Self-identity is little more than a complex fiction. Attempt to suspend your disbelief or any moral affront you might at first experience when engaging such a thought as that the foundation upon which you build a world of meaning and purpose is utterly and ultimately insubstantial. In fact, the vigorous spectrum of discomfort and aggression […]
Tag: fiction
Global Conflict: Time to Grow Up
While it may be low-hanging fruit and all references to it may be quite akin to stating the bleeding obvious, there is a distinct lack of unity in the world: wars, political dissonance, conflict, sabre-rattling and a thousand different flavours of internecine anger or paranoid fear. What might be somewhat less obvious in such an […]
Shared Daydreams and Emptiness
We rarely attain to moments of clarity (or maturity) sufficient to acknowledge the extent to which all of our identities are really and at base quite thoroughly and irredeemably fictional. All definitions of identity are made (and justified) by and in reference to other definitions and those themselves rest similarly upon yet more definitions in […]
The question is surely as to a definition of meaning. As Russell remarked in “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, all definitions are made in terms of other definitions – ergo and by way of endemic circularity there is no anchor or Archimedes Point upon which to hang notions of a “most meaningful” life. All meaning is […]
It is all Fiction
We are all quite simply role-playing: doing what it is that we think that someone like that who we believe we are should be doing, regardless that there is no one thing that anyone actually is. Fascinated by this internalised mirror image of Other as Self, we find ourselves transfixed by fantasy and illusion. Even […]
The Paradoxical Haunting of Selfhood
What is (perhaps) even more curious than this, the translucent Cheshire Smile of a concept of Self that becomes an artefact around which we find ourselves (!) in endless free-fall and ontological orbit, is that the very difference and distance by and through which we define that self traps us in an intractable enigma. We […]
Culture: Using Fiction to understand Fact
To understand the mood and the Zeitgeist of an era, inspect the art, the fiction, the entertainment and the overtly and consciously, intentionally superficial. It is in the manifestation and cultivation of oblique and useful falsehood that the underlying axioms inexorably reveal themselves. What is considered “real” or “important” reveals itself as merely being another […]
These Masks Wear Us
These masks of self obscure only the fact of their own emptiness.
The Emptiness
There may be something tragically inevitable in the procedural hollowing-out of social lives in an era of accelerating and technologically-mediated hyper-connectivity.
Choice and Illusion
Do our choices choose us ?
Reciprocity
We live through each other or not at all.