background of Sholem’s Major Trends. For an Infinite Creator, creation is necessarily a subtractive process. It creates by negation. This is the fundamental insight of tzimtzum, the heart of panentheism. But (not to get too Hegelian) but negation does not negate or exclude or subtract from infinity, it negates, excludes, subtracts within infinity, as an intrinsic part of infinity. Oblivion is essential to infinity, and nihilitude is a fine name for it. Nihilitude makes finitude possible and actual within infinitude.

Nihilitude can be seen as a distributed tzimtzum. In Sloterdijk’s idiom, where tzimtzum suggests a grand cosmic sphere of divine nothingness, nihilitude suggests a whole spherology of scales, of granularities. Nihilitude can be a foam, or a bubble, or a globe, or an everything-sized universe or even a more-than-everything-size metaphysics.

As a designer, I constantly encounter piercing of foam-scale nihilitude — “oh, wow, I never noticed that!” — “oh, I see what you mean, and now I can’t see it any other way!” — “Oh, I heard it differently, but now I’m hearing it your way!” — “This. Changes. Everything.” — We paper these events over with opaque language. But I see and cannot unsee them as everyday minor miracles.

I didn’t always see things this way. The meta-event of coming to see these everyday surprises as minor miracles came as a piercing of a slightly larger bubble-scale nihilitude. It was a paradigm shift — a localized conversion experience, that jostled my overall enworldment but did not burst it.

But several times in my life I have burst my enworldment. My ultimate, outermost heaven-dome was pierced. An epiphany irrupted into what seemed given, and forced a rippling comprehensive transformation of everything-all-at-once. The first time it happened it seemed like truth itself had exploded into what had been pure enslavement to convention, and that was true as far as it went.

But when this happened again, and then again, an even stranger epiphany pierced of an even vaster sphere of nihilitude.

Etcetera, ad infinitum, ex nihilo.

The creativity that we know is combination of givens we have passively received.

The nothing we know is just exclusion from a finite everything that, to us, seems limitless because it is bounded by oblivion, a nothingness that is absence precisely when it is present.

And the infinity we know is the endless concatenation of whatever givens we have been given, ex nihilo, and therefore with nothing beyond it.

Letterpress magic trick

Exnihilism, Letterpress, Philosophy, Star, Symbols and diagrams

As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil.

Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness.

I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion object in a blind spot demonstration, which exemplifies nihilitude (a present nothing which leaves nothing missing, showing very clearly how blindness is the furthest thing from darkness.) It is by nihilitude that the Trickster tricks, so I cannot imagine a better vanishing-appearing figure than Mercury, the trickster angel, for this vanishing act transpiring on my little magic paper strip.

Instructions.

  1. Orient the strip so the asterisk is on the left, and the Mercury sigil is on the right.
  2. Hold the strip arm’s length from your face.
  3. Close your left eye, and keep your right eye open.
  4. Focus your eye on the asterisk, while focusing your attention on the sigil.
  5. Maintaining this dual focus, slowly move the strip closer and closer to your open right eye.
  6. Notice when the sigil is no longer there, absent, while leaving no trace of absence.
  7. Say: “Nihilitude: Nothing is present so nothing is missing.”
  8. Remember that all but the tiniest sliver of reality is submerged in nihilitude. (“Exnihilated”)
  9. Thank God for the shelter of nihilitude, which is the precious gift of moral existence.
  10. Seal it with “Amen.”

There comes a perilous point in a person’s life when the decision can no longer be evaded or postponed:

Either seem sane, or be sane.

Creation redescription

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Symbols and diagrams

From Absolute One

…

Pure Infinitude to Articulate Infinitude (through definitude, divine Withness)

Articulate Infinitude to Defined Finitude (through nihilitude, divine Orness)

Defined Finitude to Formational Beings (through finitude, divine Notness)

Formational Beings to Material Actualization (through combination, divine Andness)

…

From Unformed Matter,

Inarticulate, undefined, unformed, at one with

Absolute One

The passage above is not translation. It describes in pure English what I have been shown in Hebrew.

+0(

Jacob’s Lattice

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah

In the Jacob’s Ladder figure (which a designer might be tempted to call Jacob’s Lattice), four Sefirot appear in vertical arrangement, each a world, overlapping at Malchut-Keter.

The terminal consummation at the foot of the world above (its fully realized Malchut) initiates the world below (that world’s Keter). Each world is suspended between an inheritance and a bequeathal, a coronation (Keter) and a kingdom (Malchut). The King is dead; long live the King.

Each world is the emergence of a category of transpiration. A mode of transpiring transpires.

In Beriah, creation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate emanated world, Malchut of Atzilut, culminating in a consummate creational world (Malchut of Beriah) where formation can commence (Keter of Yetzirah). Here transpires creatio ex nihilo: something from nothing.

In Yetzirah, formation transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate created world, Malchut of Beriah, culminating in a consummate formational world (Malchut of Yetzirah) where actualization can commence (Keter of Assiyah). Here transpires formatio ex spiritu: something from something.

In Assiyah, actuality transpires, starting from an inheritance of a consummate formal world, Malchut of Yetzirah, culminating in a consummate actual world (Malchut of Assiyah). Here transpires ars ex formatione: thing from something — first, inception of an idea, then its unfolding as multiple possibilities, then development as one specific possibility, then finally to full actualization as a voiced word or physical act or artifact — a material actuality.

If material is invited to reciprocate — as it should, for this is the material dialogue of craft — the influence ripples back upwards. Material responds to actions, actions respond to form, form responds to creation, and presses into inconceivability, impossibility — nihilo —

…And sometimes a response issues from the emanative beyond — a divine echo of creation, revelation from nowhere, revelatio ex nihilo, also known as inspiration. Some shocking, inconceivable impossibility is conceived as a given possibility.

And when this happens, two things happen. The qualitative meaning of infinity is experienced directly as radical surprise. And the person who receives the surprise is transformed, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, occasionally completely, and neither they nor the world they now inhabit is ever the same again.

Conversion is reenworldment ex nihilo. With a sufficient number of reenworldments, a person might become metaconverted to a world of enworldment, where reenworldment ex nihilo is permanently possible and forever expected. Such a person can never take nothingness, inconceivability or impossibility at face value ever again, for nothingness is the tender mask of infinity, worn for our own fragile finitude.

Let us call this metaconversion exnihilism.

Each one in One

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Love, Philosophy, Religion

Each one of us is the image and likeness of the One.

But each one is merely image and likeness, a self-similar part of the One.

The essence of the One is absolutely unique all-inclusive infinitude. Only the One is absolutely unique, all-inclusive and infinite.

Each one is finite, unique solely by other-exclusion, and has a given finite appearance of centrality within an all-containing everything given through the negative element of infinitude, nihilitude.

Nihilitude defines finitude against absorption in the exnihilating infinitude of the One. The layered protecting garments that bless finite beings with the possibility of enworldment are woven from the divine negative substance, nihilitude.

It is easy to confuse Nothingness with the Infinite, because the infinite One against whom our finite one is defined is concealed in nihilitude. But nihilitude is only the skin of the Infinite One, relative only to some particular finite one. The nothingness comprehends only some particular one, not the One.

Some of us despise our own finitude. We want to transcend it in order to escape it. We want to lose our finitude and be re-absorbed back into the infinite. Others hate whatever reminds us that we are merely one, not One. We try to annihilate whatever and whoever punctures the thin skin of our universal everything-that-is. Whether that everything-that-is happens to be objective scientific fact, or an absolutist religious doctrine, or a socio-psycho-physio-historic theory does not matter — whatever or whoever defies our universal gnosis cannot be. Some of us are just lonely and do not want to be alone inside our own finite one. We long for another to be one with us. Or we subscribe to something universally good. We try to become one with a collective one so vast and grand that it seems, in comparison with our own one, to approximate One.

We must learn to want our finitude. We must learn to savor inexhaustible moreness, and its practical manifestation, inexhaustible surprise. This requires us to intuit and love the nihilitude that protects our finitude and the finitude of others. It is from this nihilitude that creation and revelation come to us from the Infinite One, in small enough quality and magnificence that we may grow toward the infinite without exnihilating into it, altogether.

Years ago, a strange friend shared a quote with me in a characteristically strange way, which, it turned out, was a poetically simple expression of this truth.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.