Category Archives: Works

Content-container distinction

February 25, 2025Enworldment, Everso, Murmurations, Philosophyanomalogue

A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”

It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:

Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.

But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.

The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.

Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.

If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.

One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.

Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.

Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.

What is a container? An object which contains content? Yes. A wineskin, for example, is a container for wine. But a container may also be a subject — one who contains.

A container is a subject who does the containing of some form of objective content.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

February 20, 2025Autobiography, Design, Everso, Letterpressanomalogue

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
Shabbat prayers chapbook
Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
“For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Persons, subpersons, interpersons, superpersons

February 5, 2025Enworldmentanomalogue

Once again, I am studying collective personalities.

Personality is an old interest of mine, rooted in two sources: 1) a pathologically obsessive study of Jungian personality theory, and 2) a practice of Vipassana meditation.

From these sources, I learned to question our conventional notions of personality as a unitary, essential, unchanging, stable, enduring mind-being (soul) that neatly zips into a person’s body. I came to understand and experience most souls as non-unitary, contingent, changeable, unstable, ephemeral and mostly independent of bodily boundaries.

A unitary, unchanging, stable, enduring soul is almost miraculously exceptional. Such souls not essentially this way, but a hard-won accomplishments of cultivation. And such personalities almost never stay inside the frame of a human body, but rather radiate beyond the originating person, crystallizing whole communities into living cultures that last centuries or millennia.

(I say “I came to understand and experience” this truth. Another way to say it is that this idea of personhood became a given truth for me, once I learned to perceive and conceive it this way. It was not merely a theory or belief. It was not part of a belief system that could be applied. It is an intuitively self-evident feature of my enworlded reality.)

One of my early experiences of direct perception of this phenomenon came in the late 90s, when I observed personalities forming across individuals — personalities composed of semi-autonomous fragments (at the time I misused the word “homunculus”, but I could have called them “complexes” or “sub-persons”) within individuals, merging to form new emergent “inter-persons”, who possessed more energy, integrity and coherence between them, than existed within either individual. The remainder of each person outside this new shared interperson had no influence over this new interperson, nor did any friend of either of the scrambled former persons. When people fall madly in love, friends can be estranged.

This is just one example. Another can happen on a much grander scale. Moods can overtake entire societies. (This is the phenomenon of zeitgeist.) Or societies can have total personality shifts. Or, as Nietzsche (a man supremely attuned to the workings of superpersons) observed “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda in 1994 are examples of collective madness, where self-perceived victims of other groups turned murderous.

Today, though I’m thinking about personality shifts in disciplinary fields. I think my own field of service design is shifting. Perhaps the whole field of design is shifting. And because Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is still fresh in my mind, I decided to reread this passage, because it explains some of the very unmystical social mechanisms that bring such collective personality changes about.

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon….

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic, ” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

And it was.

I think times when personalities are not cultivated, where independence of thought is rare (yet, everyone unanimously and uncritically believes that their unanimous uncritical beliefs are independent and critical thought!), where each person is taught deep self-mistrust (cognitive bias!) and excessive trust in expert authority and techniques for calculating perspective-neutral truths and ethics — that bundles of subpersons who mistake themselves for persons can be conveniently subsumed and used by superpersons who care nothing about anyone but their collective, solipsistic superself.

What I have called enception is the substance of personhood at all scales.

Know thyselves

January 25, 2025Enworldment, Etymology, Existentialism, Philosophyanomalogue

“Know thyself,” Apollo commands.

Okay. But how? And which “thyself”? — for there is more than one. Two roads diverge before us: the path of self-consciousness and the path of self-awareness

Most take the path of self-consciousness, which tries to know the self objectively. One’s self is taken as an object of knowledge. We call it “reflecting on ourselves”. We look into the mirror, and we are absorbed in the image we see there. We identify with it.

But we can also take the path of self-awareness, and take ourselves as subject, the subjectivity to whom objective data is given, including our objective third-person self.

But self-awareness includes an insight that we are given only what we know how to take, and that changing our way of taking can change our givens.

We can experiment with our taking (our receptivity) and see how observing from various angles or focusing on various aspects changes our objectivity. Or we can experiment with our conceptivity by asking different questions about what seems objectively true to us. Or we can experiment with our selfhood by participating in new realities, physical and/or otherwise.

What we take “self” to mean makes all the difference in who we are, and who we may become.

Etymological cheat sheet:

Conceive = together-take
Perceive = thoroughly-take
Receive = back-take

Data = given

Untried ideas

January 21, 2025Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Politicsanomalogue

The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.

The problem of idle thought has nothing at all to do with virtues of industriousness or vices of laziness. The problem with idle thought is that such thoughts are not only untried and likely untrue, but that a great many of them are untriable and cannot even be said to be truth or false, because they are nonsense. They create what Richard Rorty called “theoretical hallucinations”.

This invites a comparison with drugs. We can use drugs for therapeutic purposes. We can also use them ritualistically. And we can use them experimentally. But all too easily what begins with therapeutic, ritual or experimental use lapses into mere recreational use, and from there to recreational abuse and addiction.

People who have zero occasion to put thoughts they consume or think up to practical trial — except to sell or resell them to other, equally idle thought consumers — can become a lot like recreational drug abusers, who maybe deal on the side to fund their all-consuming hobby. The drugs or ideas are for nothing but themselves. A life organized around procurement, consumption and traffic of such intoxicants begins to serve nothing but perpetual intoxication.

Rereading Richard Rorty, I’m realizing I am in a similar situation as when I read Christian scripture. The ideas are amazing and meant to be employed in practice.

But many of the most fervent fans of both of these luminaries just like feeling intoxicated by the ideas. They use them recreationally, but never put them to work in the real world. They’ll memorize words and quote them chapter and verse, but the ideas are their play toys, not their life equipment.

Back in 2016, the smarter regions of the proggosphere lost their collective minds over the uncanny prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. They neatly carved this quote out of its context.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. …members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What is rarely included was even more insightful prescient explanations of how a thoroughly decadent, idle and alienated cultural left would cause this to happen.

If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party — namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals — Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me.

The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere — to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.

Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated — and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.

The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements.

And then Rorty continues on.

These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”

In its Foucauldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot “… confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.” Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued… that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman’s civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists-the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the daylit cheerfulness ofWhitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete-for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.

If you buy into this dark, fundamentalist deformation of progressive politics (which I call “progressivism”, similar to “Islamism” and “Christianism” as names for fundamentalist deformations of the religions they pervert) it probably makes perfect sense to you that the occult forces of racism must be coercively exorcised from every institution via “antiracism training”. Doing so might not even seem to be a political act, but a purely ethical one.

One Rortyist (a Rortian can be fundamentalist, too!) appealed to history. His claim was that because the historical fact of racism is indisputable, that the need to respond to this fact is, by extension, also indisputable. So, because the effects of history continue on to the present (which is entirely plausible), all the disparities progressivists observe and compulsively measure can be attributed to the effects of this history (less plausible), that this effect is concentrated primarily in the institutions where the disparities are seen (institutional racism, which is the furthest thing from indisputable), that progressivists have an effective remedy for this problem (in the form of “antiracist” harassment of employees, which is flat implausible) and that therefore employers have a moral right to use their power to subject employees to cultural political harassment. All this is contrary to liberalism and to Rorty’s ideals, in much the same way that political Christianism is directly contrary to Jesus’s teachings and example.

But back to the original point I was making: “The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.”

What I am saying here is an old thought I’ve been hammering again and again.

John Dewey called his brand of Pragmatism “instrumentalism”. According to instrumentalism, we should understand ideas not primarily as representations of reality, but as tools for responding to reality. A idea that helps us respond effectively in a wide variety of practical challenges can be called true. One that malfunctions can be called false.

I’ve called my praxis, “design instrumentalism“. I think we should evaluate our ideas exactly as designers evaluate their outputs: by Liz Sander’s brilliant framework of useful, usable and desirable. An idea that gives us a feeling of clarity and reinforces our sense of moral rightness, but which cannot be applied to practical problems lacks usefulness, and in all likelihood, usability beyond clear talk.

Such appealing but impractical theories are at best, art.

Art is only useful when we take it for what it is — something we experience but do not take literally.

Art that is taken literally and confused with reality is delusional or even psychotic.

A failed attempt at theological clarity

January 5, 2025Enworldment, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Religionanomalogue

When I profess belief in God, people are often either baffled or they misconstrue what I mean.

Things get weirder when it turns out that my beliefs and attitudes can diverge from or even clash with those of some religious believers, while harmonizing with those of some atheists. I will frequently tell atheists “I share your disbeliefs.” But then I will seem to agree with with theists. Because of my esoteric orientation which accepts the necessity and relative validity of approximate understandings, I avoid contradicting good-faith simplistic understandings. I do this not only because such conflicts are nearly impossible to resolve, but even mere because I believe creating this kind of conflict is wrong. Despite our theoretical differences, at an infra-theoretical intuitive level, I believe they are as right as possible, and that their beliefs inspire good action. This is what I choose to emphasize.

So depending on context, it can look like I agree with everyone, or it can look like I agree with nobody at all. Everything is fuzzy or endlessly qualified. My yesses do not mean yes and my noes do not mean no.

I’ve mentioned before that the pragmatic maxim is useful in theological discussions.

C. S. Peirce formulated the maxim several different ways. My favorite is:

To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception—and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

(I love these words so much I plan to enshrine them in a letterpress piece.)

When someone states belief or disbelief in God, this tells us nearly nothing. But when we ask what follows from one’s belief or disbelief in God, an entire world begins to unfold. Let us make an attempt to unfold my world.

Pragmatic consequences of an essentially divine reality:

Reality transcends the grasp of reason. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Reality is inexhaustibly surprising.
Each and every person is a minutely bit divine reality, and each transcends the understanding of every other person. Every person is a source of surprise, both in who they are and what they can show us about reality.
Morality is one aspect of reality that transcends truth. Reason cannot and must not veto conscience; it can only make appeals to conscience and pursue positive judgment. Reason is a lawyer before the judge, conscience.
Morality obligates us to live in accordance with transcendence. We must invite, welcome and extend hospitality to surprise and the judgment of conscience, not only intellectually, but in our being: emotionally, intuitively and practically in our being — heart, soul and strength.
The consequence of immorality is alienation. We have the freedom to wall ourselves up inside our reason, acknowledging only realities that reason reasons is reasonable, but this cannot be accomplished without a felt loss of reality. It only feels like punishment.

Above I linked to an earlier post, and I prefer my earlier, simpler expression:

I believe in God, and therefore we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. We must live as a part of a reality that includes and exceeds us, and requires us to do so.

But honestly, the sequence is backwards. For the last year, my friend and colleague Darwin Muljono has been preaching the gospel of critical realism, which I vulgarly interpret as pragmatism-in-reverse. It encourages us to ask: “if things are such and such a way, what conditions are necessary for this to be so?”

I believe — and cannot sincerely disbelieve — that we are morally obligated to live toward alterity. I believe in the reality of this obligation more immediately and deeply than I believe in evolutionary psychology theories that treat this conviction as a by-product of instinct. A reality that can morally obligate us in such a way is divine. That is the condition of a morally-obligatory reality. Therefore, I cannot sincerely disbelieve in God. My intellectual conscience forbids suppressing this fact, so I will not suppress it.

I will close this mess with another favorite C. S. Peirce quote:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

Taste of infinity

December 16, 2024Exnihilism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Idea: Designing Hat

December 3, 2024Design, Design Instrumentalism, Ideas, Politics, Worksanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

December 3, 2024Design, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Religionanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exnihilist Manifesto

November 23, 2024Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophyanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothingness is dreadful.

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

Dread is the birth pangs of revelation.

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

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

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

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

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

Brief Introduction to Enworldment

November 16, 2024Enworldment, Polycentered designanomalogue

Whenever I contemplate the ideas that matter most to me, which have shaped my life overall, and which guide my everyday thoughts and actions, I notice that they are all rooted in one or more of my three central preoccupations: design, philosophy and religion.

Each of these preoccupations began as relatively compartmentalized domains of activity and thought. Initially, each had its own discrete place in my life, disconnected from the others. Over the years, however, as my understandings of each deepened, they began to inter-illuminate. Each helped me better understand the others. Through iterative application and reflection — by using ideas to guide practice, and allowing the practice to inform, reshape and refine the ideas — the domains began to grow together and integrate, until eventually an organic whole developed. The former domains evolved into organ systems within a new living praxis.

The purpose of this work is to convey this living praxis. These organ systems serve both as a relatively accessible point of departure and also as an organizational scheme for presenting the content.

This work has at least two levels of coordinated intention.

The foreground intention is to convey conceptual content. This work is designed to communicate a set of ideas and the relationships among these ideas, while preventing misunderstandings that might obscure the relationship between the ideas and the whole.

The background intention is to set minds in motion in a particular choreographed way — a way that makes it possible to take the content of this work as a given truth. We will follow several interweaving paths of inquiry, and this following produces the intellectual movements that give the conceptual content its sense, and eventually its woven-together common sense.

The work unfolds in seven parts, and can be visualized as a Venn diagram.

In part one we will look at the three domains of design, philosophy and religion, starting with one common conception, judged to be familiar to most people in this moment in history. Then each of the domains will be redescribed from a slightly tilted angle. These reconceived domains will provide solid ground for a more integrated understanding.

In part two we will look at the overlaps between each pair of domains, and see them gradually integrate. In each overlap the domains will grow together and form mutually reinforcing relationships.

In part three we will look at what happens when all three domains are understood together, as a whole, without reference to the original domains. We will allow it to detach from its origins, and emerge as a unified, organic, living praxis, with its own common sense.

Part 1 – Domains

1.1 Design: What is design?

One accessible conception: Design is an approach to crafting of artifacts that pays close attention to the experience people have using the artifact. Designers talk a lot about experiences. They certainly focus on experiences more than their artifact-building counterparts and collaborators, engineers. Designers ask: What is the best experience to deliver, and how best can we deliver that experience? Designers create “user interfaces” between engineered artifacts and the people who will experience them.

The tilted conception of design is to see design as crafting “hybrid systems” of human participants and nonhuman parts. These hybrid systems are understood to include, as an essential part, the people who participate in the system — who, in their participation, complete and actualize the designed system. Where, according to the conventional view, the designed artifact is complete in itself prior to use, in the tilted view, the designed artifact is an incomplete until people complete it by participating in it. Seen this way, it becomes more obvious why designers insist on involving “users” throughout the design process. People are an essential and intrinsic part of any design system; so if we try to develop a system without the active presence of “person components” we are attempting to develop a system with crucial components left out, untested and left to ignorant speculation. No engineer would develop a system with an incomplete set of components, and simply mentally speculate on how a component will probably perform within an engineered system, so why should designers? Further, these person components are precisely the most crucial point-of-failure components, whose behaviors spell success or failure of the system. They are also the most variable and unpredictable components, requiring the most effort to understand. By this tilted conception, design is the art of reshaping society (materially, practically, intellectually, aesthetically, symbolically, etc.) with the intention of better serving the people who participate in it and constitute it.

1.2 Philosophy: What is philosophy?

One accessible conception: Philosophy is the development of conceptual systems that give an account of reality, or of consequential aspects of reality. These conceptual systems are often abstract, speculative and universal in scope. Philosophy differs from sciences in that philosophy normally does not equip itself with physical instruments or procedures to prove its truth claims. However, philosophy sometimes provides the speculative preliminary work that founds new sciences..

The tilted view of philosophy gives philosophy a McLuhanesque twist, and places more weight on the effect of doing thinking than on the content of the thought. The “medium” of doing the thinking is the message of a philosophy. This pertains equally both to original thinking, and to understanding another thinker’s ideas. Philosophy can reinforce a way of thinking, but often it seeks novel modes of thought, and here the goal of philosophy is to induce a conversion. By following a line of thought, one is transformed into a person capable of understanding the philosophical content of the work — and, more importantly, of understanding or re-understanding relevant material beyond the work. This process transforms both the person and the world as given to their understanding.

1.3 Religion: What is religion?

One accessible conception: Religion is what people or communities do to be in the proper relationship with transcendent being (or what they believe to be the proper relationship with what they take to be transcendent being). Interrelated symbols, practices, beliefs, objects and spaces mediate and encourage this relationship.

The tilted view of religion is an existentialist one, and it involves the practical acknowledgement of some uncanny qualities of relationship between finite beings like ourselves and infinite transcendent being, and the practical consequences of this uncanniness is what constitutes “proper relationship”. Such a relationship involves reason, but also crucial modes of engagement beyond reason’s scope. Religion engages the entirety of one’s being. Different people emphasize different modes of transcendent engagement, and emphasis can change over the course of a person’s life, but the trajectory is embracing more and more infinitude with more and more of one’s own finite being.

Part 2 – Overlaps

This section will be essay collections on ideas that belong to pairs of domains. They are not explicitly connected as thought systems, but they are organically related. Ideally, each essay stands on its own, but intuitively illuminates others, and inspires the reader to make their own systematic connections.

2.1 Design and philosophy

When we approach design as a method of developing hybrid systems of human participants and nonhuman parts, and philosophy as a method of personal transformation through the coming to understand concepts that prior to the transformation were inconceivable, some new concepts emerge.

2.1.1 Conception, construction, synthesis

In design as well as philosophy, understanding can mean multiple things. Some things are spontaneously, instantly and effortlessly intuited as given truths. We see them and immediately recognize and respond to them almost by natural or second-natural instinct. Other things are easily figured out. We put time and effort into understanding them, and once we do the thing makes explicit sense. Finally, some things, once we make sense of them they, not only make explicit sense, but crystallize into something intuitive. We are able to both intuit these things as a whole, but also analyze them and make explicit sense of the parts and how the parts combine into a whole. This essay establishes a vocabulary to differentiate these different modes of understanding. We will call the effortless intuitive getting of givens conception. We will call the effortful making sense of things construal. And we will call that mode of understanding that can simultaneously conceive or construe synthesis. — From a design perspective, when making artifacts for people we want to aim for the ideal of synthesis — of constructing systems that can both be intuited and construed by by anyone who encounters it. But philosophy, too, when constructing conceptual systems, can bring people who engage them to conceive in constructs novel concepts they never before conceived. These conceptual epiphanies are the transformative element of philosophy. We will call a newly acquired capacity to receive a new variety of givens “enceptions”. The transformative purpose of philosophy is achieved through inducing enceptions. Philosophies that only construct construable theoretical content might inform, but they do not transform. For this same reason, some designs (rare and precious!) can, through new forms of participation, induce new enceptions and have the same transformative effect as philosophy.

2.1.2 Inspiration

What we call inspiration or epiphany is the result of inducing new enceptions. New enceptions allow us to receive novel data as givens — new given experiences (perceptions) and new given truths (conceptions). The reason inspiration bursts the boundaries of whatever inspiration content it conceives, and creates a sense of boundless significance — that “this changes everything!” — is that enception is a capacity to receive — to take givens as given. The immediate impact is inspired content, followed by waves of reunderstanding as the new enception reconceives and recrystallizes one’s own stock of knowledge within the newly enabled conceptions — and it becomes overwhelmingly apparent that the waves of reunderstanding will continue to radiate beyond the mind into a newly experienced and understood world — a world to which we will respond in different ways, within which we will participate in new ways.

A blind man who experiences sight for the first time will be fascinated by what he sees before him. He will look in wonder at the room he is in, and at the world outside his window. Almost immediately he will start connecting this newly visible world to his stock of sightless memories. He will want to see the realities he has only heard, touched, smelled and tasted. And it will dawn on him that he is now inhabiting a new world. He will live a new life in this world of vision, light, color and shade.

A truly inspired reframing of a design problem is a tiny philosophical work. It activates new enceptions in design teams. The concepts conceived with these new enceptions, if well executed, will inspire people who encounter and participate in their designs. They will say “This changes everything!”

This changes everything because we ourselves have been changed and the world as given to us has changed.

2.1.3 Useful, usable and desirable philosophies

It is possible to evaluate philosophical works as design artifacts, looking at them through Liz Sanders’s design evaluation framework, useful-usable-desirable. What is useful? A design that is useful helps a person do something that would otherwise be more difficult or impossible. What is usable? A usable design is one that can be effortlessly understood and interacted with, ideally without need of any inward verbalization. Usable means the artifact is intuitable, and ideally, intuitable and construable. Mere construability (“figure-out-ability”) falls short of the ideal. Yet many designers confuse usability with construability. What is desirable? A design is desirable to the degree that it is valued apart from its use and its ease of use. So far, we have been considering useful-usable-desirable as it pertains to design, but we can apply this framework to philosophy — and indeed we must apply it if our goal is to develop philosophies that transform us into people capable of living more effective, lucid and meaningful lives.

2.1.4 Designing design problems

Philosophy can play (and often does play) an important role in design, when the goal is to create a synthetic whole that can be both intuited as a whole but also construed as an ordered construction. Philosophy seeks to strip out the conventional wisdom that invisibly impels ideas toward sameness by interrogating the problem space, deconstructing and reconstructing it — until a construction crystallizes into a novel conception. The painfully destructured region of the process (lying between deconstruction and crystallized reconception) fits Wittgenstein’s description of a philosophical problem, “Here I do not know how to move around.” When we strip out the conventional thinking that gave a problem its sense, the problem stops making sense, and we are forced to make new sense of it. When we reframe the problem, we give it a new sense — a new way to think the problem requiring a new response to it. The reframed definition of the design problem, expressed as a design brief, can be viewed as a species of philosophical writing, meant to induce “precision inspiration”, transforming designers who “get” the problem into people who can understand this problem in a new, productive and reality-informed way and solve it in radically novel ways. We could view the design brief as an example of a deliberately designed philosophy — designed for adoption and use by a non-philosophical readership. To ensure adoption, the brief has obvious practical application (useful), it is brief, simple, direct and accessible (usable) and it is inspiring and motivating (desirable).

2.1.5 Creative perplexity

Conceiving new conceptions entails undergoing an uncanny kind of pain, which is essential to all radical creativity.

2.1.6 Design as praxis (maybe)

Design theory (philosophy) guides design practice. Design practice informs design theory. Design is a kind of praxis. This praxis has applications extending beyond the field of design as normally conceived. It extends, in fact, to all societal change. Design praxis ought to be the praxis we use for all political problems.

2.2 Philosophy and religion

2.2.1 Metanoia and t’shuvah

Two words from the Christian Bible, one Hebrew the other Greek, are translated as “repent”, and they are different enough that one belongs more to the domain of philosophy and the other more to the domain of religion. The Greek word metanoia, refers to a transformation in how we think and understand, meaning literally “after-think”, and so is a philosophical transformation. In fact, metanoia summarizes in a word the essential purpose of philosophy. T’shuvah belongs to the domain of religion. T’shuvah means “turn”, and while it can involve engagement with thought, but it will always engage more than thought, and invariably involve behavioral change. This turn transforms our own being both within and beyond our cognitive grasp. The turn is away from what is purely thought, toward what transcends what is currently thinkable or even intelligible in principle. It is a turn toward God. The most crucial overlap region between philosophy and religion is metanoia effecting t’shuvah. This is specifically religious metanoia. Not all metanoia turns us toward what is beyond thought. Much metanoia turns us toward a self-enclosed idealist thought-world, which is the opposite of religious. What many people call religious extremism, is in fact extreme antireligion.

2.2.2 Subjects and faiths

A subject can be understood as a way the world is given – a form of objectivity. A personal subject is a subject in the same sense that an academic subject is a subject. Faith is the organization of a soul; that by which beliefs are believed – but also by which reality is perceived (intuited), by which responses are motivated, by which meaning is felt – by which given realities are received. We can see subjects as the relationship between a soul and all that is transcends the soul, where faith is the relationship among the beings within the soul, who constitute it.

2.2.3 Esoteric and exoteric understandings

Religion, unlike philosophy, seeks commonality of implicit faith, even across various explicit understandings. This is not achieved by identicality but developmental continuity. In religious traditions, the developmental path can be characterized as that from exoteric to esoteric understandings. A philosophy that seeks to effect a cultural change must consider interoperability. One way to achieve interoperability is to design into the philosophy a similar developmental continuity — a “graceful degradation” to vulgarity. This path might very well be the path of exposition of the philosophy itself — good instruction. Any attempt at interoperability implies an attitude of transcendent relationship, alterity.

2.2.4 Existential perplexity

Existential perplexity is the root of creative perplexity. It is the response of a soul to a reality its subject cannot accommodate. The soul is confronted with a mortal choice: it must dissolve and reconstitute its faith, or it must deny a reality that will not be denied.

2.3 Religion and design

Two ways of shaping and maintaining our experience of the world: Spiritually and materially.
Participation: in ideas and language – but also in worship, prayer, ritual, custom, morality – but also interaction with tools, media (McLuhan), spaces and participation in economic activity (Marx)
Polycentricity: relationship with others as transcendent beings
Religion’s Design of Experience: Religious faiths design how we experience the world, both spiritually and materially
Enworldment: reshaping and changing the world, being reshaped and changed by the world and how it gives itself to us

Part 3 – Enworldment

Psychic common sense

October 23, 2024Enworldmentanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exnihilist declaration

October 20, 2024Exnihilism, Judaismanomalogue

When you stare out into death and don’t attempt to project an afterlife into it — when you let it be sheer nothingness, Ein Sof — God comes to you from nothingness, ex nihilo, and blesses your life with new meaning.

Even if you cannot know or feel the truth of this declaration, it is real, and it is waiting for your wordless choice.

Chord: Participatory knowing

September 12, 2024ANT, Chord, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Staranomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Re)welcoming Buber

September 8, 2024Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Judaism, Philosophyanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn’t this the effect… of prayer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, how, why, that

August 12, 2024Philosophy, Trefoilanomalogue

Know-what recognizes. It conceives entities of any kind as being like or unlike another.

Know-how responds. It participates in situations, interacting with entities of any kind involved with it in the situation at hand.

Know-why values. It feels betterness or worseness in entities and situations.

Know-that intuits. It receives the reality of real given entities.

Campagna

July 28, 2024Autobiography, Enworldment, Metaphysicsanomalogue

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

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

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

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

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

And now here’s the good part:

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

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

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

There’s an old joke.

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

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

The complaints and anxieties change generationally, but the form is constant. It is forever “life sucks [for x reasons] and then life as we know it will end prematurely [from y catastrophe], and this time it is different and worse than ever before [due to z criteria].” And the most constant element is “this time it is different.” It is always “this time is different.”

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

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

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

Scooped.

But then, maybe that’s what ought to happen when your story is truth.

Transcendent versus transcendental

July 1, 2024Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Staranomalogue

I could swear I posted this before, but I can’t find it anywhere: In the star diagram in Geometric Meditations I could have substituted “Transcendental” for Potential, and “Transcendent” for Other. I don’t think I regret writing it the way I did, but I do find it clarifying to note this alternative possibility.

Trouble, divergence, alignment, diversity

June 19, 2024Design, Enworldment, Ethics, Philosophyanomalogue

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

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

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

This happens for at least three big reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rapport as data

June 19, 2024Design, Enworldmentanomalogue

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

Rapport is the most important data we gather in research.

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

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

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

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

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

I call this productive, shifted state precision inspiration.

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

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

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

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

anomalogue blog

design of philosophy of design of philosophy of design

Category Archives: Works

Content-container distinction

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Persons, subpersons, interpersons, superpersons

Know thyselves

Untried ideas

A failed attempt at theological clarity

Taste of infinity

Book Idea: Designing Hat

T’shuvah and-or metanoia

Exnihilist Manifesto

Brief Introduction to Enworldment

Psychic common sense

Exnihilist declaration

Chord: Participatory knowing

(Re)welcoming Buber

What, how, why, that

Campagna

Transcendent versus transcendental

Trouble, divergence, alignment, diversity

Rapport as data

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