Category Archives: Works
Notes on design esoterism
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Dreamt awakening
Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.
Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.
We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.
Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.
We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.
And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.
Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.
Hermeneut lifecycle
For a decade I have struggled with an enduring aporia, a question concerning enception. (An enception is a capacity to receive a given of some particular form.) My question concerns whole versus part, but even just saying it this way gives me the missing answer.
At various times I have talked about enceptions in terms of a holistic ordering principle among capacities (or faculties) and at others as the capacities (or faculties) themselves to be ordered.
When approaching enception part-to-whole we emphasize enceptions as multiple capacities of reception of givens — a capacity to -ceive / take in a reality of some particular form, whether through perception, conception or intuition. Without enception for a particular form, that form remains submerged in oblivion. With the enception the form can be taken as a given — a perceived given reality or conceived given truth.
Enceptions operate at every scale. The perceptions of our five senses are taken-together (con-ceived) gives us sensus communis (perceptual common sense of what is real). And our social participation mediated by language gives us another common sense of shared understanding of the world with others of our community. Communities collaboratively build varying enceptive systems of understanding, each with its distinctive knowledge and practices.
This scaling brings us to the other use of enception, the whole-to-part approach. Here an enception which is a principle of holistic ordering, which crystallizes or harmonizes multiple capacities/faculties into a stable and self-reinforcing subjective system with its own ontology and objectivity. According to this view, the enception is not so much a function of parts, but of the stability of some ultimate, ordering enception. By this view, with a change in ultimate enception, givens can both irrupt into givenness or vanish back into oblivion. This seems true.
How I managed to not see this all along is beyond me: The hermeneutic circle is also the hermeneut lifecycle.
I knew this.
West and autumn and evening:
Establishing,
Perfecting,
Immortalizing.
North and winter and night:
Questioning,
Breaking,
Liberating.
East and spring and morning:
Playing,
Experimenting,
Discovering.
South and summer and day:
Believing,
Committing,
Conquering.
Beings cycle through phases,
each phase a relation of whole and part,
with its own mood and thrust.
In west and autumn and evening,
beings participate in the order.
In north and winter and night,
beings revolt against a world
unable to comprehend them.
In east and spring and morning,
beings wander freely,
groping for possibilities of relation.
In south and summer and day,
a movement emerges,
persuading and enlisting –
proceeding from the most yielding
to the most resistant.
Looping in on exnihilism
To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?
The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.
Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.
Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.
Protected: Tzimtzum and exnihilism
Crossing design with Kabbalah
I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.
- Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
- Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
- Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
- Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
- Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
- Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
- Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.
Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.
Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.
For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.
Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.
The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.
The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.
Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.
Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.
The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.
Haloed dread.
The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.
Olamot
I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.
What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.
What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.
What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.
What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.
Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.
Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.
Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.
Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.
Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.
Protected: Seed
Protected: Everso hymn
Protected: Some eversions
Hineini void
Quantlocked
Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.
An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.
Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.
Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!
So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.
And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)
With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.
Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.
Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.
Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.
I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…
…
Oh.
Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.
It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.
Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.
Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.
Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.
Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.
The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.
This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.
And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.
Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.
No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.
Topology of mystery
Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.
Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.
We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.
But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.
The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.
The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.
And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.
The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.
Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.
Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.
Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.
Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.
Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.
In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.
On decadence
Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.
The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.
A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.
One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.
In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.
A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.
A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.
A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)
Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.
There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.
There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.
Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.
Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.
Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.
Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.
A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.
I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.
An insincere exhortation
This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:
We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.
The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.
Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.
Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.
Protected: Prometheus Centrifuge
Protected: Wombinal souls
Sense, common and uncommon
Common sense is our “sixth sense”: the sense of an objective world of objects intuited by the concerted perceiving of our five senses.
Each of us has this kind of intuitive common sense. Each person’s intuitive common sense overlaps significantly with that of every other. We tend to notice and focus of the differences, but they stand out precisely because they are anomalous.
Most intuitive common sense is shared, and to the degree it is shared it is taken as universally recognized givens of reality.
These universal givens of reality provide a second meaning of common sense — social common sense.
Social common sense is founded on the necessary assumption that our intuitive common sense gives us the same world, a world common to each and all of us, a world of objects we all know commonsensically.
Social common sense is the basis of all community and communication. We assume we all share common sense of a common world, and it is on this basis that we can communicate with others in our community.
The necessary assumption of common sense is so necessary that it rarely occurs to us to question it. We simply believe it and act on it. Let us call necessary assumptions behind belief and action faith.
And when we do question common sense, even in our questioning, we continue to assume common sense. We address others in our community and communicate with them in the faith that they will understand what we claim to question. This is “performative contradiction” and is symptomatic of “bad faith”.
(But the degree of universality of alleged commonsense universals is a contestable matter. We can, do and should challenge, test and debate norms of social common sense.)
Common sense is our immediate home, however imperfect, unsteady, contestable and ramshackle, and we must never attempt to abandon it, or pretend that we have escaped it.
We can certainly expand this commonsense home, however. Every culture, large of small, does precisely this. Upon the most common ground of social common sense shared by all human beings, each culture grows and builds (to varying degrees of cultivation and construction) ramifying, diverging common senses.
And this is one of the most intense sites of contested common sense universality. The boundary between natural and second-natural is blurry, broad, squiggly and often faint.
And here we come to the supernatural. Every culture until very recently (and even this exception is questionable!) has treated a supernatural reality as part of common sense, though each approached, related to and spoke about supernatural reality differently.
What do we do with this? Does the supernatural belong to the universal common sense or to the extended common sense of particular cultures? Is the supernatural only an artifact of the second-natural — perhaps an inevitable artificiality?
(Eventually, I need to develop a two-fold definition of transcendence, paralleling the two conceptions of common sense. Transcendence can refer to what transcends what is immediately given to our own being. Nothing is more ordinary than this transcendence. Past, future, substances, distances, self-possibilities, the reality of other people — these all transcend the present and immediate. But most people, when referring to transcendence mean realities beyond the totality universal common sense gives us. Below is a messy sketch, which will need serious rewriting.)
I am inclined to understand transcendence as another kind of common sense implied by the very existence of intuitive and social common sense.
We do not normally receive sensations as mere sensations. We necessarily take sensations as perceptions of reality — a reality that transcends mere sensation. We immediately make sense — an intuitive synthesis — of our perceptions, in the form of transcendent being, perceived in common by our senses (in intuitive common sense) that is shared by others (in social common sense).
But also, intuitive common sense is not univocal or perfectly continuous.
The more attentively and sensitively we cultivate and expand our common sense, the more we detect disturbances that suggest that there is more to reality than we perceive and understand. And when we attempt to make sense of these disturbances, the more surprising they become.
We arrive at another order of transcendence, beyond the scope of ordinary intuitive common sense.
It is a common sense born from aporias, ruptures, epiphanies and rebirths.
Perhaps we could call it “uncommon sense”. Some of us, in order to communicate it to our community speak of it objectively, because that is the law of common tongue. Some of us ritualize it because ritual participation is closer to its truth. We indicate, evoke, invoke… all given indirectly, but taken directly — grasped objectively, evertedly. We do our insufficient best, and sometimes communion accidentally occurs despite the communication.
The irruption of uncommon sense is disturbing, sometimes distressing and sometimes even devastating, but if it completes and consummates itself, it is always worth the ordeal.
What seems to be disease and death and annihilation in nothingness is ultimately revealed to be labor pangs of new life. Indeed, it is through these ruptures that meaning enters the world, ex nihilo.
Indeed, anyone who suffers this kind of common sense death only to be reborn into a better uncommonsense common sense can no longer see nothingness the same way. Nothingness is eternally pregnant ayin. Nihilism is no longer possible. One is an exnihilist.
It is because of the disturbing, but vivid and vivifying supernature of uncommon sense, and the need to connect it with intuitive and social common sense, in order to circulate meaning throughout the world and bathe the world’s tissues with purpose that I am religious.
Not spiritual. Not merely mystical. Socially religious. Jewishly religious.
And design is how I put my religious life into practice.
Design! Jewish! Not religious!
Not to you. Not yet.
Radical mid
Periodically, I follow a line of thought so far that I lose touch with my point of departure.
That is, in fact, my goal — my “point of failure” as bodybuilders call it. A touchstone quote from Nietzsche brings me back:
The two principles of the new life.
First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.
Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.
What is most certain for a human being is the middle.
Voegelin called this existential middle the metaxy. The metaxy is the threefold present I-now-here.
Between the beings (beyond) who superscend and comprise us and the intuitive sparks (behind) who subscend and constitute us is a tension called I. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite living oblivion, spirit.
Between the future (beyond) which draws us forward into its indeterminate possibility and the past (behind) which constitutes our time is a tension called now. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite temporal oblivion, eternity.
Between the distances (beyond) which stretch outward interminably and substances (behind) which constitutes our immediate environment is a tension called here. And this extends indefinitely into an infinite material-spatial oblivion, apeiron.
For each of us, metaxy collects in mesocosm, suspended between microcosm and macroscosm.
Husserl called this mesocosm in which each and all of us lives lifeworld.
In this lifeworld there are myriad ways to make common sense of things, some better than others.
We make personal common sense across our senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting “the same thing” in our environment, understanding it synthetically as the common object of our sensory experience.
And we all make interpersonal common sense by talking about and interacting with common objects among us — things we experience together.
As we make sense alone or together, we, ourselves, are shaped. Our objectivity shapes our subjectivity. Or, more accurately, our subjectivities are shaped, and learn to cooperate within a single, multifaceted subject. We learn to understand (to varying degrees and predominance) via all the subjects we learn in school, plus many other, far more local subjects, like the subject of the inhabitant of our home, city, region, nation and internationality.
These subjects and supersubjects are not objects and cannot be known objectively. They are who does objective knowing. The tree of subjectivity is known solely by its objective fruit. Trying to have the tree by possessing its fruit everts being. We compulsively evert being. It is how we are.
Some of these subjects are harmonious with one another and can be used simultaneously and integrally, and some conflict and can only be used serially. The latter are the ones that make us feel self-estranged. We are one person at work, another in public, another with friends and another at home.
But our souls are expansive. We want to extend our I to wider scopes of we. And we want to go deeper to involve finer and finer, subtler and subtler sparks of intuition. We want to integrate with and without, to be self-possessed but to belong. We want to concern ourselves with more varieties of materials networked across greater expanses. We want to come to understand and come to terms with our personal past and the past of our peoples and of our species, of life and of the universe, and we want to see beyond the horizon of the future and anticipate what is in store for us.
As we dilate our souls toward spirit, eternity and apeiron, structures of meaning emerge.
These structures are sacred. They link us to subscendent and superscendent transcendence, which is our source of being. It is a trellis to hold us firm as we extend ourselves, entwine ourselves, ascend beyond the I-here-now point.
Religion is a trellis.
Now I am back in the middle, rerooted in what is closest, most immediate and real.