The technology through which we measure, celebrate and cultivate our selves is simultaneously the blind-spot in our vision of that Self; this is as much a symptom of the technology as it is endemic of the introspective cultural and psychological process of self-definition. A technology of language and communication (or, really, any other art) has […]
I wonder sometimes: am I the sum of my past, the simple aggregate bundle of sensations and experiences or memories and otherwise material or extended causes and effects I leave behind me (in time) like vapour trails? This Self I carry around as some interior burden or mirror of external expectations or normative cultural conventions […]
Spontaneity is a living essence but in naming, we destroy it. I am trapped in and by the very labyrinth of words and language with which I seek through speaking (or writing) to free myself.
I went for another solitary afternoon walk today and discovered this small token of human affection attached to a lonely tree on the edge of some farmland in the hills not far from where I live. I’m not sure why anyone would leave this there, exposed to the elements and bound to suffer an inevitable […]
I wonder what it is about an image that fools the mind so swiftly, so sweetly and so completely. The suspension of disbelief in the essential illusion with which we are presented is so natural and so subtle as to be all but invisible to us. It is perhaps precisely in this invisibility that they […]
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 […]
To ask how does art acquire value is really no different than asking how art (or anything at all) acquires meaning, as both concepts are significantly more hollow than any of us are commonly willing to admit into consideration. Art itself is the reflexive recombination of (existing, pre-existing) idioms, concepts, images and narrative (cultural) threads. […]
In his classic Tao Te Ching (The Way of Life), Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu characterises the utility of what does not exist as being of profound importance. While there exist complex senses in which this illustrates a powerful gradient of logical thought, the fact is – and contrary to pretty much every single ideological position or […]
The general assertion of significance and meaning as belonging to symbols (of Self, of nation, of Other, of flag or tribal, ideological and cultural association) is a direct and inverse consequence of a foundationally incomplete psychological identity; itself being little more than the symbolic or communications system and technological hyper-extension of a general principle of […]
We do not use language, it uses us and its greatest trick is to easily persuade us otherwise. Language defines or prescribes personality in ways which few of us are prepared to admit. The different patterns and structures of cognition implicit to any linguistic pattern of communication must inevitably shape and influence the overall ways […]
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 […]
All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity […]
Daedelus Kite 