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Tag: metaphysics

  • Theme:

    The self: unreliable ghost vs synthetic process

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    1–2 minutes

    There is a persistent looping regress, where we look to outward sources for reality (stable facts, empiricism) but find reality shaped by our own experience (phenomenology).

    More confounding, we cannot find “the reality of the self” inside us when we look. It simply appears and acts, obeying neither reason nor ideology nor religion.

    No wonder we abstracted ourselves by dividing the soul from reason. We need something besides the “invisible self” to lean upon; a synthetic process (an imminent transcendental abstraction) is preferred to an unreliable ghost.

    Like the soul, we see very little reason and rationality, yet we feel that we use it and are stabilized by it. It can chain narratives together into comprehensible shapes, but it fails to fully tell us who we are: even using reason, we cannot pinpoint or control the elusive self.

  • Theme:

    Subjectivity: the rational vs sensuous self

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    1–2 minutes

    Between the rational self and the sensuous self is the subjective self.
    If you are all rational (empirical), you are a machine-like automaton. If you are all sensual (phenomenological), you are an instinctual animal.

    Both extremes forsake the freedom to choose.

    The self is not found by selecting one or the other, or synthesizing the two, but in playing between both.

  • Theme:

    Utopia of the body

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    1–2 minutes

    Utopia, definitionally, means “no place.”

    It is a place outside of us, which makes the body unwelcome, since it is indeed a place in which we reside.

    However, Michel Foucault says the body itself is unknowable, making it a place we cannot define, and thus a “no place” similar to the utopia.

    Our attempts to escape ourself into a mysterious better place are refuted, because our literal self (physically) is an unknown place, rich with mystery that denies escape.

  • Theme:

    the immanent improvement impulse

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    1–2 minutes

    We have an internal compulsion that comes from the survival imperative: perpetual striving.


    Even periods of sloth end or become obsessive in as sophisticated, ordered, and avoidant compulsions.

    To order our life is a struggle: a persistent fight that burns our energy. Even when there is no witness, which means it is not only a social construct of achievement but an immanent (innate) means of relating to the world.

  • Theme:

    Morality vs Metaphysics; classical vs modern

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    1–2 minutes

    Modern sensibility is metaphysical, while classical is moral, according to Albert Camus.

    Metaphysics is asking “what is” – such as what is being, or perception- while morality is the ethical consideration of the right or good. Modernity is a recursive evaluative question rather than a value judgement.

    All of that confusion to say: we value the question over values.

  • Theme:

    Art reveals the lie and saves us from the real.

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    1–2 minutes

    Picasso says, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”

    Nietzsche says, “we have art in order not to die of the truth.” Or, the creative act saves us from the truth (reality).

    In one view, the world is hidden and must be revealed through the “lie of art.”
    On the other, the world’s reality of brutality requires transcendent imagining.

  • Theme:

    Entelechey: realization of potential

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    1–2 minutes

    Aristotle says there is a core principle within that shapes outcomes into reality.

    The “entelechey” is a motivating force that organizes potential into actuality; that is, it directs potential into the real instead of mere theory or form.

    A fundamental seed, like a crystalline DNA, expresses its shape (ideas and form) and its will to expand into an organized realization (matter).

  • Theme:

    Your self is time

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    1–2 minutes

    When we are is who we are, according to Heidegger.

    Our temporality is inseparable from us, so we should consider more importantly our historically positioned current moment: what we do is more precisely when we are.

    In this context, if who we are is what we do, action is time and we are a moment.

  • Theme:

    Actions follow being, or not

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    1–2 minutes

    “Actions follow being,” wrote Aristotle twenty-three centuries ago. He meant that a thing can only act according to what it is. (Luke Burgis, Wanting)

    If your “being” is set, this smacks of determinism, yet it also feels true that one cannot act out of character.

    We must ask: what if the truth is the opposite? There is no being without first acting.

  • Theme:

    The digital is an extension of the real

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    1–2 minutes

    To exist in the digital world is not an escape from this world; it is merely an extension or facet of it.

    The digital is contained within the real world, supported and influenced by it.

    It is only an alternate terrain: do not think of it as an escape.