Categories
culture

Embracing Difference

There are some failing metaphysical assumptions and troubled subjectivities in the notionally “Western” position and its attendant parochialisms. A drift through deterministic materialism and downstream mechanical (or algorithmic) thinking into untenable philosophical positions also seems somewhat inevitable, if perhaps not entirely irremediable. I am constantly fascinated (and yet to be quite honest also simultaneously horrified) […]

Categories
Philosophy

Self-Surveillance

There is, perhaps, as much to be said for an acquired art and experience of “self-surveillance” as there is of the orchestrated ubiquity of surveillance in information and (communications) technology that Orwell predicted. The longer arc and trajectory of human history has been one in which the inflating internal, interior spaces of memory and perception […]

Categories
Philosophy

Social Media and the Need to Feel Loved

You want to be loved for how you look but you need to be loved for who you are. The truth is, only one of these things matters and only you can work this out for yourself and this is not about simply hearing or reading these words, it is about listening, understanding and carefully […]

Categories
Philosophy

Can our ideas love us back?

If other people must always and to some extent only ever be ideas to any of us, how can those ideas ever love us back without the whole thing devolving into intricate games of haunted, hollow and narcissistic self-deception? What, in essence, is the meta-ethical solution here? Is there one? I suspect there is, but […]

Categories
Psychology

Emptiness in Psychology, Subjectivity and Art

This, from the book above: (…)art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.” Staging Nothing: The Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s “The Raven”, Sean J. Kelly, in Psychology in Edgar Allan Poe, Logos Verlag Berlin, 2019, p. 69 Replace “void” with “subjectivity” and you have a […]

Categories
Psychology

Mental Illness as Endemic Property of Subjective Identity

It is an unacknowledged truth that subjective self-identity is always and already a psychological artefact that exists upon a sliding scale of graduated pathology. A notionally healthy or well-adjusted individual in comparison to a person experiencing some form of dissociative or discontinuous psychological reality represents a difference in degree but not in kind. That is […]

Categories
Philosophy

Threaded destinies…

It’s a curious thing, this life. So many chance meetings and threaded destinies as a sophisticated tapestry of interdependent artefacts, entities and systems – all seeking self-expression and sustainable continuity while at same time and for the most part deeply, profoundly and reflexively afraid or wilfully unreceptive to the fact that none of us are […]

Categories
Philosophy

Distance

We have all and for so very long defined ourselves by a conceptual difference and distance we now accept as necessary that we fail to see that the loneliness and isolation this exclusion brings has become the one thing that unites us all. It is as though we seek to experience and know the world […]

Categories
Philosophy

All my hollow sorrows haunt me.

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Healing Wisdom

Sometimes we see ourselves as separate and isolated from a world which asks (or as often, demands) of us that we be or become these separate nodal trees as labelled identities and alienated decision-machines of consumption and compliance to fuel the swirling, rolling, tumbling chaos and confusion that our cultures and Global civilisation represents and […]

Categories
life Philosophy

Loneliness in Love

Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Selfish Problem of Duality

The core issue is an ontological symmetry that in some sense “breaks” or aggregates around, through and as human subjectivity. All of our organisational systems, definitions, structural and technological innovations and vulnerabilities reflect this self-same underlying and enigmatically self-contained dynamic. The proliferation of models, frameworks, maps and “best practices’ is  misses a key point. A […]