The Marriage of Vibe and Concept
Consciousness, Art, Mysticism, and Politics from Kabbalah to Hegel
I. The Marriage of Concept and Vibe
One of the core teachings of mystical traditions is that good and bad are interdependent, sometimes to the point of being “flesh of one flesh.” Evil isn’t the privation of good as classical Christian theologians, following Plato, argue, but part and parcel of it. William Blake captures the sentiment when he writes of the marriage of heaven and hell. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett popularized this notion in Good Omens, which recently got adapted into a TV series.
In Kabbalistic thought, the other side, or sitra d’achra, refers to the demonic dimension of the good. Carl Jung articulates a similar idea when he posits how all human strengths come from and also lead to a shadow side, a point of weakness. We find Jungian archetypes all over media: In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader share an intimacy, despite being on opposite sides of the Force. Harry Potter’s powers derive from the primal wound inflicted upon him by Voldemort. The concept is also operative in vaccination, whereby a small dosage of a disease is the very thing that protects against it.
The ethical, legal, and political implications of mystical thought are often bothersome to normies, who think that the fungibility of good and evil gives license to moral relativism, or worse: the elevation of evil to a moral ideal. This is the theme of Gershom Scholem’s studies on antinomian thinkers like Sabbatai Sevi and Jacob Frank, who believed they could bring “Redemption through sin.”
But you don’t have to look to fringe examples to see the point. The Talmud makes it banal: without an evil inclination, it says, we wouldn’t build houses or reproduce. Some basic sense of egotism, of the desire to conquer, some basic amount of lust, is needed to get the ball of life rolling.
It’s not so much that desire is neutral, but that it is both positive and negative at the same time. The French psychoanalysts call the phenomenon of painful pleasure jouissance.
II. The Marriage of Concepts and Vibes
Once you see good and evil as interconnected, a lot of one-sided debates look different. This is part of what Hegel teaches through his method of dialectic, a high-minded approach that itself become the basis for Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s “Third Way” politics in the ‘90s.
One of the great polarities that I see—and that doesn’t break neatly along a left/right political axis—is between concepts and vibes.
Ok, actually Kant used a different word: intuitions. But vibes is more contemporary. Both intuitions and vibes appeal to emotion, to immediacy, to something we know without reason or justification.
How does a pizza master know when the pizza is ready? By following the recipe? No. By vibing. The master craftsman is not bounded by the concept, but the vibe, of pizza. Yet vibes also lead astray. They are mushy, often prejudicial. And because they are harder to put into words or arguments, also harder to scale.
A good heuristic: vibes can be learned through apprenticeship, concepts can be learned from books.
Vibes are charismatic. Concepts are rigorous. A vibe without a concept is snake oil. A concept without a vibe is an empty suit.
When Kant was writing about concepts and intuitions he was writing about human consciousness, about how the mind constructs meaningful experiences out of the chaos of sensory data. But his teaching could also apply to culture.
A world in which people are technocrats only would lack vibe. A world in which people just follow their emotion could lead to all kinds of terrible places, from the wide embrace of conspiracy theories to outright fascism. Political rallies are a vibe. And as Burke knew, the task of politicians is to provide theatrical entertainment. But the wellbeing of a society can’t live on cheer and outrage alone. Policies should be evaluated on their merits, not on the basis of pre-determined ideological, tribal allegiance (vibe).
III. The Marriage of Populism and Elitism
Why am I translating Kant’s intuition as vibe? In part, because I am trying to express stylistically a marriage of high and low culture. This marriage is not only tactical for me, but a sincere expression of something I believe: we need to bring elitism and populism together, without compromising on either. We need to elevate everyday life by giving conceptual analysis and shape to it; we also need to uncover the beating heart that abstract thought, at its worst, denies or represses.
Elitism tracks with top-down authority, populism with bottom-up. We need both. Vibes are bottom-up. Concepts are top-down. Concepts alone detach us. Vibes alone have no staying power.
Some great artists manage to combine both high and low. Shakespeare is an obvious example—his plays borrow from classical tradition yet also contain plenty of gallows humor. A typical Roberto Bolaño story describes a drug dealer or prostitutes who reads Pindar and Alcaeus.
Democracy is basically the enshrinement of low culture as an ideal, while aristocracy is the enshrinement of high culture as an ideal.
Today, we need the combination more than ever—we need a culture that takes the responsibility of elites seriously, and one that doesn’t take them too seriously. We need a culture that finds dignity and wisdom in the people, but also doesn’t let the people have the last word on what is good, true, and beautiful (for these things cannot simply be a popularity contest).
In short, mysticism needn’t be fringe or antinomian. Mysticism, in the Hegelian variety I’ve articulated (Hegel was influenced by Christian Kabbalah) is practical. It’s about bringing opposites together, about finding points of collaboration where other see opposing teams.
Whether we are talking about consciousness as in Kant, God, as in Kabbalah, archetypes as in Jung, art as in Shakespeare, or politics as in Hegel, we need to find the hell in heaven and the heaven in hell. We need to vibe with concepts and conceptualize the vibe.
You can learn vibes from a book but it has to be written a certain way, heavy on stories and concrete examples and pictures. The very best math textbooks do this: they switch back and forth between formal structured reasoning and motivating stories. The motivating stories give you, the math student, a muscle-memory sense of why the great theorems are true, and teach you how to discover new truths, i.e. how to do mathematical research. The formal reasoning teaches you how to check your intuition and when and why not to trust it.
A great example is David Bressoud's _A Radical Approach to Real Analysis_ which did more than any other book to teach me how to think like a mathematician. Now I am biased because I took the course from Professor Bressoud himself, and so maybe my vibe experience is confounded by that bit of apprenticeship. But at the very least I think a clever and motivated autodidact could have learned much-- maybe not all-- of the same vibe from self-study of the book. I would love to hear of someone trying it.
Theoretically, I agree with your conclusion—we need to bring heaven and hell together but that becomes impossible when both sides thrive on their differences. When the extreme voices control the dialog there will never be agreement. Unfortunately one party's ideology is based on hate, anger and resentment which is a huge impediment to the marriage of vibe and concept. xxxxx g di