Three neglected distinctions

Philosophy, Politics

I want to call attention to three crucial distinctions that I seldom see made, but which are disastrous if conflated.

  1. Evil versus immorality. Evil is acting with sadistic intent to harm or annihilate. Immorality does not intend suffering, harm or annihilation, but it tolerates or supports what does harm, and sometimes even tolerates or supports evil. When evil and immorality are conflated, moral judgment loses a primary point of orientation, and well-meaning people can be manipulated to tolerate or even support causes whose only goal is sadism, harm and annihilation. The passionate revulsion humans naturally feel toward evil is channeled into whatever examples of immorality capture their attention (whether injustice, indifference, disrespect or tribal animosity).
  2. Authoritarian versus totalitarian. Authoritarians attempt to tyrannically control what individuals do (and do not do). Totalitarians attempt to tyrannically control not only what individuals do, but also how they think and feel. Totalitarianism is not authoritarianism taken to an extreme; totalitarianism has the aim of displacing intuited reality with its own constructed truth, and it has its own path of development. When totalitarianism and authoritarianism are conflated, the visible brutality of authoritarians can be used to divert attention from cultural propagation of totalitarian ideologies through propaganda and indoctrination.
  3. Moral explanation versus justification. Moral explanation is descriptive, and causally accounts for the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. Moral justification is normative and morally assesses the thoughts, attitudes and actions of an individual or group. When these are conflated a sympathetic description of how a person or group became evil can be passed off as a justification of evil.

I just know that something good is going to happen

Biography

I have always felt — and I believe this is a generational feeling — that something inconceivably good could happen.

Kate Bush sang of it in Cloudbusting.

I just know that something good is going to happen

I don’t know when

But just saying it could even make it happen

We also felt knew something inconceivably bad could happen. We fully expected to be annihilated in nuclear war. Every generation has its apocalyptic anticipation. Ours was nuclear holocaust. We cannot conceive our own inevitable nonexistence, so we channel the dread of this inevitability into some end-time event, and make it an object of all-consuming fear. Nuclear holocaust, the apocalypse, global warming. Every generation is the first to face the real existential threat.

We inhabited a vacuous present, which is an interregnum preceding the inconceivable good or bad event. This present offered us only tedium under fluorescent lights, a long, pointless trudge through the Stations of Quotidia to pointless retirement, all utterly impossible for any person to want. We were commanded to want it, anyway. We had no way to comply. You can’t make yourself want something unwanted (though you can want to want and use that as a counterfeit for wanting). But we discovered that we could extract some meaning and dignity from defiantly refusing to do what was impossible, as if we were choosing not to comply out of spite. (Punk was our pica. We didn’t have proper nutrition, so we ate soil and cigarette butts, and it was, to our impoverished palates, delicious.)

I think young people today have been taught to sneer at inconceivable hope, and to take every signal from within the soul literally. They are fixated on a literal climate apocalypse, and are too knowing for salvation. In another age they would be Father Ferapont, or one his modern secular politicized echoes.

Their ideology blinds them to the connection, because for them the gulf between scientistic believing and creedal believing is absolute. The one thing they do have right is that they are not religious. Father Ferapont confuses his creedal ideology with a religious faith.

The one thing the adherents to the post-postmodern doom cult cannot conceive is the possibility that they are not the moral pinnacle of humankind — judges fit to condemn (or faintly and tentatively praise) the present and all that has come before. There is a covert moral narcissism hidden in this attitude that brings to mind the words of Nietzsche: “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”

The metacognitive incompetence of these young judges in their self-assessment of their own judgment defies all comprehension. Ironically, moral judgment is the only place where they have any confidence at all, but it is precisely here where their confidence is least warranted.

Ungrounded is not abstract

Philosophy

I believe what is making so many people feel alienated from the world, from other people and from themselves is too much playing with remote notions and far too little intuition of what is present.

If the world feels like a simulation to you, maybe you inhabit a simulation. If you feel like a ghost, maybe you are not doing what is required to be.

Lacking intuitive grounding, the ideas the alienated thinker plays with are not even abstract. After all, an abstraction is abstracted from something real and concrete. An ungrounded idea might share the simplicity and insubstantiality of an abstraction, but it can’t even claim to represent anything other than itself.

Too much ungrounded thought-play and a thinker will almost automatically succumb to that perennial radical cop-out that today narcissistically claims to be a courageous assertion: reality itself is constructed.

People wonder why art today is so uninspiring: “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.” Nietzsche saw what is coming, the last time it came.

Intuition abuse

Philosophy

Some people cannot believe something exists only if they are unable to think it.

Others think the more something is encountered as the existent it is, the less it can be thought, and the more one must rely on direct intuition, such as perceptions or tacit know-how and tacit feel-why.

This is a Kantian — not Jungian — use of the word intuition. By this use, intuition is a direct, non-linguistic, non-logical, non-representational relationship with some real, present entity or being we are presently encountering.

I am strongly in the second camp. Intuition gives us what is present. What we actually encounter in reality will always be partially incomprehensible and inconceivable, but, through skillful use of intuition supplemented by thought can become more comprehensible and conceivable.

Our thoughtful intuitive dealings with realities of various kinds is the best data (literally “givens”) for representations of reality. Thoughtful intuition provides us a repertoire of representations faithful to the real entities and actual beings we attempt to represent in language and thought. It also develops our capacity for interpreting and responding to present realities.

Intuitive grounding makes thought reasonable, and not merely ideologically logical — or capriciously illogical.

If we approach present realities representation-first, scanning for representations to recognize and logically manipulate, we lose our ability to improve our representations. Our ideology limits our ontological repertoire and we experience only what we were already “ready to see” or “ready to hear”. This data gets fed into our cognitive processes, which are also often limited to an ideological toolset. Ideologically-determined nounset interact by an ideologically-determined verbset.

But approaching representations intuition-first is also disastrous. Capricious illogic and intuitive manipulation of mental representations acquired willy-nilly from wherever does not produce a reliable sense of reality, nor any sense of the kinds of supernatural realities new age mystical types think they know. Intellectually laziness, indisciplined and unscrupulousness only reinforces and intensifies whatever unchosen prejudices and attitudes that passively infected our minds.

To rely on one’s intuition in matters of representation or language or logic to try to understand a distant reality is to misuse intuition and to short circuit intuition and turn it toward mental objects, instead of outward toward beings and entities transcending our mind. Intuiting mental objects is not a proxy for intuiting the realities these mental objects claim to represent.

A strong aversion to learning and informing your mental objects in order to make them more faithful representations — to rely instead on intuiting mental objects already inside your head — this is an alienation from reality akin to solipsism.

Moral benchmarking

Ethics, Philosophy

Before I dig all the way down into Bernstein’s Radical Evil, I want to benchmark my current views on what is evil, vs immoral, vs unethical.

Evil means active desire to annihilate and inflict suffering on other people.

Immoral means supporting evil, while stopping short of being evil oneself. One accepts, affirms and strengthens the conditions of evil and beliefs of evil-doers, while lacking evil desires.

According to this view, most progressivists are immoral. Only some among them — the ones who support Hamas, chant their slogans and mean it, or the ones who enjoy harming, abusing, terrorizing and humiliating living manifestations of identities they hate — are actively evil to any real degree.

But most progressivists I talk with believe the same things evil progressivists believe, and differ primarily in lacking an appetite to take part in the sadism and destruction. Part of progressivist immorality consists in a stubborn incuriosity to look into who they support and the practical implications of their beliefs. This allows them to water down their immorality with amoral ignorance, and to dissociate themselves from what they passively support, while also enjoying a sense of tribal belonging and security.

Ethics is fidelity to the behavioral rules of an ethos, which includes linguistic behaviors. It is entirely possible to be highly ethical within an amoral ethos. To be truly moral, one must actively choose a moral ethos. But most people are not morally responsible, and do not make such choices. They are merely ethical, and fail to make moral choices of any kind.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, and in the compulsivly identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is attributable to this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.

Jewishly

Judaism, Love

For my entire adult life, I’ve returned, again and again, to C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, usually to re-critique it from a subtle variation on the same basic complaint. In his meditation, Lewis observes a beam of light from the side, and has an insight that this looking at the beam of light from the side does nor reveal the light the same way that looking directly up into the beam does. My complaint is that maybe there are better things to do with light sources than examine their beams or stare directly into them. Perhaps I am just weird, but my preferred use for light sources is to illuminate spaces and the objects in those spaces.

I mean this both literally and metaphorically.

Today’s version of the complaint is no different, except today I want to suggest (or re-suggest) that this complaint I’ve been making is a Jewish one. And by “Jewish”, as always, I mean in accordance with Buber’s fundamental insight of I-Thou, which is the whence of my faith — the from-where — or to translate it into hippie, “where I’m coming from”.

Here is what Buber says in I-Thou, which I read as an expression of my complaint.

When you are sent forth, God remains-presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, he cannot attend to God but he can converse with him. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the world movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the world movement of turning toward.

It might be helpful here to re-quote Saint-Exupery:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.

I believe, with my entire stubborn Jewish faith that the famous Jew that so many people want to face, contemplate, love and worship, never wanted to be loved face-to-face in that romantic  way that lovers love, as they stare into each other’s eyes.

With Buber, I believe that this exceptional Jew very Jewishly wanted us to stand next to him in the light of creation, our backs warmed by his Father’s radiance, and look out upon a divinely-illuminated world with him.

Please do not hate me for saying these things, which I fully believe and consider of highest importance. I love Jesus, Christians and Christianity, but my love is a thoroughgoing Jewish love.

Hineini and amen.

Two senses of polycentric

Design

For a while now, I’ve been referring to service design as a polycentric design discipline. I picked up the term from Michael Polanyi. Nobel Prize winner, Elinor Ostrom, also adopted the term and made it mainstream in the wonkier regions of nerddom.

Polanyi and Ostrom use the word polycentricity to describe social systems where agency is distributed throughout the system, not centralized or imposed from above.

I’ve been using the word in related, but distinctly different way. I use polycentric to describe design disciplines that design for multiple interacting people, all of whom are treated as I-centers of their own experience. I use it to contrast service design from older design disciplines that placed one person — a user, or customer, or employee, or patient or citizen, etc. — at the center of their design work, the person experiencing the designed artifact. Service design is polycentric, where older human-centered design (HCD) disciplines like UX design or industrial design are monocentric.

But what if we also thought of service design as polycentric in the same sense as Polanyi and Ostrom? From that perspective we could say that polycentric design establishes conditions where mutually beneficial social arrangements emerge, as spontaneously as possible, sustained by voluntary choice.

This is not just theoretically interesting. It has practical importance. With increasing frequency, my clients are coming to me with situations where they are trying to persuade partners who are outside their direct control to collaborate with them to deliver services to their customers in specific ways at a high standard of quality. Problems of this kind absolutely must be approached polycentrically.

This connects with something I’ve noticed many times in my three decades as a designer. Design thrives where people have choice and agency. Wherever people have choice and agency, we must abandon coercion and manipulation, and instead appeal to them as people who make free decisions based on their experience.

When the internet opened a broader range of choices to consumers and equipped them with more information to make smart choices, their agency increased, and this sparked a sort of design methods renaissance.

But now, due to a variety of factors, employees and non-employee partners also have more agency and more choices, and access to information required to choose options that works for them.

We are still not yet in an economy where all organizations need service design.

As long as an organization can command their employees and partners to behave however they want, a polycentric approach like service design is not necessary. The organization can just engineer rules and tools for service delivery, and everything will work like a well-oiled machine.

But if you are not in a position to boss your service delivery people around, either because they don’t work for you, or because they can choose to stop working for you if they don’t like being bossed around, service design is your best choice.

So, to summarize, when I say “polycentric design”, polycentric refers to two kinds of center: 1) experiential centers, and 2) agential centers.

Psychic common sense

Enworldment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equalities

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

In a liberal-democratic order we are equal as citizens before the law.

In communion we are equal as souls within God.

In society, however we are not equals before one another. We assume roles and perform them within hierarchical systems — and these roles cary varying degrees of responsibility and authority. But in this social inequality, we must always remember our spiritual and political equality.

But those who do not understand the existence of political and spiritual have cannot know spiritual and political equality. So they can only conceive achieving equality in the social domain. Some demand equality from every social order, which is impossible, while others, noting the impossibility of social equality, deny the possibility of any equality. These are the origin of left illiberalism and right illiberalism, respectively.

The ethic and ethos of liberalism

Ethics, Politics

Liberalism is not a morality. Liberalism is an ethic.

The distinction I am making here is this: Morality is unconditional; ethics is contingent upon ethos.

An example of morality is rejection of sadism. There is never a situation where sadism, especially extreme sadism like that of Hamas on October 7th, is justified. Anyone who cannot understand this is a sociopath, or is morally confused to the point of sociopathy. Sadism can be explained, but explanations are not justifications. I am saying here that not only is sadism immoral, but justification of sadism.

The value of a liberal ethic is entirely instrumental. An ethic is a means to the end of supporting a liberal social order — a liberal ethos.

(A point where morality and ethics connect. Morality requires keeping ethical commitments. There are moral ways to renegotiate commitments, and immoral ways to break them. I taught my children that there are no preexistent rules to relationships, but once rules are made, those rules are ethical realities one is morally obligated to honor. And then there is etiquette, which is neither moral nor ethical, but something else of enormous importance.)

For a while now, I have been declaring “mutuality is for the mutual”. When I say this, I refer to ethics, and the ethic I almost always mean is liberalism. But this is not the only ethos. Friendships of various kinds also have their own ethics. Every enduring friendship is its own ethos and has its own ethic and etiquette.

When I make the mutuality declaration what I mean is this. Where there is no liberal ethos, and no reasonable possibility of a liberal ethos, a liberal ethic is not appropriate. Where illiberals are likely to exploit liberalism to undermine a liberal ethos, it is unethical to extend the rights, privileges and courtesies to illiberals.

Yes, this is a very dangerous stance to take. Conditional liberalism is the slipperiest of slopes. But unconditional liberalism is just as slippery, and we have already slipped far from our best liberalism. I meet very few liberals under the age of 40.

And, yes, the line between liberalism and illiberalism is faint, fuzzy and ambiguous. But fuzzy boundaries do not negate the clarity we see at the extremes. We can debate how liberal Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt were, but the fact that Axis leaders were illiberal, and less liberal than Churchill and Roosevelt is beyond reasonable dispute.*

And yes, if illiberalism is presumed, liberalism cannot take root and flourish. Sometimes an intricate and delicate dance must take place between nervous and skeptical liberals to cultivate mutual trust and establish a liberal ethos. It requires both liberals to “go first” and provisionally offer one another liberal courtesies. But there is a point where dancing ends and defensive maneuvers start.

I am still working on this. It does not yet feel complete and flawless. I do think it is fundamental,y right, though, so I’m putting it out there. There will be more.

  • Note: Regarding fuzzy lines and clear extremes, if you have a shred of intellectual and moral decency in you, you will admit that, while we can (and should) debate how moral or immoral Israel’s war conduct has been, there is no room whatsoever to dispute Hamas’s evil. Witness Hamas’s enthusiastic, joyous embrace of sadism on October 7, and its explicit genocidal goals. Israel is undoubtedly morally flawed. Hamas is undoubtedly morally depraved: evil. And anyone, however soft-hearted and well-intentioned, who justifies Hamas’s evil is morally corrupt. I stop short of calling them evil, but they support and enable evil to flourish, and that is immoral.

Bottled ghost

NOTA

If you cannot be someone to another — if you cannot maintain a reliable self — if you cannot exchange promises and obligations with others — if you only know how to live in parallel spectatorship with others, each an audience of the others — you will passively seek containing circumstances that prevent dissipation.

You will drift along, blown from haunt to haunt, until you drift into a windless space that no longer transports you, where you will settle into the life of a bottled ghost.

Perhaps you will settle in a monastery. Perhaps in a cubicle. Perhaps in some domestic limbo. Perhaps in an identity.

You’ll live a life of awaiting, vaguely anticipating a life to come that never comes, but which provides a semblance of stability to a wisp of being with no integrity or structure of its own.

L’Chaim faith

Design, Judaism, Philosophy

For the last week, I have been closely and carefully reading a long, gnarly and crucially important passage from Buber’s I and Thou, in both the Smith and Kaufmann translations.

One benefit of understanding this book to be a prayer is that I am much more relaxed about getting through the book. The point of it is not to acquire information, but, rather, to allow it, invite it, entreat it to work on me. I have been taking my time and giving myself ample space to respond.

I want to share two key excerpts from this passage, each in both the Smith and Kauffman translations.

The first excerpt compares and contrasts Buber’s own Jewish faith with other forms of faith. He focuses on Buddhism, but Buddhism stands in for ascetic faiths in general.

This comparison is important, because Buber’s Judaism differs radically not only from conventional exoteric theisms, but from conventional esoterisms. It is a different religiosity that is often excluded from consideration. In my own experience, expressions of this faith — particularly practical ones — can trigger psychic allergies in both conventionally religious and “unconventionally” spiritual people.

Smith’s translation:

The Buddha describes as the goal the ‘cessation of pain,’ that is of becoming and passing away-release from the cycle of births.

‘Henceforth there is no return’ is the formula of the man who has freed himself from the appetite for living and thus from the necessity to become ever anew. We do not know if there is a return; we do not extend beyond this life the lines of this time-dimension in which we live, and do not seek to expose what will be disclosed to us in it own time and disposition. But if we did know that there is a return we would not seek to escape it, and we would long not indeed for gross being but for the power to speak, in each existence in its own way and language, the eternal I that passes away, and the eternal Thou that does not pass away.

We do not know if the Buddha actually leads to the goal of release from the necessity of returning. He certainly leads to a preliminary goal that concerns us — to the becoming one of the soul. But he leads thither not merely (as is necessary) apart from the ‘thicket of opinions,’ but also apart from the ‘illusion of forms’ — which for us is no illusion but rather the reliable world (and this in spite of all subjective paradoxes in observation connected with it for us). His way, too, then, involves disregard; thus when he speaks of our becoming aware of the events in our body he means almost the opposite of our physical insight with its certainty about the senses. Nor does he lead the united being further to that supreme saying of the Thou that is made possible for it. His innermost decision seems to rest on the extinction of the ability to say Thou.

Kaufmann’s translation of the same:

The goal was for the Buddha “the annulment of suffering,” which is to say, of becoming and passing away — the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. “Henceforth there is no recurrence” was to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. But if we did know that there was recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible.

Whether the Buddha leads men to the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly he leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. But he leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the “jungle of opinions,” but also away from the “deception of forms” — which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for is simply belong to it) the reliable world. His path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when he bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what he means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does he lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You.

In response to this, I wrote a margin note: “L’Chaim! Declaration of faith.”

The second excerpt pertains to what I have called “enworldment”.

Smith’s translation:

The beginning and the extinction of the world are not in me; but they are also not outside me; they cannot be said to be at all, they are a continuous happening, connected with and dependent on me, my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But they do depend not on whether I ‘affirm’ or ‘deny’ the world in my soul, but on how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect. But he who merely ‘experiences’ his attitude, merely consummates it in the soul, however thoughtfully, is without the world — and all the tricks, arts, ecstasies, enthusiasms, and mysteries that are in him do not even ripple the skin of the world. So long as a man is set free only in his Self he can do the world neither weal nor woe; he does not concern the world. Only he who believes in the world is given power to enter into dealings with it, and if he gives himself to this he cannot remain godless. If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit, our hands will meet the hands which held it fast.

I know nothing of a ‘world’ and a life in the world’ that might separate a man from God. What is thus described is actually life with an alienated world of It, which experiences and uses. He who truly goes out to meet the world goes out also to God. Concentration and outgoing are necessary, both in truth, at once the one and the other, which is the One.

God comprises, but is not, the universe. So, too, God comprises, but is not, my Self.

Kaufmann’s translation of the same:

The origin of the world and the annulment of the world are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not — they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. But whoever merely has a living “experience” of his attitude and retains it in his soul may be as thoughtful as can be, he is worldless — and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasms, and mysteries that happen within him do not touch the world’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in his self, he cannot do any good or harm to the world; he does not concern it. Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms — and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.

I know nothing of a “world” and of “worldly life” that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-world, the life of experience and use.

Whoever goes forth in truth to the world, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful.

God embraces but is not the universe; just so, God embraces but is not my self.

This excerpt contains something close to a definition of enworldment, and notice that it includes an element of pluralism in affirming the weaving together of different attitudes of soul as intrinsic to actual life. Smith’s: “…how I cause my attitude of soul to the world to grow to life, to life that acts upon the world, to real life — and in real life the ways of very different attitudes of soul may intersect.” Kaufmann’s: “…how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life — and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross.” This connects powerfully with my vocation of polycentric design.

Importantly, this endeavor involves embrace of dread: Smith says, “If only we love the real world, that will not let itself be extinguished, really in its horror, if only we venture to surround it with the arms of our spirit…” and Kaufmann says, “Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms…”

This is my first reading of I and Thou since Bruno Latour induced my “material turn” ?a little over a decade ago.

At the time of my initial Buber immersion, I preferred ?Buber’s essays (especially those in Between Man and Man) to I and Thou, which at points seemed someone obscure and poetic, especially when it extended the I-Thou relationship beyond interpersonal interactions.

This time around, having embraced both an “apeironic” materialism and a Jewish life, the whole book makes perfect sense, and I cannot imagine preferring any prose to this prayerful poetry.