From nethermost nescience to the apex of omniscience, all states of knowledge are without any ultimately real foundation whatsoever—and the same applies to the very states themselves. Without the recognition of this basic fact, it is impossible to ascend from ignorance to knowledge. For if things did have an intrinsically existent foundation or essence, it …
Introduction to Unphilosophy
Unphilosophy is the praxis of undoing philosophy by demonstrating that the transcendental conditions for the very possibility of philosophy are also, at the same time, the ultimate end of its own immanent movement, in order to immediately bring about the self-liberation of philosophy so as to open up the clearing for the illumination of primordial …
Constituting Individual Objects without Private Essences
If I recall correctly, for Graham Harman and perhaps Object-Oriented Ontology generally, an individual cannot be exhausted by any or all of its relations. Thus there is some kind of irreducible essence that is particular to that individual object. But there's something circular about this idea, because it offers a definition of the individual object …
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Form, Content, Expression
Form constitutes the shape of any given entity, along with the various elements or properties by which the shape is composed. It can be analysed in terms of part-to-whole relations, where the form can be divisible into a multitude of parts as well as being apprehended as a whole. It is what gives something its …
Similarity, or Beyond Identity and Difference
On Identity: Generally today it is often felt that an affirmation of difference and plurality is preferable to an existence based on identity and universality, which is negatively evaluated as being characterized by excessive limitation. This is true, for definition by negation is the underlying basis of any sense of self-identity: what one is, is …
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Divine Persistence: Notes for a Post-Atheistic Conception of God
God does not exist. Nor has God ever existed, and nor will God ever fully come into existence. God is neither the efficient nor the final cause independent of the actual world. God can never be found and never will be found. God does not exist, but it can be said that God persists in action to …
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Unity-In-Difference
There is no essential difference between Ultimate Reality and Conventional Existence; between Emptiness and Appearance; between Being and Becoming; between Universal and Particular; between Feminine and Masculine. While they can be thought independently, in actuality they arise interdependently, with their cooperative interplay creating this fantastical flux that we call life. It is through their union, …
Beautiful Life
Even in stoic perseverance do mountains erode and cascade into the temporal flux of change... Only in this beautiful life is the ceasing forever ceaseless, is the resting forever restless, by which Being is forever Becoming. Only in this beautiful life does the ceaseless come to cease, does the restless come to rest, from which …
reflections on the notion of Self (Identity)
The sense of Self seems to arise out of the assumption that the chain of reference produced by our inquiry into this notion (the chain that results from reflecting upon the contents of this notion of self, in which the contents themselves are found to be only composed of a series of reflections …
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Beyond Affirmation and Negation
Affirmation and Negation can be understood to be the positive or negative reactions we have towards the contents of experience. These reactions are causally consequent of the registration of sense data, which abstracts fact from sense and upholds fact within reflection. While reaction may be a causal consequence of this entertainment of …