Our Source Code
There is an Indian story about an elephant who is being used as a pack animal for men going into war. When the shelling starts, the elephant finds himself too terrified to move. He looks around and sees the ass and is envious because the ass is too ignorant to understand the shelling, so he is not afraid. The elephant also sees the man, who understands the shelling, but also understands why he fights, so his fear is conquered by his purpose. The elephant alone knows fear without purpose, and suffers the most of all. We call ourselves after that elephant, because we are the people who refuse to be brave out of ignorance like the ass, but who recognize that uncovering purpose is a life-long pursuit.
Hawthi is created in two parts, the philosophy studio and the machine company. Both are guided by the vision of redeeming the beauty of classical things through their correct formation within the modern context. The Hawthi Studio is a gym-style Socratic space styled to fill a hole left by the modern university: exploring the metaphysics, not just the physics, of life. Moria Machine Company seeks to build everyday technology with a telos other than materialist progressivism. It is the tangible endpoint of the studio.
What We Do
The Hawthi studio is a membership-based lifestyle gym and philosophy studio. Members have access to different tracks, guided Socratic sessions exploring and practicing a variety of themes. They also become part of the lifestyle design community, which provides resources and practices for embodied philosophy.
Reasons for Existence
A Place for Intentional Lifestyle Development
For the first time in recorded history, every class in our society has the luxurious burden of choice. Our questions are no longer those of the means survival, but those of the point of survival. It has become our responsibility to design our own lifestyles, and to avoid defaulting into satiation. Finding, and adhering, to one's purpose and sources of meaning is nearly impossible in isolation, and we exist as a community of seekers dedicated to the mutual support of others as we enact our visions in the world.
A Place for Mindful Technology
Technology has passed some invisible threshold of being a tool directed at out flourishing and become a potentially dehumanizing force that usurps our agency if we do not approach it mindfully. We exist as a community dedicated to the subjugation of technology to purpose and values, at the level of the relationship the individual had with the tech directly under his control.
A Place for Embodied Ritual
Not everything in the world-out-there can be understood propositionally, that is, through analysis and definition; there are some things that must be understood through symbol and ritual. We exist as a community dedicated to the comprehension of mystery through ritual and participatory knowledge.
A Place for Cultivated Boredom
It is rare that anyone living today lacks the information necessary to make a difficult decision in their life, rather what they lack is the contemplative space necessary to order and integrate the information they already have. We exist as a community dedicated to the intentional cultivation of boredom, a space where one is not stimulated with unhelpful distraction but organized with directed contemplation.
A Place for Non-Dogmatic Inquiry
Whether in the realm of classical religion or enlightenment rationality, dogma provides a safety net to default to when making low-value decisions in confusing situations. It is, however, quite destructive in the open pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. We exist as a space for truly open dialogue, for the graceful play with ideas, for entertaining the absurd.
A Place for De-Institutionalized Therapy
The fact that modern society has developed an institution of therapy is admirable in many ways, but in many ways it is indicative of the fragmentation of inter-personal organization that met the same need. We exist as a community dedicated to the de-institutionalization of therapy, a place where people can stand and heal together in a manner often inaccessible in a largely atomized larger society.
Changes that Make Us Necessary
Failure of Higher Education in Classical Humanities
The modern and post-modern trend of the university toward materialist and propositional knowledge has left many in our society without the language or frameworks to explore their own metaphysics. This has given academics technical mastery at the cost of color and depth. We do not wish to undo this mastery, or the university, but to provide an alternative space for exploration in the style of the classical university and the monastery.
Sacrifice of Beauty to Efficiency
The average citizen of the modern world is surrounded by testaments to efficiency. Everything moves quickly in straight lines and everything is built with a minimum of complexity. This allows our society to function with an undeniable smoothness, but it leaves us with an uneasy feeling that we are simply propelling ourselves faster towards our own deaths. We wish to provide a space for the creation of things with beauty as their end, and function as their effect.
Atomization of Societal Structure
It is not good for man to be alone, it is said, but it is comfortable and it is easy. Many of the technological advances made during the industrial revolution enabled people to survive in isolation with nothing but access to and mastery of their machines. Many of the advances made during the digital revolution made that isolation desirable. We wish to provide a space for humans to reengage with social ritual intentionally, not disengaged from the isolating technology but mastering it.
Post-Literacy and the loss of social memory
The digital transmission and generation of media, while invaluable in making knowledge accessible to nearly everyone, brought with it a strange side-effect. Words have become so cheap so as to be without worth. Language is a beautiful gift, and we wish to be a space for the reclamation of participatory and contemplative uses of it, and for the use of symbol as a mnemonic method of memory and organization.
Consumerism in the Arts
The past century of recorded arts, and the past decade of infinite availability in particular, has created a strange collective conception of art-as-product. In many ways, people have forgotten that art used to point beyond itself; it used to invite one to look through it and not simply at it. We wish to introduce people anew to a participatory form of art, to give them space to tell stories and write songs for no reason beyond the piece itself.
