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.

Mutuality and reciprocity

Design

In my “Six Sensibilities of Service” course, I’ve gone back and forth on naming one of the sensibilities. I’ve called the same sensibility both “Reciprocal” and “Mutual”.

Each has advantages and tradeoffs.

“Reciprocal” emphasizes the interactivity inherent to the sensibility. An interaction takes place where value is exchanged between participants in a service.

“Mutual” emphasizes sharedness — specifically, shared benefit. In a good service, an exchange is well-designed when it is of mutual benefit.

This sensibility is meant to represent an idea in Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) which has variously been called “value exchange” or “value-co-creation”. The former seems to favor “reciprocity”, where the latter seems to favor the latter, as the participants in the service collaborate to produce an event of mutual benefit to all involved.

I still don’t know which term I prefer. This is partly because this sensibility belongs to a larger system of sensibilities, which includes one called “Polycentricity”, which is a way to translate pluralism into designerly terms. Until recently, most designers who have defined their goals with a single subject in mind — a user, a customer, an employee. Even when they have designed to accommodate multiple personas, those personas were understood as isolated subjects of the experience. In service design multiple participants experience the service simultaneously, and experience one another within that service, each a center-point of their own experience. It is within this polycentricity that reciprocity and mutuality occurs or fails to some degree.

Double ignorance of illiberals

Philosophy, Politics

In Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? he dedicates considerable space to the problem of the Black Power Movement.

King demonstrates understanding of a principle to which Progressivism is oblivious: Power and Love are not enemies, but partners in marriage. It is only when the two are divorced that they become enemies:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed. This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral persuasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

It has become fashionable and a mark of superior wisdom to condescendingly dismiss King as a man who meant well and was helpful in his own time, but that we have outgrown. According to these evolved thinkers, King was naive, and out of touch with the realities of race. But if you read King himself, instead of uncritically believing his critics, you will learn that this “evolved” thinking was around in his own time. They said all the same things today’s black racists say. And King answered them.

This rejection of King is part of a comprehensive dismissal of liberalism in general among today’s clever degree-holding elite who believe themselves educated. Liberalism is either naive, or cynically preys on the naive.

But it is the dismissers of liberalism who are naive. Worse, are arrogantly naive, and thus entirely closed to detecting their naivety.

Of course, there is a simple word for this: fools.

The wise are aware of their ignorance, and — more importantly — prepared practically to respond to ignorance. To theoretically acknowledge the possibility of being wrong or the impossibility of omniscience is a necessary condition of wisdom , but it is far from sufficient. Wisdom knows what to do in response to the ineradicable omnipresence of ignorance.

Fools, on the other hand, assume if they don’t already comprehend something, that something is incomprehensible. If something is inconceivable, it cannot be. If something doesn’t make sense, it is nonsense. If “I cannot understand why” there is no why, and whoever claims to know or feel why is delusional. It is what Socratics call “double ignorance”. Here we can see exactly how foolish is opposed to wise. If Socrates was, as the oracle said, the wisest man in Athens for knowing that he did not know, fools do not know they do not know and imagine themselves wise in their knowingness.

So returning to liberalism, every illiberal I know, whether a Progressivist or Alt-righter, is a demonstrable fool with respect to liberalism. Every time I try to engage one of these them in liberal interaction, they crap out. They say all kinds of dismissive words about liberalism. They say lots of words about how the world really is and how it actually ought to be. They say a lot of words about words and the limits of words.

But when the time comes where liberalism is most needed, they cannot do liberalism.

And the know-what theory of liberalism is useless if it is not married to the practical know-how of doing liberalism.

Ward Farnsworth on double ignorance:

Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general.

People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance— the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

…

Double ignorance has practical consequences. Being wrong isn’t a terrible problem if you know it’s a risk and account for it. But when people are wrong but feel unshakably right it takes away their will to learn and eventually involves them in disaster. And if they are put in charge of anything, their double ignorance produces disaster for everyone else, too. Most political calamities can be seen that way.

Existentialism

Philosophy

Existentialism is a style of philosophy that attempts to keep thought in relationship with reality by resisting the natural human tendency to confuse essence (whatness) for existence (thatness), and reduce existence to essence.

We strive, against human nature, to maintain our personal faith that “existence precedes essence.”

Perhaps for some existentialists, the maxim “existence precedes essence” is a statement of fact. For me, however, it is a profession of faith — an intention — an aspiration — a prayer.

What set me on this course this morning was a sentence from Kaufmann’s translation of I and Thou. I will make minor edits to make it more digestible to contemporary readers:

The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into the thinking One, “that by which this world is thought,” the pure subject. But in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather, that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists — in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived.

Philosophical content is conceptual, and therefore, necessarily I-It. But philosophical practice may or may not do its work within a context of I-Thou, and it may or may not take its content as given within an I-Thou metaphysic. In other words, it might proceed from I-Thou, toward I-Thou, or it might confine the entire endeavor to a generic, solitary I constructing and It-system to account for an It reality.

When Buber says “that which thinks is as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa,” I read him as acknowledging the necessity of I-It for I-Thou, while denying its sufficiency.

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Saint-Exupery

Viddui: I have mysticized

Biography, Judaism, Religion

Mysticism reduces one’s relationship with God to one’s own experience of God. It belongs to a more general tendency to reduce all relationship with being (and beings) to one’s own experience of being (and beings). Like all religiosities, including, especially, fundamentalism, mysticism can even take forms that dispense with God. It goes like this: “I experience something that points beyond my experience, and that experience-beyond-experience is a kind of revelation of a mystery: the mystery of inexhaustible moreness.” Spiritual-but-not-religious Nones fall under this category.

Mysticism takes root in souls who have nothing against which to contrast this reflexive comprehensive mystical response: “Experience… as opposed to what?”

I can describe mysticism because mysticism is a personal vice of my own: O God, I pray to “you”, be way over there, blessing me and this world with your opalescent existential backglow. I ask nothing of you, except that you ask nothing of me. Make me unspoken promises that can never be broken, but infuse my life with an enchanting hopefulness, which is hope for nothing in particular. Drape my life in a protecting veil of the gentlest contempt toward all who expect from me what I give only to you. Amen.

To tease out the truth of a mystic, to get a glimpse of their soul, need something from them, ask them for something, even something very simple, and notice what ensues. Parallel lines are held apart by a sacred void. Thou shalt not obligate.

Mystics want freedom, and will pay whatever price they must for their redemption from obligation. But this payment for freedom does not redeem. It isolates.

Martin Buber says this:

That there is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubstantial—we may say: God and man, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to man, is called mission and commandment; from man to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in him, bows before him that is “greater” and prays to him.

All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to man’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization.

— But mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony?

— I know not only of one but of two kinds of events in which one is no longer aware of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too, did at one time.

First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the spirit. With this — it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection. But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way is decision — intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret — but this one, deep down, is the primally secret decision, pregnant with the most powerful destiny.

The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. But when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflects on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this world into that unity, when this world itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity — what does all “enjoyment of God” profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich heavenly Moment has nothing to do with my poor earthly moment — what is it to me as long as I still have to live on earth — must in all seriousness still live on earth? That is the way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of “unification.”

Which was no unification.

And then he describes the precise error Julius Evola made in his starkly solipsistic book on sex, where he claims a woman’s essence is revealed to a man in the moment of climax:

Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured.’ What we find here is a marginal® exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten.

I will conclude now with an image (from despair.com) that I have used more than once in project post-mortems and in summaries of my long and twisting career path.

3,007

Biography

This is my 3,007th post since August 2008, when I stopped using LiveJournal and switched over to WordPress. 257 of them were private and some others are password protected. This is not counting the 1,045 posts I abandon as drafts.

Now I want to count my LiveJournal posts and tally my total output since 2003.

Update: I counted 4,094 posts on LiveJournal between 2003 and 2009.

This brings the total to 7,101 posts.