Healthy psychological growth is quite likely a function of the degree to which a person, or indeed – a civilisation, can successfully negotiate the persistent presence of irreconcilable absence that difference and logical dissonance invokes. In this sense, (both) neurotic obsession and territorial expansionism represent an orientation towards the world that constitutes, in varying degrees, […]
Beyond the most broad brushstrokes of inductive intuition, we should never assume anything about others’ thoughts or intentions and yet find ourselves quite naturally predisposed by endemically limited information to do precisely this. A corollary assumption being that not only are the assumptions we make as essentially and irreducibly metaphysical assertions regarding others most likely […]
The singularly unifying property (as an aggregate sum total entropy and hyper-inflating combinatorial multiplicity) of all diverse methods, logics and schools of philosophical thought is precisely the enduring presence of the absence of unity. This is instructive as to what ontological properties reality (as much as experience or valid descriptions) might possess. If the unifying […]
It is fascinating that human beings are in general so fixated upon provisioning plausible or compelling ontologies (of “how things are”) that they quite happily trade away their own conceptual creativity and intellectual aptitude for the lean pickings of effectively fictive narratives that rarely if ever meet anything like the lofty ambitions towards which they […]
As objective reality is essentially an unattainable metaphysical assertion, all systems of belief and subjective identities are anchored not in fact but upon themselves.
“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” – Jorge Luis Borges How true, and yet the solution to this enigma is not to entirely disassemble or invalidate the riddle but (quite counter-intuitively) to embrace it. While it is true that no rational […]
Finding ourselves existentially foregrounded as the protagonist in and of all we do, it is almost inevitable that we come to think of ourselves as exceptional or special and in those instances when the healthy doubt of a wise, common or garden-variety insecure intellect dawns upon us, we quite rapidly and gratefully barter our own […]
Belief is a system of fictional narrative that by sufficient self-replication begins to masquerade as truth. In systems of language and communication, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions that inevitably loop back to enfold the entire system in a singularly intricate autocatalytic loop of self-referential tautology. Systems of belief are similarly self-inflected […]
Facing reality has always been my most unpalatable responsibility and were it not a necessary burden to attempt to bear to merely survive and play all these hollow games of meaningless repetition that this world incurs, I would have stopped trying many years ago. But survive we must and if in so doing this means […]
I am as though that myth that as soon as you stop believing in me, I cease to exist. The beliefs we hold are very much like this but it is (also) we who stop existing when they vanish. For this reason, but perhaps not only for this reason, we all find ourselves committing to […]
Most of us have to endure the gradual and eminently tedious acquisition of eloquent versatility across increasingly narrow conceptual and technical vocabularies and only then, having been profoundly shaped by the normative logical and grammatical, behavioural or cognitive organisational practises that aspirationally contain and constrain systems as a function of their sustainable continuity, finding ourselves […]
It need hardly be said that good ideas sell themselves, that bad ideas only catch fire where (and when) ignorance is in ascendancy, and that only truly terrible and utterly ugly ideas require propaganda or violence to acquire or maintain a hold upon this long-suffering human world. It is and remains a fact worth acknowledging […]
