Tag: reason

Nothing but Sophistry and Illusion

Un diner des philosophes by Jean Huber

We often designate the 18th century as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason due to the pervasive confidence in rationality and the burgeoning optimism that distinguished the era. According to many virtuosos of rationalism, the possibility of mitigating all of our problems – social, psychological, and material – seemed not just feasible but inevitable.

Continue reading Nothing but Sophistry and Illusion

On reviving the carcass of philosophy

The following are collected tweets (@thanatology) I’ve made in the past month about posthumanism, or reviving the carrion of philosophy:

Once the window to a frozen thanatosphere opens, thought becomes razor sharp enough to slice through the rotting corpse of anthropocentrism.


And the slimy pus of the absolute seeps out and clot into new-old ideas: a heretical Derrideanism that continually savages itself

 is a decadent form of post-Socratic felo-de-se that faces biological contingency w its own blind eyes a Corpse w/o Organs?

Freed from miserly enforcement of rule-bound metaphysical dilemmas, we are stoned by the fumes rising from a chaotic sea of virtualities.

Cynically supercharged w obscene desire for death, we, slaves to cruel directives of base materialism, bottom out in a dark zone of thought — once we see thru the deceptions of life Ego owns up to its pathology, embarrassed with its Macbeth dagger that drips the Earth’s black blood. 

Agitprops of phenomenology, in resurrecting consciousness, merely plunge themselves deeper into the quicksand of their coprophilic narcissism.

Today’s thinkers are mere maggots feeding on the carcass of Brobdingnagians, whose feces will join the deep undercurrent of chthonic thought. 

Crawling out from the bubbling orifice of its decomposing tomb, posthuman thought performs an autophagous Aufhebung as  cannibalism.

A perverse slave of its own meaninglessness, Posthuman Thought gnaws at the root of the Yggdrasil of its own fatuous jurisdiction.

Today our amputated Reason continues to goose-step around calcifying totems of half-baked ideologies, either out of perversity or mockery. 
Vaguely, the subject will re-cohere in the void pried open by the expulsion of Nature out of its hearth, due to revitalized post-idealism.After sprinkling black salt on the wounds of theology, sliced by universal contingency, thought painfully realizes the anorexia of meaning.

Posthuman thought adjusts its peripatetic trail among the gravestones of exhausted theologies in the misty light of the Polaris of nihilism.

Bizarre avatars will usher in new techniques of thought, sporadically evolving fetid rhizomes & decaying yet again in a farcical cycle.Inciting catastrophic predictions, opening a space for self-destructive ideological scrutiny & directing thanatocratic methods, philosophy ends up as a mere choreography of furious, demented & recurring political sequences.

Greatest insight

Imagine something too hot to handle. A hot potato. Now, try imagining something too cold to touch. They freeze the handler by draining away all vitality. Perhaps some insights are far too cold to be adequately handled enough to be understood. Unlike most insights that enlighten, these cold insights carry a sense of danger – even potentially harmful for many who deceive themselves. Continue reading Greatest insight

Nihil est sine ratione

In Latin that spells “nothing is without reason.” We often say “everything has a reason” when we are trying to explain something, an object or an event. The appropriate philosophical terminology is a bit more technical: the principle of sufficient reason, (PSR) which means all contingent facts have an explanation. Continue reading Nihil est sine ratione

Sometimes a spade is not a spade.

The World’s Oldest Metaphor, by Marcello Gori

Aren’t metaphors merely a colorful way of saying something literal, that is otherwise, a non-boring way of saying something boring? Merely the rhetorician’s weapon that subjects his/her audience into compliance? The dictionary of literary terms denote the metaphor as a figure of speech where something is described in the terms of another, or attribute something with a quality that is associated with something else. For instance, Walt Whitman’s metaphor for grass is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” The relation between the two terms in a metaphor is implicit, unlike a simile, where it is explicit. Continue reading Sometimes a spade is not a spade.