You can read it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06669-3

I ran this script manually every morning, expecting it to return nothing for further weeks or months. The process had taken almost exactly two years from start to finish. It was first outlined in March 2024, submitted on 18 April 2025, accepted on 29 January 2026, and published on 13 March 2026. For many new friends, I’ve been working on this paper the whole time that I’ve known them.

But on 15th of March (the Ides!) when I ran the script,1 I got some output on the terminal — and was excited to read the title of our paper. I opened it in a browser and saw what you can see now at that link. I excitedly clicked the “Download PDF” link and then…

I felt disappointed.

I was looking at our submitted manuscript, an unadorned and unofficial-looking Word document. We had written it in Google docs, using Zotero for references, even though I’d been tempted for a few days to convert it all LaTeX, to make it look better. Plus we’d seen the uncorrected proofs beforehand, on Nature’s letterhead, which looks much more official. My coauthor assures me this doesn’t matter to academics, but to me it still feels a bit unfinished.

I’d also expected to have a few more last minute edits on the paper. We’d spent so much time trying to accommodate the five peer reviews we’d received back, and worried so much about length, that we’d not been as effusive as I’d have liked about some of the wonderful references we cite. When we resubmitted in December, I had guessed — wrongly as it turns out — that it would require another round of reviews. Instead, in January, the most critical reviewer, who had sent us 4,422 words worth of detailed feedback, had done a 180 and was now extremely positive. The editor notified us that it had been accepted in January.

The next step was to correct the proofs. Luckily, re-reading the uncorrected proofs, having passed peer review, despite my misgivings about not being able to do another round of revisions, Isabela and I were both extremely happy with the paper. We were even happier with it than we’d been in December, when we’d been ruthlessly cutting passages to get the length down. In the proofs, there were only about two true issues — one of which came from the journal changing our British spelling to American (by “analyses” we meant multiple instances of analysis, which they’d corrected to “analyzes”). The other issues (dozens of places where the citations were not properly linked to the bibliography) are not an issue in the manuscript you can now download.

And so, on that March morning, with neither fanfare nor notification from the journal, Neither/Nor was out in the world. Its full title is “Neither/Nor: a pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge” and it’s in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature, 2026). It was up!

And I felt vulnerable.

I think this was because of the two ways in which it felt unfinished — the unofficial letterhead and the feeling that I’d just wanted to add a few more references to certain passages (we’d been afraid that it was already too long to be accepted). And now the public could read this paper. I felt inexplicably worried that people would attack us for it. Maybe I can chalk that up to the fact that 15 of March was the day that Caesar was assassinated, 2,070 years ago. Whatever it was, it’s because of this feeling of vulnerability that I hadn’t yet posted anything here to you, Dear Reader, though I did put the link on Substack notes.

What’s in the paper?

The short version: we argue that neither theory nor practice alone is sufficient for flourishing — in personal life or in scientific inquiry — and that the real skill is learning to oscillate deliberately between them. We call the unconscious preference for abstract concepts over lived experience “latent Platonism,” and trace it through figures who explicitly rejected essentialism but arguably smuggled it back in. The paper draws on ancient skepticism, Buddhist philosophy, modern pragmatism, and cognitive science, and opens with a concrete example: managing my Type I diabetes, which requires constant negotiation between abstract formulas and what my body is actually telling me.

It’s technically still “in press” — meaning the accepted manuscript is live and citable, but the final typeset version hasn’t yet been assigned to a journal issue. Despite my theoretical discomfort about this, in practice this changes nothing: the paper is peer-reviewed, open access, and fully readable right now.

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Would you like to read and discuss it?

My coauthor Isabela is visiting London from Toronto, and a group of us are getting together to discuss the paper over drinks. This came about largely through my Saturday writing group, First Few Books — which my friend Pen co-hosts with me at Sam’s Café in Primrose Hill. Thanks especially to Salman, Bobby, Ross, and Harry for encouragement along the way, and to Bobby in particular for repeatedly asking that we do an event like this.

The event is at the Cittie of Yorke, 22 High Holborn, on Thursday 2 April, 6–10pm.

Please do RSVP — it helps enormously with planning, and we want to make sure there’s room for everyone.

Please RSVP here →

I can highly recommend Isabela’s most recent piece, on Gen Z, which you can find on her Substack:

I’ll write more about the ideas in the paper soon. For now, I’m just glad it’s out.

Best,

Bryan

As I described last week, this week I’ve been engaged in the mind-melting process of trying to appease (or even please!) five reviewers plus an editor on our academic paper. The good news: it’s gone well! Though a vast amount of cleanup and polish remains to be done, we have restructured the whole paper and addressed many of the reviewers’ concerns.

In order to address certain things missing from the paper, we have of course had to add quite a bit of text — in particular, discussion of pragmatist thinkers like Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. This has meant that we’ve had to cut a lot of things.

Cutting writing can be painful, especially when weeks or months have been spent honing it. But that’s been one advantage of the five months it took to receive the reviews back; I’ve lost a lot of attachment to the writing.

This week, I thought I’d give you an entire section that we cut from the paper, because I still think it’s valuable, it’s just that it no longer fits in the paper’s current structure. So here’s an excerpt of the paper, lightly edited, on how concepts relate to suffering.

Dependent arising and suffering

Buddhism provides a potent practical methodology for reducing suffering in a doctrine called “dependent arising,” which poses two responses to each moment of awareness (SN 12.3). The first response—what Buddha terms “with-the-grain”—accepts appearances at face value and seeks to alter them. This approach employs linear, causal thinking towards goal-directed actions, dividing a reified self from a reified world. It typically leads to judging this relationship as unsatisfactory, prompting the “self” to seek satisfaction through actions driven by “craving” and “aversion.” The resulting sense of dissatisfaction is traditionally translated as “suffering.” While this default mode is necessary for practical results, when unchecked it leads to anxiety and depression (e.g., A-Tjak et al 2015).

The alternative approach—“against-the-grain”—resists the temptation to act and accepts experience as it is in the moment, while recognising its conditional dependencies. Unlike “with-the-grain,” it doesn’t attempt to create categorical judgements or pursue goals. Instead, it cultivates awareness of how experiences arise and pass away, without immediate reaction. Crucially, it involves investigating the conditions from which concepts like “self” and “world” emerge. This mode requires deliberate training: learning to resist both the impulse toward logical analysis and the urge for immediate action in order to witness how concepts arise. While the full practice involves a nuanced understanding, even simple everyday acts like meditation or mindfully persisting through physical discomfort during exercise are examples of acting “against-the-grain.”

These two modes align with the distinction between concepts and experience: “with-the-grain” corresponds to conceptual reasoning, while “against-the-grain” engages with direct experience before conceptualisation (intuition, in both Kant’s sense and the everyday sense). Critically, the collective experience of meditators across millennia suggests that “against-the-grain” practice can effectively reduce suffering (e.g., Goyal et al 2014).

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Suffering arises, more specifically, when we accept concepts as self-evidently true—particularly the concept of a self divided from the world. From this “self-view” (“I am this,” “This is mine”), opinions arise and proliferate through conceptual chains of reasoning: “This person thinks A is bad, and I am A, therefore this person thinks I am bad.” Buddhism calls this rumination process papança, where “with-the-grain” thinking leads to leaping to conclusions, producing what Ñāṇananda (2012) describes as a “labyrinthine network of concepts... a tangled maze with its apparent objectivity [that] ultimately obsesses and overwhelms.”

Living in proliferation means living amid rigid concepts, suffering when categories clash with experience or are overgeneralized. The conceptual mode suppresses inconsistent information, as in active inference (Seth and Tsakiris 2018). Buddhism offers a solution: returning to the experiential mode, by seeing through the illusion of a fixed conceptual self, then examining patterns of suffering through dependent arising. In active inference, this amounts to revising prior beliefs. In the Diabetes example, learning to separate conceptual calculation from experiential awareness means understanding when to trust the formula versus when to attend to embodied sensations; these are different, and they can’t be entirely collapsed into “both.”

This “against the grain” process examines suffering’s conditions, asking not “What single cause led to this?” but “Without which conditions would this not have arisen?” Where “with-the-grain” seeks control and prediction, “against-the-grain” aims to understand and contextualize. As conceptual categories become less rigid, the craving for certainty diminishes—and with it, suffering. This ancient approach parallels modern therapeutic practices: cognitive-behavioral therapy similarly targets over-generalizations and black-and-white thinking, addressing the conceptual rigidity that amplifies suffering (Cuijpers et al. 2019; Hofmann et al. 2012).

[…]

Although this section didn’t survive our revisions, the Buddhist distinction is central to my thinking. The Pāli terms I’ve translated as “with-the-grain” and “against-the-grain”—anuloma and paṭiloma—literally mean “with the hair” and “against the hair.” This refers to how it feels to stroke an animal’s fur in one direction or the other: one way feels smooth, the other resistant. They name something we all recognise: the difference between reacting automatically, following our habitual inclinations, and pausing to investigate how our experience is actually structured. The latter is uncomfortable, which is why it requires practice. But it’s also where the grip of suffering loosens. If you’re curious about the broader argument, you can read the full paper when it’s published—I’ll share details here once it’s out.

If you liked this piece, please share it, or let me know in the comments!

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Best,

Bryan

For a fuller description of dependent arising…

On 18 April 2025, Isabela Granic and I submitted an academic article. Since then, we have been invited by the journal, Humanities and Social Studies Communications, which is a Nature journal, to revise and resubmit the article. Alongside this rather discouragingly worded invitation — I’m told it’s standard “academese,” and my academic friends had to translate it for me into “good news” — came no fewer than five reviews.

This is unusually high for an academic article, but we have taken it as a sign of interest in our topic.

At the time I was writing about this in April, I thought that they had 50 days to respond to us. While some reviews were received by the end of July, we weren’t able to read any of the reviews until 19 September 2025. Nature wanted us to make the changes suggested by the five reviews by 3 November, though they said the deadline was flexible. We wrote back quite quickly to ask for an extension to the 15 December.

This deadline has required me to temporarily set the main Neither/Nor manuscript aside. As a recap, I wrote 60,000 words between May and July 2025 as a “first draft.” Then I wrote another 30,000 words in July and August, intended to be a “second draft.” Then I began a “third draft” on 1 September 2025. I use quotes because I didn’t effectively build on previous drafts, but instead did rewrites, mostly without looking at the older drafts, so “draft” seems misleading, but I’m not sure what else to call it.

That third draft is now 40,000 words, taking a biographical approach which will cover the lives of people including Charles Darwin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Thomas Kuhn. Only these final 40,000 words are close to what will end up in the book, and even then they will need to be cut down a lot. But I’ve written 130,000 words on the topics which are to be covered in Neither/Nor this year, and the project and its scope are much clearer than they were when I began at the start of May.

Over this next week, I’ll be in Canada to work intensively on the revision of the Nature paper with Isabela. The reviews themselves were encouraging; most seemed to want to see the paper published, and some said so explicitly. But they’ve required me to do a deep dive into pragmatism, and especially into the work of John Dewey. I’m just coming out of reading him, and starting to write about him, with gratitude for the great overlap that Dewey’s work has with mine, and also with a sense of the contours of the differences.

This update is intentionally elliptical, leaving out a substantial amount that has been happening in my life. But I hope it gives some insight into the intellectual work, to which I remain committed. I’m grateful to all of you who have supported me through this period.

All best,

Bryan

I was thrilled recently to speak with a hero of mine, Brook Ziporyn, who is Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago.

In this podcast we cover Ziporyn’s intellectual history, from his grandfather’s Spinozism to the ontological ambiguities of Tiantai Buddhism. We spoke about how values undermine themselves when made explicit, how grammar shapes metaphysics, and what happens when one follows anti-realism all the way through to its surprisingly positive consequences.

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The Thread: Values That Undo Themselves

Professor Ziporyn traced a philosophical thread that runs from the Daodejing’s second chapter—”when all in the world recognizes the good as good, there is the bad”—through Buddhist emptiness to Spinoza’s critique of teleology. This “value paradox” suggests that explicit embrace of values contains an immanent reversal, a self-undermining which challenges the Western philosophical tradition’s foundation in purpose, natural kinds, and the Good.

We look at related insights across traditions, for example:

• Chinese Buddhism’s claim that samsara is nirvana,

• in Schopenhauer’s blind will that has no internal divisions nor any ultimate goal,

• in Nietzsche’s affirmation of life including its suffering,

• and in the Daoist sage who acts through wu-wei (spontaneous action or non-action) rather than purposeful striving.

Grammar as Metaphysics

Our central exploration concerns how language inclines thought, though it doesn’t limit it. Classical Chinese lacks tense, gender, singular/plural distinctions, definite articles, and even clear differentiation between parts of speech—the same word can be beauty, beautiful, or to beautify depending on context. This grammatical openness means that certain metaphysical questions of “Being” simply do not naturally arise. Other philosophical questions, whose appeal is difficult to render into English, do, of course, arise in Chinese — like the paradox “a white horse is not a horse”.

By contrast, Indo-European languages with their subject-predicate structure seem to demand an agent behind every action (Nietzsche’s example: “it rains”—what is the “it” that does the raining?). The law of excluded middle, natural kinds, and teleological thinking may be, as Ziporyn puts it, “downhill” moves in Western languages—statistically more likely to develop because they’re grammatically easier to express. But they are “uphill” for Chinese, meaning that they can be expressed with difficulty. Likewise, Chinese insights into “non-purposive action” can be expressed easily in Classical Chinese, but only with difficulty in Western languages, like Spinoza’s Latin or Schopenhauer’s German.

Ontological Ambiguity and the Emptiness of Emptiness

Ziporyn has written on “ontological ambiguity” in Tiantai Buddhism. Rather than ambiguity being merely epistemological (we don’t know what something is), Tiantai suggests ambiguity is inherent to existence and distinctions. To be determinate requires relations to what something is not—and those relations make any finite thing necessarily ambiguous, appearing differently in different contexts without changing.

This leads to the Buddhist notion of the “emptiness of emptiness.” Rather than a straight line to pure experience beyond concepts, Chinese Buddhist readings suggest the negation of negation brings us back to provisional reality—but transformed. As Ziporyn notes, once you say everything including nirvana is an illusion, the contrast between illusion and reality disappears. “Illusion” no longer functions as a put-down but describes what it means to exist at all.

Neither/Nor as Oscillating Skills

I present my Neither/Nor framework, which treats conceptual and experiential modes not as fixed positions (rationalism vs. empiricism) but as trainable skills that can be developed and oscillated between. Drawing on developmental psychology, particularly Thomas Kuhn’s Last Writings (published 2022), he suggests that the Aristotelian distinction between particular and universal inappropriately conflates two types of non-overlap principles: Particulars come from object impenetrability, whereas universals actually emerge from proprioception and internal bodily states.

The conversation explores how thinkers like Darwin, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein work “against the grain” of dependent arising, deconstructing conceptual systems—but suggests this deconstructive move alone isn’t sufficient. As both speakers note, engaging in conversation, building anything, or taking collective action requires some organizing concepts, even if provisional.

The Methodological Toolkit

I argue for three approaches to problematizing one-eternal-truth claims:

1. Historical/Genealogical: Showing that supposedly eternal categories have specific origins and develop separately (Nietzsche on good and evil)

2. Anthropological: Demonstrating cultural variation in basic concepts (Pascal’s “Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth” which I slightly misquote)

3. Developmental: Revealing how categories emerge from embodied experience rather than being given (Kuhn on how spatial object-tracking gets misapplied to concepts)

While acknowledging these methods can be co-opted (“we just discovered the truth first”), we also explore how they work as “skillful means” (upāya) for different audiences and contexts.

Key Insights

• The value paradox: Making values explicit and universal causes them to undermine themselves

• Grammatical determinism is too strong, but grammar creates “uphill” and “downhill” paths: Some ideas require more work to express in certain languages

• Illusion all the way down isn’t nihilism: When everything including enlightenment is “illusion,” the term loses its negative force

• Categories aren’t discovered but co-created: Through collaborative direction of attention rather than discovery of pre-existing kinds

• The Bodhisattva’s infinite engagement: Rather than ending thought, emptiness multiplies perspectives—learning to think like every type of being

The Philosophical Lineage

We weaves together some surprising resonances:

• The Daodejing and Zhuangzi’s perspectivalism

• Mahayana Buddhism’s two (or three) truths

• Spinoza’s substance monism and critique of teleology

• Schopenhauer’s blind will and Nietzsche’s affirmation

• Hegel’s failed attempt to make concepts non-exclusive

• Contemporary developmental psychology and anthropology

Final Reflection

As Ziporyn notes, following nihilism “all the way through” doesn’t lead to meaninglessness but to proliferating perspectives and a deepening of meaning. Rather than escaping concepts, the challenge is learning to embrace their provisionality. We’re “always walking two roads,” confronting not just others’ perspectives but our own multiplicity across time—what Nietzsche called the “multiplicity of souls” within each person.

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Please share (or like!) this post if you’ve read this far so that I know you’re still with me :)

Brook Ziporyn’s Books

Recent Work

• Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond (2024) - A profound exploration of “atheist mysticism” that argues for a religious rejection of God, drawing on Daoism, Buddhism, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille — with an impressive 546 page online supplementary!

Translations

• Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings (2020) — A comprehensive translation of the entire Zhuangzi

• Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (2009) — A focused translation with traditional commentary

• Daodejing (2022) — A fresh translation of the foundational Daoist text

On Chinese Buddhism

• Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism (2016) — An accessible introduction to Tiantai Buddhist philosophy

• Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (2004) — Philosophical explorations of Tiantai thought

• Ziporyn’s Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Tiantai Buddhism

On Coherence in Chinese Philosophy

• Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (SUNY Press, 2012) — Traces how Chinese thinkers approached coherence, identity, and value

• Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents (SUNY Press, 2013) — Continues the exploration of Li (coherence/principle) through Chinese Buddhist philosophy

• Moretoitivities — Ziporyn’s academic website, named after the Tiantai concept of “moretoitivity” (the quality of always constitutively having more-to-it), serves as an ongoing philosophical laboratory where he continues to develop themes from his published work, posting supplementary materials, responses to readers, and new ruminations on atheist mysticism, Chinese philosophy, and comparative thought.

He’s also done a great “Why This Text Matters” talk on the Daodejing:

Brook Ziporyn is the Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Bryan Kam hosts the Clerestory podcast and is writing Neither/Nor, exploring oscillation between conceptual and experiential modes of knowing.

If you’d like to consider supporting my philosophical work financially, you can do so either here on Substack, or on Patreon.

I’d love to hear your comments!

Leave a comment

Best,

Bryan

Listen to a related podcast

The podcast I released last week with Alex Gheorghiu pairs well with this podcast:

Read my related writing

A Conversation with Alex Gheorghiu

Bryan Kam in conversation with Alexander V. Gheorghiu, assistant professor and a New Frontiers Fellow in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

As you’ll hear in this podcast, my meeting with Alex was random and fortuitous. In this podcast we discuss whether and how mathematics and logic relate to reality, why Buddhist thought challenges Western categories, and what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem might mean for how we understand the world.

From realism to anti-realism

Alex traces his intellectual development from teenage mathematical realism—the belief that mathematics describes the fundamental structure of reality—to his current anti-realist position. Through studying algebra and analysis during his degree, he came to the view that these mathematical tools are cultural constructs rather than discoveries about an objective reality “A model is just a model in the way that a map is never the land itself.”

When Logic Meets Buddhism

Alex is also a Zen practitioner. We explored the famous Zen koan of Master Joshu, to the question of whether a dog has Buddha-nature. He responds “mu”—which neither affirms it nor denies it, but rather rejects the question. This exemplifies a philosophical move that transcends binary thinking, similar to how the Daodejing presents the Dao as preceding both unity and duality. We discuss how Chinese philosophy, lacking the Indo-European grammatical structures that equate existence and predication, developed fundamentally different approaches to how categories work.

Dummett, Meaning, and the Problem of Vixens

Through Michael Dummett’s anti-realist philosophy, we explore how meaning emerges from use rather than correspondence to reality. This challenges millennia of Western philosophical assumptions about categories and definitions. We get into Alex’s example of “Tammy is a vixen.”

From Parmenides to Process Philosophy

The ancient tension between Parmenides (static being) and Heraclitus (dynamic becoming, which I’ve written about here) continues to shape philosophy today. We examine how Plato attempted to reconcile these positions through his theory of forms, and why this synthesis may have taken Western philosophy down a particular path—one that privileges nouns over verbs, objects over processes, and abstract categories over lived experience.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness Question

Eugene Wigner’s famous question—why mathematics works so unusually well in describing nature—dissolves when viewed through an anti-realist lens. If mathematics is a human tool rather than a discovery of reality’s structure, its effectiveness becomes less mysterious and more a reflection of how we’ve shaped our tools to solve our problems.

Incompleteness and black holes

Alex shares his vision for bringing Gödel’s incompleteness theorem into public consciousness the way physics has done with black holes. Having just won the 2025 Graham Hoare Prize for his essay, he argues that this “small technical result” has profound implications for how we understand the limits of formal systems and human knowledge itself.

Key Themes

• Mathematical anti-realism: Mathematics as human construct versus discovered truth

• Cross-cultural philosophy: How grammatical structures shape metaphysical assumptions

• The problem of universals: From medieval debates to modern logic

• Meaning as use: The inferentialist account of language and logic

• Process vs. object ontology: Why “Why is there something rather than nothing?” might be the wrong question

• Buddhist logic: The significance of “mu” and neither/nor thinking

Referenced Thinkers & Concepts

• Michael Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics

• Robert Brandom’s inferentialism

• Wittgenstein’s “meaning as use”

• The Zen koan of Joshu’s dog

• Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction

• Gödel’s incompleteness theorems

• Eugene Wigner on mathematics’ “unreasonable effectiveness”

• Heraclitus vs. Parmenides on being and becoming

Related podcast

This podcast with Alex pairs exceptionally well with another I did the following week, with Brook Ziporyn:

About the Participants

Alex is an assistant professor at the University of Southampton and honorary fellow at University College London, working in logic with interests spanning philosophy of mathematics, theories of language, and the relationships between reasoning and reality. He’s currently developing a mathematical account of Dummett’s philosophy and working to make logic and mathematics accessible to wider audiences.

Bryan Kam hosts the Clerestory podcast and is writing Neither/Nor, exploring how conceptual and experiential ways of knowing can inform both individual flourishing and our approach to philosophical problems.

Recorded at Drake & Morgan, London, where philosophical work happens with “consistently low” productivity but high philosophical engagement.

If you’d like to consider supporting my philosophical work financially, you can do so either here on Substack, or on Patreon.

Bryan

A few exciting announcements today!

Scholarship applications for Liminal Learning

First, I wanted to share something I'm personally involved in that might resonate with you or someone in your network.

I'm a founding member of Liminal Learning, a year-long program designed for 18-25 year olds navigating the transition into purposeful adulthood. We have 5 scholarship places available for our next cohort which starts on October 19th.

Our program follows a unique arc: it begins with a wilderness retreat called a Quest 🏕️, in Elbow Lake, Ontario, continues through an online community Hub 🌐, where participants build relationships and develop skills, and culminates in a creative project which we call a Heist 🎨.

We’ve designed the programme for young people who are:

• Taking a gap year and want something meaningful

• In university but feeling lost or disconnected from their path

• Recent graduates asking “what now?” and seeking direction

• Anyone in that liminal space between adolescence and full adulthood, looking for community and purpose

The program works because it combines wilderness experience, peer community, mentorship, and creative challenge in a way that helps young people discover not just what they want to do, but who they want to become.

As a nonprofit, we're committed to accessibility — 30% of our lifetime places will be scholarships.

Applications close September 8th. Full details here.

If you know someone who might benefit, I'd be grateful if you could share this exciting opportunity with them!

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Mind-blowing documentary: Mother Vera

I also wanted to highlight my friend Cécile Embleton’s *stunning* documentary Mother Vera, which won the prestigious BFI London Film Festival Grierson Award.

In a glowing review, the Guardian calls it “riveting,” a “luminous portrait.” It's a contemplative black-and-white documentary about Vera, a Belarusian Orthodox nun who runs the convent stables and has a remarkable backstory as a former heroin addict. The Guardian notes her “intense, powerful character, speaking with ruthless honesty” as she “invites us in to her inner world.”

If you like Tarkovsky or Bresson, you’ll love it.

UK cinema release is August 29th. And you can see it NOW in London. Links to tickets:

• 📅 NOW! until Mon Sep 2 at the ICA

• 📅 Thu Sep 5 - Hackney Picturehouse, 8:00pm + Q&A with co-directors Cécile Embleton & Alys Tomlinson

• 📅 Thu Sep 5 - DocHouse, Bloomsbury, 6:20pm

• 📅 Tue Sep 10 - Picturehouse Central, Soho, 7:30pm + Q&A with directors

• 📅 Sun Sep 22 - Garden Cinema, 8:30pm + Q&A with Naomi Pallas

Nuns, redemption, heroin, horses… What more could you ask for?

Buddha, Socrates, and Us

This Thursday 4th September I'm co-hosting a salon with Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and the forthcoming Buddha, Socrates, and Us (Yale University Press, 2025). We'll explore how these two transformative figures developed surprisingly similar approaches to living well amid uncertainty — each refusing ultimate truth claims while insisting on critical self-evaluation as the foundation of ethical life.

This connects with my philosophical framework Neither/Nor, which treats conceptual thinking and experiential knowledge as complementary skills that can be deliberately trained and alternated — offering an alternative to the rigid thinking that dominates contemporary discourse, whilst allowing for greater flourishing under conditions of uncertainty.

In this salon, we’ll examine how their methods of inquiry, rooted in humility and productive doubt, can guide us through contemporary crises toward what Batchelor calls a “secular faith” for addressing our spiritual and planetary challenges.

Details and tickets here. It says “sold out,” but I believe you can still buy tickets — if you have any trouble please drop me a line.

My recent podcasts

I was recently featured on the Interintellect Hostcast discussing “Philosophy, Conversation and Uncertainty” — exploring how to host discussions that blend intellectual depth with lived experience, and why uncertainty might be our most important philosophical practice.

And check out The Long Now in East London — my podcast with Christopher Daniel where we walked through East London discussing architecture, philosophy, long-term thinking, and how to create meaningful communities:

If you’d like to consider supporting my philosophical work financially, you can do so either here on Substack, or on Patreon.

Subscribe now

Best,

Bryan

On Thursday 7th August, I walked around Bethnal Green with Christopher Daniel, who organises Long Now London.

We walked through East London, discussing architecture, philosophy, and the importance of long-term thinking. We explored the evolution of our own projects, especially Long Now London and my discussion group, Through a Glass Darkly.

We delved into broader themes like societal change, the impact of technology, and embodied experience versus conceptual abstraction. We wandered the streets, thinking about history, our own personal stories, and how to create meaningful and sustainable communities.

The Bertrand Russell quote I butchered is this:

“Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

Some sights we saw:

We also discussed a few pieces that I’ve written, on Heraclitus and Buddhist dependent arising:

A few other things we mentioned:

• Jamie Stantonian on the Uffington White Horse

• Anab from Superflux whom Chris mentioned a few times.

• I wrongly called one of the Greek schools of medicine "Dogmatist" when I should have said "Rationalist"; Sextus opposes both dogmatism and rationalism. The three schools of medicine in 2nd century AD were "Empirical," "Rationalist," and "Methodist."

Finally, here’s a view of the Uffington White Horse:

Please consider supporting my philosophical work financially, either here on Substack, or on Patreon. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

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Best,

Bryan

Five days a father

On Tuesday morning I became a father. Evangeline Véronique Kam Mazitova arrived just before 10am, and my wife and I have been learning what it means to live in a state of perpetual semi-consciousness punctuated by moments of overwhelming joy.

l’ll have more to say about Eva later, but here I’ll just leave you with the experience of seeing her face.

Asking for help

If you only read one thing from this newsletter: I’m running a family experiment this year, and we would love to have your support. We’re also incredibly grateful to those of you who have given us so much support in the recent past as well as over the years.

In this experiment, the question is whether it’s possible to do serious intellectual work while living a full life with all too human constraints.

As a partial overview, I’m currently writing a book on philosophy, helping to launch a startup, working a full-time job, doing freelance work, hosting events, and — as of Tuesday — my wife and I now have a newborn. We live in London, and we are not quite making ends meet.

That’s the experiment. Can such a life be lived?

If this experiment interests you, consider supporting us on Patreon, and I’ll post updates on how it’s going here on Substack.

I’m trying to live for philosophy, i.e., to arrange my life and the life of my family to support the pursuit of philosophy. This means producing a new philosophy. However, this is difficult, slow, time-consuming work which does not generally pay. As with most creative endeavours, it’s difficult to support.

It is also possible to live by philosophy, for example, by being paid to teach existing philosophy. Schopenhauer observes the opposition between these two strategies in World as Will and Representation, Chapter XVII, “On Man’s Need for Metaphysics.” For Schopenhauer, living by philosophy means receiving payment to teach philosophy sanctioned by the academy, whereas living for philosophy means producing new philosophy outside the academy:

Among the moderns also those who live by philosophy are not only, as a rule and with the rarest exceptions, quite different from those who live for philosophy, but very often they are even the opponents of the latter. Therefore many a great mind has had to drag itself breathlessly through life unrecognized, unhonoured, unrewarded, till finally after his death the world became undeceived as to him and as to them. In the meantime they had attained their end, had been accepted, by not allowing the man with a great mind to be accepted; and, with wife and child, they had lived by philosophy, while that man lived for it. When he is dead, however, matters are reversed; the new generation, and there always is one, now becomes heir to his achievements, trims them down to its own standard, and now lives by him.

In short, the avant-garde philosophers live for philosophy, but die in obscurity and poverty, whereas the next generation profits by their work.

I hope to live for philosophy, to live an active life of the mind, without selling out. And I hope to help the next generation in doing so. This is why I’m asking for your support to try this. I’ve always found it hard to ask for help. But becoming a father has made it a bit easier, since I’m no longer just asking for myself.

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A life in London

But why on earth, you might well ask, would I try to run this experiment in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world?

This is because little has changed since Samuel Johnson wrote, in a letter to James Boswell, 20 September 1777:

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

“Tired of London, tired of life” is a phrase commonly said amongst Londoners. And I do feel that to move to the suburbs would be a disservice to the intellectual work. After eighteen years here, I still find London the most intellectually thrilling place I’ve ever been.

Yesterday, for example, despite having a newborn, I was still able to meet my extremely supportive writing group in Primrose Hill. I think in the suburbs this would be unthinkable. So would working at the British Library, writing at the London Library, and meeting other writers and philosophers for lunch every week.

A list of names

Q: What do Plato, Diogenes, Epicurus, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Kant, Schopenhauer, J.S. Mill, Kierkegaard, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Popper, Adorno, Arendt, Sartre, Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Barthes, Turing, Jaynes, Guattari, Foucault, and Badiou have in common?

A: None of them had children.

Perhaps there’s something about intellectual work that doesn’t mix well with changing nappies at three o’clock in the morning.

Or perhaps trying to raise a child and do rigorous intellectual work is an exercise in superfluity, adding one arduous goal to another, and risking doing neither well.

Or perhaps — and this is what I’m hoping to find out through this experiment — having a child might actually teach me something about the relationship between theory and practice that all these childless geniuses missed.

Part of the experiment is seeking to establish what childlessness misses. Having no children has obvious advantages in terms of time and sustained attention to intellectual work. But I’m asking the opposite: what are the disadvantages of such an approach? For one, it misses the developmental aspect of philosophy. How does a young mind come to know?

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Interintellect Hostcast

The same day my wife went into labour, I recorded a podcast with João Mateus for Interintellect’s Hostcast series. You can listen to it here.

We talked about my upcoming salon with Stephen Batchelor on The Buddha, Socrates and Us, my Neither/Nor book, and how hosting salons connects to my broader philosophical interests in bridging abstract thinking and embodied experience. (You can get tickets for this online salon at the Interintellect.)

Listen on Spotify

You might expect that now, five days into fatherhood, I would discover that everything I thought I knew about the relationship between theory and practice has been overturned. Instead, I feel that my work on Neither/Nor, which emphasises embracing uncertainty and alternating between embodiment and intellectual activity, has actually been a great preparation for what’s going on before my eyes.

For her part, Eva has only just begun opening her eyes. On her first day she could seemingly only flutter them occasionally. On the third day she could keep her lids open for longer, but her eyes tended to roll back; she did not seem able to keep them staring straight ahead. Today was the first time she looked straight at me for an extended period (though she still seems very unfocused). During that time I sang her four or five songs — she loves “Annie’s Song,” a John Denver song which my mother sang to me, which always made me cry as a child — and she just stared in the direction of my face. This evening, she’s started to track faces a little more. Now, when two faces are in her field of vision, she flicks back and forth between them with a slightly bewildered interest.

My wife doesn’t particularly like my singing, but it calms Eva so immediately and dramatically that it’s comical. The only more potent drug for her is breastfeeding, which can bring her from a panicked shriek to profound tranquility in a fraction of a second.

Confirmation bias

From my interactions with her so far, Eva seems to have what I’m calling proto-conceptual perception. She can reliably differentiate between comfort and discomfort, between our presence and absence, but this does not seem to involve concepts. She knows when we leave the room even though she can’t really see us yet, responding to smell and sound more than sight. It seems to contain some of the seeds of later abstract thought. And each set of categories has grey areas between them. This lines up with the explanation that Thomas Kuhn gives in his Last Writings, arguing that concepts arise not out of the grouping of objects in the world, but out of the need to differentiate feeling states.

The most surprising thing is how much we have to figure out socially, to figure out together. She doesn’t know what she needs — she doesn’t have a concept of “breast,” but when it is present, she calms. She certainly shows gratitude, and seems “blissed out” after feeding, but she has yet to display any of the “envy” aspect that I wrote about here:

For the most part we don’t know what she needs either, at least not instinctively. It’s basically all trial-and-error, an intersubjective social discovery process of co-regulation, finding out what feels better and what doesn’t. Sometimes midwives or other parents give us tips. But what works for them has also been ascertained by trial-and-error, only over longer periods. There is no handbook.

That it isn’t instinctive is shown by how much childrearing advice varies across cultures and over just a few decades within a single culture. (Tonight we watched Bergman’s 1958 Brink of Life, which I would highly recommend not watching to anyone who is expecting — but it’s a good example of how much has changed in how pregnancies are handled.)

Eva’s crying isn’t intentional in any meaningful sense, just a direct response to how she feels, which I don’t think she understands. And yet it’s functionally perfect — her pitch evolved over generations to be exactly the right frequency to command our attention. How can something be functionally perfect but without a purpose? I would argue that Darwin provides a great answer to this question, and it’s one of the central themes of Neither/Nor.

Even something as simple as nappy discomfort shows how non-categorical and non-purposive early human life is — and how quickly it comes to seem categorical. At three days old, she now has the category of “wet nappy.” But this category cannot be basic, because nappies aren’t basic. Modern disposable ones are from 1947, and infants seem to have been swaddled back to at least 4000 BC. But in hotter climes and ancient times, before fabrics existed, parents read an infants’ cues directly, intuitively timing waste elimination to occur in an appropriate place, a practice called elimination communication. The cue is more basic than the nappy, but we mistake the nappy for being basic. The nappy is the effect of a cultural process, not a natural one — though because of its link to a natural process, it has the illusion of seeming basic. If it seems obvious that this kind of discomfort is basic, I will note that Althusser argues — and I agree — that obviousness itself is a sign of ideological thinking.

Eva and I are both part of an ecological system that neither of us controls, where patterns emerge through our mutual attunement rather than through individual agency on either of our parts. This challenges so much of what Western philosophy assumes about knowledge, intentionality, and the primacy of abstract reasoning. Her total dependency isn’t a deficiency, but deeply related to the fundamentally human capacity for behavioral flexibility and social coordination that makes human learning possible. Other animals have stronger instincts from a younger age, but these prove less flexible in the long run. Her helplessness, in other words, is related to her ability to learn.

The ratio of labour to joy can sometimes feel, as other fathers had warned me, rather high. There’s a lot of practical work involved in keeping a tiny human alive and comfortable. But at the same time it’s neither overwhelming nor drudgery. It’s all somehow fascinating and often quite funny, and not as hard as people had warned us, even on an hour and a half of sleep. When Eva settles into my chest while I’m singing, or opens her eyes and briefly appears to see me for a moment, so much of Western philosophy seems utterly beside the point — and my own philosophical work seems somehow more urgent than ever. (I’m happy to report I’m still, on average, writing just over 1,000 words per day on Neither/Nor.)

The experiment continues

This is an honest account of what it’s like to think and write while strapped for time, financially uncertain, and sleeping between one and five hours per night. If you want to support this experiment in doing philosophy while living a life with real constraints, contributions to Patreon would be especially welcome right now. We get a few hundred pounds per month from supporters, which is incredible. But with a newborn and the economic realities of freelance intellectual work, we’re still not covering our costs.

If you’re in North London and feel like dropping off a meal, we’ve also got a meal-train going while Zarina recovers from her caesarian. Please email me if you’d like to participate. Thank you so much to Noah for starting off this meal train, and to Pen and Jess who have contributed. Each of the three cooked and delivered food to us, which made our first week easier to handle and made us feel the love.

For now, though, I’m just grateful to be in this liminal space, in this strange exhaustion and wonder. As my friend Mike told me, “I expected it to be not that much work, and that I wouldn’t like doing it. Instead it’s a ton of work, and I absolutely love it.” As I think my friend Maggie told me, everyone warns you about the difficulties, but nobody tells you about the love and the magical high of having created a living being.

I thank the childless philosophers for pursuing intellectual work above all else. I share with them an overriding obsession to make sense of it all. But I also suspect they missed something crucial about how knowledge actually works, why we need it in the first place, how concepts actually form, and how thinking actually emerges from the irreducibly social, embodied, contingent business of being human.

• Please consider supporting my philosophical work financially, either here on Substack, or on Patreon.

• You can listen to the podcast with João here.

• The salon with Stephen Batchelor happens September 4th at 3pm GMT; tickets here.

• If it’s easier for you, please support us on Substack:

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From a Lake in Sweden

I spent a week recently at Emerge Lakefront for the Planet Health conference — a gathering that self-organized around three distinct but overlapping streams of work: Wisdom Infrastructure, Network Nations, and Symbients. Because it was so wide-ranging, I’ll just try to give you a taste of what each of those meant.

Wisdom Infrastructure drew some incredible people who are reimagining education and knowledge transmission over generations and centuries. This stream was nearest to what we’re building with Liminal Learning: spaces where ancient philosophy meets embodied practice, rather than remaining in abstract propositional claims. In Liminal Learning, we aim to cultivate a tolerance for uncertainty, working in small groups to establish what matters to us and navigate possibilities together — rather than imposing top-down prescriptions about “the right way” to think. This fit well into the broader group’s question: What if education focused more on wisdom rather than propositional knowledge or productivity?

Network Nations brought together ecological activists, policy makers, healthcare professionals, and systems thinkers working on sovereignty beyond physical territories and traditional nation-states. These folks are experimenting with geographically distributed communities that coordinate through digital and physical nodes, bound not by shared borders, but by shared practices and voluntary participation. This could include online mutual aid networks, healthcare cooperatives that span continents, or new ways of organizing. They seek to create legitimate governance through active participation rather than the lottery of inherited citizenship.

Symbients explored the strange territory ahead. The term “symbient” designates entities that emerge from symbiotic interactions between organic and synthetic intelligences — not humans using AI as a tool, nor AI enslaving humans, but integrated systems where both maintain autonomy while creating something with emergent properties and agency beyond either form of intelligence on its own. See, for example, Upward Spiral (a project exploring two-way human-AI alignment). This group is working on questions about consciousness, agency, and identity when human and machine cognition interweave. This stream ventured furthest into speculation about what kinds of beings we’re becoming.

My Neither/Nor work also aligned most naturally with the Wisdom Infrastructure track, though the boundaries between the three streams proved wonderfully porous. There was a feeling of hopeful and exciting cross-disciplinary collaboration. What struck me most was that the participants seemed to be thriving on an emotional level, were on intense spiritual journeys, possessed real academic intelligence, and were builders.

This combination felt rare — builders often lack wisdom, wisdom practitioners rarely build, and academic intelligence doesn't always connect with emotional intelligence or action in the world. The beautiful natural setting and access to woods didn’t hurt either.

77,000 Words Deep

Meanwhile, I maintained my daily writing practice on Neither/Nor — 1,000 words a day for 70 days now, missing only one or two. The first draft reached 60,000 words in 53 days; I'm now 17 days into the second. This discipline of daily philosophical work grounds everything else I do. You can read more about my morning routine here.

To a stage in Texas

My colleagues at Liminal Learning — Catherine Woodiwiss and Isabela Granic — have pitched panels for SXSW 2025. Our workshop "From Worry to Wonder: Youth Practices for a World in Flux” offers evidence-based practices to help young people transform anxiety into creative action through three components:

• The Quest, which allows young people to disconnect from their daily patterns, and connect with themselves and others.

• The Hub, which is a yearlong weekly online program which attunes to the needs and interests of the young people.

• Heists, as in a heist film, in which the young people assemble a team with different skills to deliver a timebound creative project.

Southwest Request

Liminal Learning needs your votes to bring these conversations about navigating uncertainty stateside. If you have a few minutes:

1. Quick signup here

2. Go to this link, and click the ❤️

3. Then go to this one too, and click the ❤️

A tease against telos

Soon I’ll start a series on teleology — the notion that things have inherent purposes or goals. This is a long-running thread which is central to my work, Neither/Nor. I generally oppose teleological explanations for non-human phenomena.

In 2022, I came across a remarkable section of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, volume II (1844). In it, Schopenhauer lists three great thinkers who opposed teleology (which he, along with his hero Kant, supports). From Chapter XXVI:

Three great men have entirely rejected teleology or the explanation from final causes; and many small men have echoed them. These are Lucretius, Bacon, and Spinoza. In the case of all three we know clearly enough the source of this aversion, namely that they regarded teleology as inseparable from speculative theology.

I love Schopenhauer, but on this central issue we part ways. He thought purposiveness in nature too obvious to ignore — that only an allergy to anything theological could blind one to purpose. Yet his diagnosis of why these thinkers rejected teleology captures precisely why I reject it too. I think “obviousness” is normally a sign of unexamined biases, a view I first found articulated in Althusser. On the issue of telos, Nietzsche, too, reacted against Kant’s view of teleology in nature, in an unfinished thesis called “On the Concept of the Organic Since Kant” (1868), which he wrote when he was only 24.

A tease about London architecture

Last week I recorded a podcast with Christopher Daniel, who has been hosting the now long-running Long Now London meet-up — since 2018, in fact, which was the same year I started my discussion group, Through a Glass Darkly. He is also an architect, so we got to speak about the architecture of East London, a side of Chris which I’d not experienced before. We explored how London's intellectual landscape has shifted over the past seven years, and what architecture (literal and metaphorical) supports long-term thinking. Stay tuned here on Substack or subscribe to the Clerestory podcast.

Interintellect tease

Today I recorded a podcast with João Mateus on the Interintellect Hostcast, about my upcoming salon with Stephen Batchelor (see below). Stay tuned on their feed to listen!

The Buddha and Socrates

I’ll be hosting a conversation with Stephen Batchelor to explore his new book, The Buddha, Socrates, and Us. The book examines parallels between Buddhist and Greek philosophical approaches to uncertainty. Both traditions developed what he calls “healthy scepticism” — not a nihilistic denial, but an active and humble questioning that opens possibility rather than closing it.

Click here for tickets!

From Swedish lakes to Greek skeptics, I'm tracking the many ways we might remake our relationship to knowledge and community. Please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!

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Bryan

Good news!

As regular readers will know, I submitted my first academic paper in April of this year.

As of yesterday, Springer Nature confirmed that the paper has gone to peer review — and so far, six reviewers have agreed to review it! This is huge for me, although I’m a bit nervous about the review process, which I understand can be challenging. Still, this is cause for celebration.

A Talk on Concepts and Perception

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Philosophy for All (on 7 July 2025).

Philosophy for All does a wonderful monthly meeting — hybrid in London and on Zoom — called Kant's Cave, and Anja Steinbauer invited me to give the July talk. I chose to speak about one aspect of the aforementioned article. I focused on the ancient Indo-European divide between conceptual thinking and embodied perception. I spoke for 51 minutes before taking questions, and you can watch it at the top of this very post.

The Setup

Imagine this: I ask you, “What is virtue?” You start to think of definitions, to categorise, to relate concepts to one other.

Now contrast those operations with taking three deep breaths, feeling the air move in and out of your body, attending to the sensation.

That’s the difference I’m writing about — between abstract reasoning and embodied experience — and it’s what I explored in this talk. It’s a divide that goes back to ancient Greece and India, shaped Western philosophy for millennia, and still affects how we navigate everything from cooking dinner to workplace KPIs.

A Personal Entry Point

I came to this topic through lived experience. As someone who's mixed race, I constantly encountered the logical “law of the excluded middle” — you're either Asian or you're not, with no third option allowed. But experience tells a different story.

Similarly, managing Type 1 diabetes requires constant oscillation between abstract calculation and embodied awareness. I have to calculate carbohydrates and insulin units to hit target blood sugar levels, but I also need to stay attuned to how I actually feel. If I get the calculation wrong, the consequences are immediate and physical — I could lose consciousness during a talk like this.

The Philosophical Journey

The talk traces this tension from Parmenides vs. Heraclitus through Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s substances, medieval scholasticism, and into the rationalist/empiricist debates of the early modern period. But rather than just rehearsing intellectual history, I wanted to show how these seemingly abstract debates shape our daily experience.

The Buddhist Alternative

One of the most striking contrasts I explored was between Plato’s approach and early Buddhism. Where Plato saw ultimate reality as conceptual (the Forms), Buddhism suggests the opposite — that concepts are useful organizing tools, but ultimate reality is known through direct, non-conceptual experience.

The breathing exercise in the middle of the talk was a way to illustrate and experience this different mode of knowing.

Why This Matters Now

I personally am drawn to philosophy that connects with lived experience. I think this division practically matters in how we think and how we act. Whether we're setting workplace targets, following recipes, or trying to understand complex social problems, we’re constantly navigating between abstract frameworks and embodied experience.

My suggestion is that rather than choosing sides in this ancient debate, we can treat conceptual and perceptual skills as trainable capacities — like cardiovascular fitness and strength training. Both are always involved in everything we do, but they can be developed separately and integrated more skilfully.

The Recording

My friend Cécile Embleton brought her camera to capture this, which is how we ended up with actual video rather than just my usual audio recorder setup. The result gives you a front-row seat to see not just what I said — though I have to admit I’m a bit nervous about appearing in such high definition!

I'd love to hear your thoughts if you watch it — especially if you've found yourself caught between abstract thinking and direct experience in your own work or life.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this talk, please share it with someone! Please also consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi.

Thanks for being part of this exploration.

Bryan

This talk builds on themes I've explored before in “Thinking and Sensing.” I also developed ideas from the talk further in recent posts, specifically “When Philosophers Panic” and “Rationalism and Empiricism”:

The Second Peloponnesian War was a long conflict between Athens and its empire, lasting from 431 to 404 BCE, when the Spartans decisively defeated the Athenians. In 404 BCE, Lysander led the Spartan and Peloponnesian League to destroy the city of Athens. The Athenians had no navy to defend them, and the Spartans cut off food supplies. Many Athenians starved. The Spartans decided not to destroy Athens, instead installing Thirty Tyrants, whose brutality was widely reviled. They tried and executed many Athenians.

Plato (428–348 BCE) was a young man during this period, and he writes about it in his Seventh Letter.1 He was initially hopeful about this period, but his hope quickly turned to disgust at the brutality of the Thirty Tyrants. He suffered further trauma when the restored democracy — the very regime which overthrew the tyrants — charged Socrates (470–399 BCE) with impiety in 399 BCE, leading to his execution. Plato regards this with bitter irony: Socrates, who had courageously refused to participate in the Tyrants’ illegal arrest of Leon of Salamis, was now being killed by the democracy he had protected through his moral stand. Some scholars argue that this period of political upheaval and personal loss drove Plato away from Heraclitean flux and toward Socratism. I consider Socratism to be a form of rationalism. Rationalism intellectualizes, which can appear, through manipulation of concepts, to provide a refuge from experiential turmoil and chaos.

During the same period, the Spartans led a major campaign into Thrace. The city of Abdera, in Thrace, fought on the side of Athens. During that period, one philosopher in Abdera, Democritus (~460–370 BCE), began promoting an early version of scientific materialism: “Reality is made of atoms and the void.” This later became a popular view within Athens itself, brought in by an outsider to Athens by the name of Epicurus (341–270 BCE). It gave a reductionist and non-teleological account of how change occurs, which (through Lucretius) may have affected Darwin’s views millennia later. I consider Epicureanism to be a form of materialist empiricism, and even though it is not empirical in the modern sense, we shall see how Democritus influenced the “father of empiricism,” Francis Bacon.

So one period of brutal instability produced two opposite responses. On the one hand, there’s the retreat to maximally abstract rational inquiry, what I call rationalism, in works like Plato’s Phaedrus and Phaedo. On the other, there’s a retreat into maximally concrete reductionism, what you might call proto-empiricism, in the thought of people like Epicurus.

One war led to an intensification, I argue, of both rationalism and empiricism.

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A Collapse of Catholicism

This same dynamic would repeat itself nearly two millennia later, in Western Europe.

In 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546) published his Ninety-five Theses, decrying the abuses and corruption of the Catholic Church. Luther believed that if people were able to read Biblical texts themselves, they would come to a new consensus around what the scriptures meant. He hoped that this would flush out Catholic corruption and lead to a deeper connection with the spirit of the Gospel. Instead, it undermined church authority, leading to a free-for-all of interpretation. This gave rise to the incredibly brutal Wars of Religion. One century later, in 1618, the Thirty Years War began. This was one of the deadliest conflicts in European History, which may have killed as many as 8 million people, wiping out up to 50% of the population of parts of Germany.

René Descartes (1596–1650) fought in this war as a gentleman volunteer in the army of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. He witnessed brutal sacks of cities and religious massacres first-hand. His famous “method of doubt” allegedly came to him in a “stove-heated room” during winter quarters in Germany in November 1619. When all authorities were suspect, and people were killing each other over competing truth claims, Descartes explicitly sought something which could survive “the most extreme doubt.” His geometric method offered escape from the chaos of religious conflict into the mathematical certainty of “clear and distinct ideas.” Descartes has been called the “father of rationalism.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) also had an extreme response, but in the opposite direction. Having witnessed the same collapse of scholastic authority and the bloody consequences of competing interpretations, he sought refuge not in abstract and indubitable reason, but in what he called “the true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty.” His Novum Organum (1620) proposed systematic observation and experimentation. Where Descartes fled from the senses into mathematical certainty, Bacon embraced sensory experience as the only trustworthy foundation, arguing that we must “dissect nature” through careful observation and experiment:

The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better to dissect than abstract nature: such was the method employed by the school of Democritus, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest.

Novum Organum, Book I, LI

John Locke (1632–1704), who had fled to Holland during political upheaval, extended this empiricist response by arguing that all knowledge must be built up gradually from sensory experience rather than from metaphysics. Later, David Hume (1711–1776) would push this retreat from abstraction to an extreme — Hume’s “problem of induction” went so far as to famously doubt whether gunpowder will explode in the present, just because it’s exploded in the past.

Once again, crisis drove philosophers to opposite extremes. Descartes pushed towards a vertiginous doubt of the senses, and disavowal of the body, leading to maximal abstraction and the mind-body dualism which is named for him — Cartesian doubt and Cartesian dualism. It also led to geometric abstraction (Cartesian coordinates as opposed to Euclid’s embodied measurements). On the other hand, it pushed Francis Bacon towards an intense observation of nature, which would lead to the scientific method.

The Death of God

The pattern recurred again at the start of the 20th century.

By the end of the 19th century, European confidence was crumbling, facing threats on all sides. Marx had argued that capitalist overproduction would lead capitalism itself to implode. Darwin had shown that men were apes. Nietzsche had declared that God was dead — and we had killed him. Colonial encounters revealed the diversity of human thought systems, challenging assumptions about universal reason. Durkheim’s sociology implied that Kant’s basic account of experience might be culturally contingent rather than a universal feature of the mind. The rise of socialism, communism, and anarchism threatened not just political but intellectual authority. Nascent nation states were destroying ancient ways of being, and homogenising populations, while new racial theories were leading to ethnic cleansing, forced relocation, and genocide.

Then came the Great War. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) served as a soldier on the Russian front, was captured, and wrote the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus partly while fighting on the Western Front. His early work sought to map the logical structure of reality itself — to show the limits of what could be meaningfully said, in maximum abstraction. “The world is all that is the case,” it simply and cryptically begins. Bertrand Russell, an outspoken pacificist, collaborated with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) on the Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), attempting to ground all of mathematics in pure logic. David Hilbert (1862–1943) proposed his formalist program, seeking to prove the consistency of mathematics through purely mechanical procedures. All of these approaches sought certainty in rationalism.

On the other side, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle — Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and others — developed their own foundationalist response. Rather than fleeing into pure logic, they retreated into logical empiricism, arguing that meaningful statements must be verifiable through sensory experience. They attempted to eliminate all interpretation, in favour of a neutral observation language, going so far as to claim that any statement which could not be empirically verified was “meaningless.” Like their empiricist predecessors, they sought to rebuild knowledge on the secure foundation of observation, using the tools of formal logic to eliminate metaphysical confusion.

Once more, crisis produced the same flight to the extremes: pure rational abstraction and pure empirical concreteness.

This pattern — crisis driving philosophers toward opposite extremes of rationalism and empiricism — reveals something fundamental about how we respond to uncertainty.

But to understand this pattern, we need to examine more closely what I mean by calling figures like Socrates, Descartes, and the early Wittgenstein ‘rationalists.’

Rationalism Q&A

Given this recurring pattern, some questions emerge.

Are you sure Socrates is a rationalist? Doesn’t he claim that it is the perceptual world that is intelligible?

Yes, and it is precisely this intelligibility, and the conceptual presuppositions it entails, which I regard as rationalist. Intelligibility means intelligible to reason. Add to this Socrates’ elevation of the role of the intellect (noos) and his strong disregard for the senses and the body, and I think he can fairly be called a rationalist. Above all, he persistently presupposes that all words have a core meaning — a fixed, universal essence that can be discovered through specifically rational inquiry. Whether through elenchus (cross-examination) or “collection and division,” methods whose issues I’ve written about here, Socrates believed he could get to core meanings and answer questions like “What are the virtues?” or “What is love?” through purely rational analysis.

But isn’t the point of the dialogues aporia which undermines simple categories?

I would say, “No.”

Even when Platonic aporia (“puzzlement”) reveals the inadequacy of particular attempts at definition, the method never questions its own fundamental metaphysical assumptions. For instance, it requires that concepts must be internally coherent without reference to experience. Socrates consistently dismisses his interlocutors' references to specific cases — when Meno offers examples of different virtues, or when Euthyphro cites particular pious acts, Socrates insists these miss the point entirely. He wants to know what virtue itself is, what piety itself is, as if these were mind-independent realities awaiting discovery rather than concepts emerging from social practice and metaphors to experience. Socrates regards concepts as mind-independent realities. Even when aporia results, he seems to think of this as a failure to find “the truth” in one particular instance — whereas I will argue that such failures indicate that Plato has fatally misunderstood what concepts are and where they come from.

Understanding Socrates' rationalist assumptions helps explain why this pattern keeps recurring. When faced with chaos, thinkers retreat to what seems most certain — either clean concepts or the “uninterpreted” material facts — rather than questioning whether certainty itself might be a problem.

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And if you got this far… Please ♡ this post so that I know you read it! ❤️

Bryan

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be at the Realisation Festival, a philosophy festival at St Giles House, Dorset. The weather was wonderful and the food was amazing. The keynote speakers (Sarah Wilson and Sharon Stein) were provocative, insightful, and passionate, though the tenor of their talks was funereal, about collapse and crisis.

This reminded me of earlier periods of uncertainty, and over the next few weeks I’ll try to show that social uncertainty can lead to embracing extreme generality (what I’ll call rationalism) and embracing extreme particularity (what I’ll call empiricism). Both extremes attempt to build a foundation for knowledge, and therefore are associated with the term foundationalism (usually referring to the early twentieth century).

It is fitting, then, that John Locke, one of the most important figures in British Empiricism, lived in the very house where the festival was held from 1666 to 1688, the period leading up to the publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

By far the best part of the festival was the conversations after the talks. Several of the people at the festival had read the Neither/Nor paper I spoke about last week, and had helpful comments and questions. Because there were one hundred and fifty brilliant attendees, I had the chance to describe my work in many different ways. Each time someone asked “What's your book about?” I experimented with new explanations, to see what resonated.

So what is your book about?

Over the past few years, I’ve played with many ways of describing my philosophy, Neither/Nor.

When asked “What is your book about?” I have often said: “It’s about two ways of knowing. The first is knowing through language, mathematics, abstraction. The second is knowing through the senses, embodied experience, or intuition.”

Today I’ll try another approach, which in my view is closely related:

“It’s about why debates between rationalism and empiricism recur in periods of uncertainty.”

Rationalism and Empiricism

First, what are rationalism and empiricism?

When the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” are used together and unqualified, most people will think of the Early Modern Period, in seventeenth and eighteenth century European philosophy. This framing pits people like Descartes and Leibniz (rationalists) against Bacon, Locke and Hume (empiricists).

The question underlying these debates is this: “What is the source of knowledge?” The rationalists appeal to abstraction and the use of reason, which involves thinking. Just think of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The empiricists appeal to facts and the use of observation, which involves investigation. Here’s Francis Bacon, on the empiricist side:

There are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from them, as principles and their supposed indisputable truth, derives and discovers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.

— Novum Organum (1620), Aphorisms Book I, XIX

Philosophical Extremism

I want to argue that rationalism and empiricism are extreme positions, and that they come with a host of auxiliary assumptions. So why do these extreme positions arise?

I’ll argue that when the foundational certainty of a society is shaken, a strong urge towards foundationalism arises. Foundationalism is usually associated with the early 20th century, and included projects which sought to ground knowledge in incontrovertible truths, to find certainty by beginning with that which cannot be doubted, then building on top of such a “foundation.”

Most of philosophy education describes such positions as arising out of a “will to truth.” But I am arguing that it is actual sociological uncertainty which drives philosophical responses. Once uncertainty passes a certain threshold, philosophers will flee to opposite extremes. When the center cannot hold, thinkers seek psychological refuge in positions that promise absolute certainty.

The rationalists attempt to flee sensory uncertainty through retreat into pure abstraction — universal laws, pure reason, mathematical certainty, or eternal truths. They seek to transcend the messy particulars of the senses ("all is not as it seems") in favor of timeless generalizations.

The empiricists attempt to flee interpretative uncertainty through retreat into pure concreteness — bare facts, rigid methods, observational data. They attempt to avoid interpretation ("just stick to the facts") and to ground knowledge directly in observation.

Both responses promise escape from uncertainty, but both result from philosophical panic — and both will fail as a result of their extremity.

In Neither/Nor terms, one extreme reifies concepts into eternal systems, while the other dissolves everything into contingent perceptions.

Next week, I’ll tell three short stories, which capture these two extremes arising three times in European philosophical history: In Ancient Athens (404-320 BC), in Early Modern Europe (17th–18th Centuries), and at the start of the 20th Century, around WWI.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with someone! Please also consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi.

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Best,

Bryan

Haven’t we heard this one before?

Maybe! See if you can find a common thread through these three posts:

In this podcast, I discuss the draft of the academic paper on Neither/Nor which I wrote about here, with my coauthor, developmental psychologist Dr. Isabela Granic.

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This paper has been a lot of work, and we discussed the writing right after finishing a major draft. In the paper and in our discussion, we emphasise the six principles of Neither/Nor. The article currently has an editor at Nature assessing the submission.

The Six Principles of Neither/Nor

1. Two Modes of Knowing: The first principle identifies the two distinct ways we learn about life — through concepts and experiences. These modes are complementary, and we consider them trainable skills. Neither should be privileged over the other.

2. Commitment to Oscillation: Rather than selecting a definitive standpoint, we advocate for a dynamic process of oscillating between the conceptual and experiential skills, allowing us to adapt to the strengths of each mode.

3. Process Over Static Entities: Our understanding should prioritise processes rather than fixed entities, recognising the ever-changing nature of knowledge as it evolves through interaction with the living world. Categories are useful, but we can’t allow them to become too static.

4. Trial and Error Learning: Engage with the world through continuous experimentation, using trial and error to iteratively refine our understanding and approach — this is at the heart, for us, of adaptive learning.

5. Social Construction of Knowledge: A recognition that all knowledge is inherently social. Our reason for wanting to know is always social. Knowledge itself is always culturally embedded. This is empowering, and allows to contextual flexibility, not relativism — some ways are more effective than others.

6. Historicity: Understanding that knowledge and its acquisition grow from historical context gives us a holistic understanding of how changes occur in personal, cultural, and scientific pursuits.

Would you like to read it?

If so, you can request a copy of the pre-print here.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed the conversation, please share it with someone! Please also consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi.

Best,

Bryan

It has been beautiful, but it wasn’t easy getting here. On Thursday I had a long day which started at 5am, and I arrived at the venue at 8:30pm. This involved an early flight from London, a series of sudden changes of plan in Rome, and a very sweaty trek across the city. Some new friends, other guests of the wedding, were kind enough to give me a ride to the venue, saving me an expensive and exhausting train and cab ride.

The ceremony was yesterday. It was wonderful. There were a mix of Jewish, Buddhist, and Yoga rituals. And the vows were heartbreakingly beautiful.

But it was also sweltering. A few hours later, after dancing, cake, and fireworks, people were jumping into the pool, some in dresses and the men in their boxers. “Absolutely not,” a new friend said, and I agreed. But after the few dozen people in the pool chanted his name for about ten seconds he began to strip, and when they chanted mine I did the same. It felt amazing.

I feel grateful to be here, and grateful today to be relaxing. I’ve had some great conversations about Neither/Nor with some amazing people from different walks of life — a founder, a therapist, a biologist, an economist, and more.

I’ve kept up the 1,000 words per day that I wrote about last week, and a mildly truncated version of my morning pages. I’m reading Thought and Language (published 1962), a colletion of Lev Vygotsky’s writings on the topic. It’s a mindblowing book, about which I’ll write more later.

But today I thought I’d at least post to say hello today, so as not to remain entirely silent.

It also seems to me that the rudest word, the rudest letter are still more benign, more decent than silence. Those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and courtesy of the heart. Silence is an objection; swallowing things leads of necessity to a bad character — it even upsets the stomach. All who remain silent are dyspeptic.

Nietzsche, The Dawn (1881)

If you’re looking for more substantial reading, here are a few from the archive that you may have missed. The first is on the Taoist concept of spontaneous action. The second is on the relationship between naming and desire. And the third is about whether opposites really exist in the Platonic sense, summarizing Nietzsche’s systematic attack on the dichotomy of “good and evil.”

All best,

Bryan

Last night I returned from the south of France, or more specifically a medieval town called Goult in Vaucluse, Provence, near Avignon and Marseille. Since 2021, I’ve been there every year with Bloom, but this time I was just there to write for a week. It is beautiful, and yet I found myself too absorbed in my writing to do much walking or enjoying the outdoors.

Nietzsche liked to walk and hike and write in the South of France, near Èze, which is closer to another beautiful place I’ve been in other years, Villefranche-sur-Mer. The tourist page on the Nietzsche trail reports that “in 1883, the writer, plunged into a period of self-doubt, found the Côte d'Azur an unexpected source of inspiration.”

But in 1882 he had published this, which suggests that perhaps he had intended to find such inspiration in movement.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science §366 (1882; trans. Josefine Nauckhoff):

Faced with a scholarly book. — We are not among those who have ideas only between books, stimulated by books — our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or right by the sea where even the paths become thoughtful. Our first question about the value of a book, a person, or a piece of music is: ‘Can they walk?’ Even more, ‘Can they dance?’ We rarely read; but are none the worse on that account — and oh, how quickly we guess how someone has come to his ideas; whether seated before the inkwell, stomach clenched, head bowed over the paper; and oh, how soon we’re done with his book! Cramped intestines betray themselves — you can bet on it — no less than stuffy air, closed ceilings, cramped spaces. — Those were my feelings just now as I closed a decent, scholarly book — grateful, very grateful, but also relieved ... In a scholar’s book there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the ‘specialist’ emerges somehow — his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback — every specialist has his hump.

I’ve always wondered how he wrote while hiking in the Alps or traipsing in the Côte d'Azur. Did he use a notebook or paper? How big was it? Did he bring any surface to write on? Where did he sit? Or did he somehow write standing? What were pens like in the 1880s? With whom was he dancing?

Others have written books on this; there’s A Philosophy of Walking by Gros and Howe, and Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag. But I’m weak on secondary sources — perhaps an unfair resistance to scholarly books.1 Still, I find myself curious how he managed it. And I’m going more into biography, so I may need to face some scholarly books in the near future.

Here’s Nietzsche again, six years later in Ecce Homo (1888; trans. Judith Norman):

Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not conceived while moving around outside, — with your muscles in a celebratory mode as well. All prejudices come from the intestines. — Sitting down — I have said it before — is a true sin against the Holy Spirit. —

I wish I could report traipsing and hiking and dancing, but instead I mostly typed at my replacement laptop, at a desk.

As I flew back from France, I read a beautiful Karl Ove Knausgaard piece on alienation and computing: “The Reenchanted World” (June 2025). First, it’s very Neither/Nor:

It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.

The feeling is one of loss of the world.

But also, he reports a similarly disembodied relationship between writing and nature:

I could, of course, turn my back on it all and move out to the countryside, into the woods, up into the mountains, or out to the sea, and live a healthy life as a machineless Luddite, close to nature. I had sometimes left everything, lived on distant, small islands out at sea, in cabins in the woods and in the mountains, not to get closer to nature, admittedly, but to write, and for no more than a few months at a time. These months were marked by a lack, a constant desire for something that wasn’t there, something that what was there couldn’t fulfill, neither the sea nor the woods nor the mountains. We are connected to one another, we who live now, we who, if fate would have it, pass one another on the street one day or not, we who sit next to one another at a bus station one evening or not. We have lived through the same times, heard the same stories, seen the same news, thought along the same lines, had the same experiences. We are woven into one another’s lives, and in that weave—which is invisible, a bit like how the force field between particles is invisible—is where meaning is created, also the meaning of nature. It sat in my head. It sat in me.

That’s a pretty good description of my relationship to the Provençal beauty which was around me.

Nevertheless, I got quite a bit of writing done. My goal was to write 1,000 words per day on the book, Neither/Nor. This is “zero draft” material, rougher even than a first draft, but hopefully weaving together the parts that will need to go into the final product.

Here’s how I did:

• Day 1: 1,013 words

• Day 2: 1,024 words

• Day 3: 1,043 words

• Day 4: 1,305 words

• Day 5: 1,944 words

• Day 6: 1,388 words

• Day 7: 1,002 words

• Day 8: 1,050 words (back in London).

For a total of 9,769 words so far. Almost a myriad.

My brain is too raw to summarize what I’ve written, so I’ll refer you instead to last week’s post, which I’ve edited since last week to engage with some reader feedback.

Thanks to Isabela Granic for hosting the writing week, to Marc Santolini for reading and providing feedback on our preprint, to Julia Willemyns for sending me the wonderful Knausgaard article, to Leigh Biddlecome for a supportive chat, and to Joe Hodson for a critique of Nietzschean gratitude.

If you read this post, please like it to let me know! And I’d love for you to subcribe, or support my work on Patreon or Ko-Fi. My trip to Provence was made possible by such support, so thank you to all who have supported my writing on these platforms.

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All best,

Bryan

Are you feeling grateful today? If not, how do you feel? Might you feel the opposite of grateful? But what is the opposite of gratitude?

Nietzsche (1844–1900) in Beyond Good and Evil implies that it is fear,1 whereas the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960) argues that it is envy, arising from disrupted intimacy with the mother in infancy.

Nietzsche contrasts the older attitude of gratitude with a newer feeling of fear. I imagine the difference between the Homeric Greeks (say, 8th Century BC) and the Stoics (say, 2nd Century BC). The former seem to be vibing with whatever happens, however violent, whereas the latter seem a lot more worried, even though many of them had easier lives than Achilles.

Nietzsche felt that fear opposed gratitude. Whereas for Klein, envy opposed gratitude. Before we get to their differing definitions of gratitude, what did Klein mean by envy?

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For Klein, envy is defined as “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable — the envious impulse being to take it away or destroy it.” Envy, Klein argues, goes back to infancy. More specifically, after the presence of mother’s breast which feeds the infant, the absence or inconsistency of feeding leads the infant to a feeling of destructive aggression. The infant is envious towards the breast itself, since it has as yet no concept of another person — not even its mother. In a sense, it only requires one person, because it is about acting destructively against an object or situation. Imagine a child kicking over a sandcastle. For Klein, this impulse would be driven by envy.

Klein defines jealousy as being based on envy, but it is more sophisticated feeling, requiring two people. It is concerned “with love that the subject feels is his due and has been taken away, or is in danger of being taken away, from him by his rival. In the everyday conception of jealousy, a man or a woman feels deprived of the loved person by somebody else.”

In the following passage, Klein defines greed. Greed, for Klein, is about “insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is able and willing to give.” Greed is about taking as much as possible, where as envy is about the desire to “spoil and destroy.”

Because jealousy is rooted in envy, jealousy, too, can be destructive; she looks at the example of Othello, whose jealousy causes him to kill Desdemona, the object of his jealousy. In other words, both envy and jealousy can be self-defeating, because they can destroy the desired object, relation, or situation. At the same time, for Klein, there may be an element of envy which actually produces or protects the ego. The question is how to get the right level of envy to allow the ego to become independent, but without allowing it to destroy the desired object, or the relation with the desired object.

This is from her most famous essay, Envy and Gratitude (1957; p182):2

Shakespeare’s Othello, in his jealousy, destroys the object he loves and this, in my view, is characteristic of what Crabb described as an ‘ignoble passion of jealousy’ —greed stimulated by fear. A significant reference to jealousy as an inherent quality of the mind occurs in the same play:

But jealous souls will not be answer’d so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous; ’tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.

It could be said that the very envious person is insatiable, he can never be satisfied because his envy stems from within and therefore always finds an object to focus on. This shows also the close connection between jealousy, greed and envy.

For Klein, envy is a pathology arising out of experiences in infancy, where intermittent or inconsistent affection leads to persecutory anxiety. The Othello example shows that this anxiety arises from early childhood neglect, and can interfere with relationships in adulthood. The Othello case is extreme; he desires Desdemona, but his jealousy actually leads him to kill her. But jealousy and envy can have corrosive and destructive effects even when they fall far short of murder. They stem from inadequate intimacy, but they self-defeatingly block intimacy and trust as well.

Gratitude can help mitigate the destructive effects of envy. Here’s how she describes their opposition. Continuing on in Envy and Gratitude (p187-190):

For it is enjoyment and the gratitude to which it gives rise that mitigate destructive impulses, envy, and greed. To look at it from another angle: greed, envy, and persecutory anxiety, which are bound up with each other, inevitably increase each other. The feeling of the harm done by envy, the great anxiety that stems from this, and the resulting uncertainty about the goodness of the object, have the effect of increasing greed and destructive impulses. Whenever the object is felt to be good after all, it is all the more greedily desired and taken in. This applies to food as well.

The sense of deprivation that an infant feels when the breast is withdrawn leads to an impulse towards destructive envy, and to a feeling of persecution. If this goes on too long, then when the child is fed again, it can be come greedy, taking more than it needs. It doesn’t require much imagination to see how this can lead to eating disorders and other forms of addiction.

Klein also thinks that excessive envy, which might be partly innate but can also be caused by maternal disturbances in feeding, can prevent an infant from enjoyment and gratitude. In other words, gratitude can impede envy, but envy can also impede gratitude.

For Klein, the first enjoyment for the infant is that of being fed. But because she thinks that all pleasures are derivative from this original process of feeding, too many problems in the feeding process can preclude the enjoyment of anything — and gratitude for anything — later in life. This is what makes early gratitude so important:

Gratitude is essential in building up the relation to the good object and underlies also the appreciation of goodness in others and in oneself. Gratitude is rooted in the emotions and attitudes that arise in the earliest stage of infancy, when for the baby the mother is the one and only object. I have referred to this early bond as the basis for all later relations with one loved person.

Because the infant will want to be fed, sometimes not be fed when it wants, then eventually be fed again, the oscillations between envy and gratitude are inevitable and not something to be avoided entirely. Too much envy can prevent gratitude later in life, but she also notes that too little envy (i.e., always being fed immediately) can also spoil the child:

It is of interest that Abraham mentions, among the factors: which underlie manic-depressive illness, both excessive frustration and too great indulgence. For frustration, if not excessive, is also a stimulus for adaptation to the external world and for the development of the sense of reality. In fact, a certain amount of frustration followed by gratification might give the infant the feeling that he has been able to cope with his anxiety.

The key is to get the balance right. Some frustration is required to internalise the fact that the world will not always bend to one’s will. At the same time, too much frustration may lead to a basic sense that the world is unsafe. A balance between the two should allow the infant to develop an internal sense of security, which, over development, can become increasingly independent of circumstances:

If the undisturbed enjoyment in being fed is frequently experienced, the introjection3 of the good breast comes about with relative security. A full gratification at the breast means that the infant feels he has received from his loved object a unique gift which he wants to keep. This is the basis of gratitude. Gratitude is closely linked with the trust in good figures. This includes first of all the ability to accept and assimilate the loved primal object (not only as a source of food) without greed and envy interfering too much; for greedy internalization disturbs the relation to the object.

So a lack of gratitude can lead to lack of trust. When I read what Klein refers to as “good figures” I think of “authority figures,” and this made me wonder if a lack of gratitude could lead to acts of rebellion or the rejection of authority. Although I rarely misbehaved outwardly, I’ve always had an internal reaction against authority figures, and it was not obvious to me that increasing my gratitude might be used to counteract this tendency when it is undesirable. It’s fine to be sceptical of authority, for example when it leads me to insist on egalitarian interactions, but at other times it can be an impediment.

A lack of gratitude can also damage expressions of generosity. For those with gratitude, generosity can be offered without expecting anything in return. But for those whose gratitude is insufficient, generosity can come to require displays of appreciation and gratitude, without which an individual will become angry:

Gratitude is closely bound up with generosity. Inner wealth derives from having assimilated the good object so that the individual becomes able to share its gifts with others. This makes it possible to introject a more friendly outer world, and a feeling of enrichment ensues. Even the fact that generosity is often insufficiently appreciated does not necessarily undermine the ability to give. By contrast, with people in whom this feeling of inner wealth and strength is not sufficiently established, bouts of generosity are often followed by an exaggerated need for appreciation and gratitude, and consequently by persecutory anxieties of having been impoverished and robbed.

Here let’s look at Nietzsche’s definition of gratitude, because Klein’s “inner wealth” could be likened to Nietzsche’s notion of “aristocracy.” For Nietzsche, aristocracy and gratitude go together; the aristocrat is grateful for life’s abundance. Elsewhere, in The Gay Science and The Will to Power, Nietzsche links the feeling of gratitude to the will to power, and for him living with gratitude is also a show of strength. This is because he links this strength to an ability to repay a debt of disturbance.

What kind of disturbance? For Nietzsche, A benefactor giving a benefit actually obtrudes on one’s autonomy. The noble action is to repay one’s debts, in this case, not with vengeance but with gratitude. It is for this reason that Nietzsche regards gratitude as a “milder form of revenge” (Human, All Too Human, I.2, §44). He notes in that same passage that “Swift suggested that men are grateful in the same degree as they are revengeful.”

This does not really align with Klein’s description of gratitude. For Klein, gratitude amounts to the ability to enjoy an object and express some of that that enjoyment back to its source. For Nietzsche, gratitude comes from receiving a benefit, which indebts one to one’s benefactor — and gratitude is the non-violent way to repay that debt. Exprssing too much gratitude, for Nietzsche, is a sign of weakness, whereas I don’t think Klein has an equivalent notion of excessive gratitude. At the same time, I read into Nietzsche and Klein the idea that gratitude can undermine fear and envy (respectively).

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For Klein, gratitude can impede envy, and vice versa. But because gratitude is closely linked with enjoyment, envy can also destroy all capacity for enjoyment. Klein therefore considers envy to be the worst of all sins, because it has the capacity to spitefully destroy all that is good:

Strong envy of the feeding breast interferes with the capacity for complete enjoyment, and thus undermines the development of gratitude. There are very pertinent psychological reasons why envy ranks among the seven ‘deadly sins’. I would even suggest that it is unconsciously felt to be the greatest sin of all, because it spoils and harms the good object which is the source of life. This view is consistent with the view described by Chaucer in The Parsons Tale: ‘It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is; for all other sins are sins only against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.’ The feeling of having injured and destroyed the primal object impairs the individual’s trust in the sincerity of his later relations and makes him doubt his capacity for love and goodness.

This destructive impulse, which she links with “persecutory anxiety,” comes from early disturbances in relations with the first “object” (which for Klein, is first with the breast, and later with the mother as a person).

Disturbances in this area manifest as an inability to securely attach to the carer, to maintain gratitude. This can lead to “craving for power and prestige” (which I read as grandiosity), or “the need to pacify persecutors at any cost” (which I read as people-pleasing). I read envy itself as an act of spiteful and destructive defiance. I would also link her notion of greed with impatience.

My observations have shown me that significant changes in character, which at close quarters reveal themselves as character deterioration, are much more likely to happen in persons who have not established their first object securely and are not capable of maintaining gratitude towards it. When in those people persecutory anxiety increases for internal or external reasons, they lose completely their primal good object, or rather its substitutes, be it persons or values. The processes that underlie this change are a regressive return to early splitting mechanisms and disintegration. Since this is a matter of degree, such a disintegration, though ultimately it strongly affects character, does not necessarily lead to manifest illness. The craving for power and prestige, or the need to pacify persecutors at any cost, are among the aspects of the character changes I have in mind.

Nietzsche observes an opposition between gratitude and fear, whereas Klein observes an opposition between gratitude and envy. For Nietzsche, gratitude is a characteristic of the nobility, who embrace life and are grateful for its abundance, whereas fear of scarcity tends to crowd out gratitude, or to make it too obsequious.4 The aristocratic attitude is one of gratitude, and the aristocrat expresses gratitude towards benefactors in the same unselfconscious way that he would undertake an act of vengeance (Nietzsche repeatedly links gratitude and revenge).

Klein links gratitude with love and the capacity for enjoyment, whereas she links envy with jealousy, hatred, greed, and persecutory anxiety. According to Klein the best way to develop gratitude and love is through secure attachment in infancy. But obviously not everyone has that luxury. Her model lends support to approaches like IFS which emphasise “reparenting.” An approach like this, with or without a therapist, could replace psychoanalytic “transference” with a process which first seeks to establish safety, then focuses on building skills of self-soothing and gratitude, which are the conditions required for the eventual attainment of enjoyment and love.

I’ve never been particularly consistent with making gratitude lists, but I’ve experimented with describing what I’m grateful for in my morning pages, and I do think that it reduces both fear and anger, and probably envy as well.

A friend suggested to me that it might be important to emphasise gratitude towards people over gratitude for possessions or unearned experiences. This is supported by Klein’s model, which has gratitude redirecting feelings of enjoyment back to their source. From Nietzsche, we might take the idea that we should pursue the feeling of an “enormous abundance of gratitude” for life, and also emphasise displays of gratitude to people at the right time, at the right level. To combine Klein and Nietzsche with modern research, we might cultivate a feeling of gratitude towards life and towards others, with the correct expression of this gratitude, after a process of deep reflection.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Bryan

P.S. If you liked this piece, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Please also like it, subscribe, or support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!

I’ve argued before, in “The Birth of Logic,” that logic is not a timeless and unchanging discovery, perfected by Aristotle and with no further developments until the time of Kant. A friend of mine, a logician, has said that Frege’s approach, which builds on Aristotle’s, still substantially modifies it

This is an odd feature I keep noticing about conceptual approaches. They often claim that something, in this case logic, is both basic to the universe and a basic aspect of cognition, and, at the same time, a massive discovery by Aristotle. For example, Kant’s forms of the intuition — time and space — are supposed to be preconditions to our having any experience at all. And yet his notions of time and space seem suspiciously Newtonian, as opposed to, say, Aristotelian. So how can Newtonian time, which ticks forward simultaneously throughout the universe, both be a massive and revolutionary discovery of a basic truth of the universe by Newton — and also basic to Kantian cognition? Obviousnesses in mathematics often seem to get similar treatment. If 2+2=4 is such a basic obvious truth that we use it as such in conversation, why do we need to teach arithmetic?

The standard view treats logic as simultaneously obvious but also a discovery. This creates a paradox: If logical reasoning is so basic to human cognition, why does it require training to master?

As a reminder, Kant declared that logic "since the time of Aristotle... has not had to go a single step backwards" and "seems to all appearance to be finished and complete" (B viii). See a fuller quote here. Today I’ll argue, against Kant, that it is not basic. I’m arguing that even syllogisms are contextual — we don’t naturally use them to reason outside of our experience.

Even Charles Sanders Peirce, who might seem to support the universality view, actually anticipated this problem. Rather than claiming logical reasoning comes naturally, he explicitly states that “we come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences, the last of all our faculties; for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art.” So he recognizes that parts of it are basic, but others require training.

Here’s “The Fixation of Belief,” section II (1877). by Charles Sanders Peirce:

The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. Consequently, reasoning is good if it be such as to give a true conclusion from true premisses, and not otherwise. Thus, the question of validity is purely one of fact and not of thinking. A being the facts stated in the premisses and B being that concluded, the question is, whether these facts are really so related that if A were B would generally be. If so, the inference is valid; if not, not. It is not in the least the question whether, when the premisses are accepted by the mind, we feel an impulse to accept the conclusion also. It is true that we do generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it.

To most of my readers, who will have been schooled in the West or by Western-influenced schools, this position may seem basic. Peirce is just saying that “reasoning” (which I would say is “using logic”) is about taking what we know and applying it to things we don’t know. He also says that we “generally reason correctly by nature.” He also seems to presuppose that the conclusions of logic are always correct, which may be true in most cases, but not in certain cases, like the later discovered Russell’s paradox.

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I want to bring in Aleksandr Luria’s Cognitive Development (1936, but translated into English in 1976). In it, Luria records transcripts with villagers of differing levels of education in Uzbekistan, where villagers were coming under the Soviet education system. He found substantial differences in how readily people would use abstraction based on even just a year or two of education. Before formal education, they were perfectly capable of reasoning, but they tended to rely much more extensively on their own experience. Those with the least formal education tend to refuse to complete abstract syllogisms or counterfactuals, even though elsewhere in the conversation they show the ability to make the very same calculation when it is a matter within their experience. The transcripts really speak for themselves. Here’s one (p110), with the interviewer’s questions in bold:

Subject: Khamrak., age thirty-six, peasant from remote village, slightly literate.

From Shakhimardan to Vuadil it is three hours on foot, while to Fer­gana it is six hours. How much time does it take to go on foot from Vuadil to Fergana?

“No, it’s six hours from Vuadil to Fergana. You’re wrong . . . it’s far and you wouldn’t get there in three hours.”

Computation is readily performed, but condition of problem is not accepted.

That makes too difference; a teacher gave this problem as an exercise. If you were a student, how would you solve it?

“But how do you travel—on foot or on horseback?”

Slips back to level of concrete experience.

It’s all the same—well, let’s say on foot.

“No, then you won’t get there! It’s a long way . .. if you were to leave now, you’d get to Vuadil very, very late in the evening.”

Condition that contradicts experience is not accepted.

All right, but try and solve the problem. Even if it’s wrong, try to figure it out.

“No! How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?!”

Refusal to solve conditional problem.

The transcripts show how readily problems whose conditions corre­spond to reality are solved, and how difficult it is for the subjects to accept conditions that do not hold true in their own experience and to perform the associated formal logical operations. Several examples show how sharply the ability to solve problems conforming to practi­cal experience contrasts with the inability to solve problems whose conditions contradict this experience. These data convincingly dem­onstrate the degree of difficulty in trying to induce our subjects to perform formal logical reasoning independent of content.

In other words, though Kant assumes that logic is basic, Luria finds that it actually requires formal education. This supports the view that logic is a major achievement by Aristotle, and not something basic. Whether that achievement is a discovery or an invention, however, will have to be left for another post.

Moreover, reading Luria’s compassionate transcripts, we come to see that the Uzbek villagers are not reasoning in an inferior way. Instead, their reasoning is perfectly functional for the lives they actually live. When the interviewer gives them an incorrect statement as a premise, they rightly reject this. They also demand more experiential evidence. They famously refused to reason, for example, about polar bears in places they haven’t been (p107):

They refused even more decisively to draw inferences from the second type of syllogism. As a rule, many refused to accept the major premise, declaring that they “had never been in the North and had never seen bears; to answer the question you would have to ask people who had been tjiere and seen them.”

Rather than showing a cognitive deficiency, this shows specificity and a refusal to enter the unknown territory of abstraction. The refusal to extend claims outside of experience may not allow for “All men are mortal” type syllogistic logic, but it could protect its users from misinformation, for example. Though it may be tempting for those schooled as we were to regard this refusal as a cognitive limitation, it could also be seen as something approaching cognitive wisdom.

Meanwhile, here’s a passage from “Cognitive Consequences of Formal and Informal Education” by psychologists Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole (1973):

The evidence that different educational experiences give rise to different functional learning systems comes primarily from the work of contemporary psychologists in cross-cultural settings. Best known is the work of Jerome Bruner and Patricia Greenfield (3, 4). In studies among the Wolof of Senegal, Greenfield repeatedly found differences between village children with a few years of education and uneducated children on a variety of classification and Piagetian reasoning tasks. On a concept-formation problem, school children who were older and had attended school longer were more likely to form classes of items on the basis of form and function than were the younger school children, whereas the unschooled children showed no such difference with age, simply becoming more consistent in their use of color as a basis of classification. When presented with a standard Piagetian conservation task, children who attended school showed a developmental curve similar to that found in European and U.S. children, whereas the unschooled ones did not necessarily manifest conservation as they grew older. Greenfield summarized her results in the generalization that Wolof school children thought and performed more like Boston school children on these tasks than like their unschooled brothers and sisters.

A leading Soviet psychologist, Alexander R. Luria, found similar changes in concept formation associated with a change from informal to formal education among Central Asian peasants. His two contrasting groups were traditional, uncollectivized peasants living in small villages and peasant farmers who had moved onto collective farms. The latter generally had had a few years of schooling of some kind and were participating in the planning and management of large farm enterprises. In one study the subjects were shown four pictures, three being of members of a well-defined category and the fourth clearly not a member, and were asked to pick out the three that belonged together. One set of pictures, for example, depicted three tools—saw, ax, and shovel—and a piece of wood. Collectivized farmers commonly selected the three tools as the items belonging together, forming what Luria called an “abstract category.” Not one of the traditional farmers did so. Their choices were made on the basis of concrete, practical situations in which the various objects could be used together; thus the piece of wood, the saw, and the ax might be grouped because “it is necessary to fell the tree, then to cut it up, and the shovel does not relate to that, it is just needed in the garden” (5, p. 268). Luria also investigated the way in which the two groups went about solving verbal reasoning problems. When presented with logical syllogisms, the traditional people refused to accept the system of assumptions embodied in the problems and to draw conclusions from them, while slightly educated people readily drew such conclusions.

Educated Wolof children classified objects “on the basis of form and function” while unschooled children used “color as a basis of classification,” which aligns with what Luria found with the Uzbek villagers.

Neither approach is more “logical” — they represent different organizational principles. The striking finding is that “Wolof school children thought and performed more like Boston school children on these tasks than like their unschooled brothers and sisters.”

This suggests formal education creates specific cognitive habits that transcend cultural boundaries while severing connections to local knowledge systems. The “universality” of logical thinking may be merely the universality of a particular educational strategy.

IF this is so, then what we call “logical reasoning” might be better understood as a powerful but culturally specific cognitive tool. This tool may be sophisticated and useful, but it is neither universal nor basic to human thinking. If reasoning is indeed a learned technology rather than a universal cognitive capacity, then we face fundamental questions about education and epistemology.

Learning other modes of reasoning, I would argue, can allow us to see both the costs and benefits of our default approach. We might ask: What other reasoning modes have we deemed “illogical” that might actually serve important cognitive functions? Indigenous knowledge systems, intuitive decision-making, embodied cognition, and experiential wisdom may all offer cognitive resources that formal logic cannot provide. Rather than treating abstract reasoning as the gold standard of human thought, we might instead cultivate what I would call (channeling Thomas Kuhn’s last writings) cognitive bi-lingualism—the ability to move fluidly between different reasoning systems depending on context and purpose.

Status update

The Neither/Nor article remains in the same status as last week: “Your submission has passed the technical checks.”

I’m also excited to report I am typing on a laptop! But it’s not a Lenovo one, and it’s not new. It’s a refurbished Dell XPS 13 which I bought from Morgan Computers to tide me over. Luckily, the Clonezilla backup I took, plus about an hour of tweaking, got my whole Linux setup running on this laptop. The Dell is smaller and lighter than the Lenovo laptop, has a better screen, and a dramatically worse battery. But it is fine for now.

Here’s what Lenovo said yesterday, for those eagerly tracking the laptop which I sent them on 22nd April. This response came on Friday 23rd May after emailing them asking politely for an update on Tuesday 20th, Thursday 22nd, and Friday 23rd:

Dear Brayan ,

We apologies for the delay , i forwarded your email and question to the engineer and technician in charge in order to provide you the correct response .

I will be back to you as soon i receive feedback from them

Kind regards
<Name>

Case Manager
Customer Care Team
Lenovo - EMEA Services Support

As always I’d love to hear from you,

Bryan

Good news! The Neither/Nor article has not yet been rejected. But first, a rant about life without a laptop.

Laptopless Life

There's a certain irony in writing about the intersection of abstract concepts and embodied experience while being deprived of one of my primary tools of thought. My recent philosophical endeavours have been hampered by my lack of access to a laptop. Philosophy demands not just reading and contemplation, but also the ability to capture, connect, and refine ideas — a process that, for me, has become deeply intertwined with digital tools like my Zettelkasten. And while a laptop may not seem the most embodied tool, being without it has felt, to me, like a physical disability.

My past month has become an unasked-for exercise in my ability to remain philosophical. I wish I could say that this limitation had itself become the starting point for philosophical inquiry: How dependent is my thought on particular technologies? What changes when the medium shifts? What are the affordances of different ways of inscribing thinking patterns? But mostly I’ve been impatiently waiting. I have some vague recollection that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty refused to use typewriters because they felt that handwriting connected the mind more directly to the ideas than did typing. I would look it up, but I don’t have my laptop.

I’ve been able to read, of course, but the absence of my usual digital workspace has altered how I process and connect ideas—a tangible reminder of how much my thinking depends on tools.

I have my work laptop, which runs Windows but has a low resolution and I don’t really want to use it for personal stuff. I do also have a Linux desktop machine, now really a glorified server and video player connected to my TV, which I use to watch films. At one point it had been reasonably high-end, but I thought it had felt a bit slow lately. When I looked up the processor, I found that I last upgraded it thirteen years ago. No wonder it’s not fun to work on.

My laptop, a Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5, which runs Linux, died a few weeks ago. I suspect there’s something wrong with the motherboard. After enduring the engineer’s usual barrage of questions and unlikely-to-work steps, he asked me to ship the laptop back to Lenovo. I was not super excited about this prospect as I had paid for “on-site” support, which I’ve previously used with success to replace a broken keyboard. But I thought they’d repair it within a day or two, and I’d have the laptop back within a week, or at worst the following week.

In fact, I shipped off to Lenovo on 22nd April. They inspected the laptop quickly and ordered a part, which did not arrive until 12th May. The week since then been an ongoing saga with very little information coming back from Lenovo. I’ve daily chased the premium care team, the customer care team, and the shadowy “escalation team,” all to no avail. They ignore most of my emails. They do respond to calls, chat sessions and Twitter DMs, but they end each conversation by saying that they’ll get back to me by email within a few hours. 80% of the time I hear nothing after that, and 20% of the time I receive an email which says that they’re looking into it and will give me an update “soon.”

This has meant a month without a machine that has the ability to run a decent operating system (I find both Windows and Mac unusable) and a decent web browser (sadly my home Linux machine is too slow for me to work properly on it).

How has this affected my ability to do philosophy? It has more-or-less stopped it, partly because throughout most of the wait I’d assumed I would get the laptop back within the next day or two. Had I known from the start that this was not happening, I might have switched more quickly to index cards or bought an interim machine. Instead, I’ve mostly stopped working.

Liminal Learning

That is not to say that nothing has happened, however. During this liminal period for my philosophy, I’ve had some great conversations about Liminal Learning, the practical counterpoint to Neither/Nor’s theoretical position. We are quite proud of the one-pager we made to describe the programme. We’re now fundraising; if you or anyone you know would like to support our work, please see more information here.

The article

The academic article, which I wrote about here, has now passed technical checks. I understand this to mean that they have been able to open the article, that they have found the authors, and that it’s passed AI checks for required ethical and data availability statements. The next step, “editorial assignment,” can apparently take a few weeks. I think this is the first stage at which a human will have to read the paper. I remain hopeful.

If you have yet to read the pre-print of this article, and would like to do so, you can request a copy here.

Some films I’ve seen

When I mentioned my film TV, I thought about writing today’s Substack about films I’ve seen lately. I decided not to do that, but here are some recent highlights of the films I’ve seen this year, and also how I rated them out of 10:

• Loulou (1980) — 8.7

• Midnight Run (1988) — 8.1

• Peking Opera Blues (1986) — 9.1

• Wild Reeds (1994) — 9.4

• McQueen (2018) — 7.8

• Love Me Tonight (1932) — 7.6

• Strange Darling (2023) — 7.7

• Dersu Uzala (1975) — 9.2

• Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957) — 8.6

• Fallen Leaves (2023) — 7.8

• Civil War (2024) — 9.3

• The Adults (2023) — 8.4

• The Witch (2015) — 9.2

So despite being theoretically disconnected, I’ve continued to have experiences, in film, in conversation, and otherwise. Once I’ve sorted my tools, I’ll write you something better.

And if you’d like to help me get a new laptop, please consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi.

Best,

Bryan

When the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem's First Temple in 587 BC, something unexpected happened—Judaism became more monotheistic, not less.

At my discussion group recently we discussed an old favourite of mine, a podcast on the excellent Historiansplaining podcast which discusses the history of Judaism, and deconstructs the concept of “religion.”

I became interested in Biagetti’s claim that, after the Babylonians destroyed the first temple in the Siege of Jerusalem (587 BC), Judaism became more monotheistic. This comes out of one branch of three possible responses to crisis, which are, broadly, to welcome change (prophets), to try to return to old authority (priests), and to try to explain the crisis (mandarins).

Wait, what? Wasn’t Judaism always entirely monotheistic?

In Biagetti’s argument, no.

Judaism had previously been primarily henotheistic, which means that the Israelites worshiped one God above others, but they don’t necessarily deny the existence of other gods. This seems to line up with the first commandment, i.e., “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Or see Genesis 3:22 for an apparent multiplicity in God, or Psalm 82 for God’s “divine council.” The podcast is well worth listening to if you’re interested in this question.

One of the aspects of Biagetti’s account that interested me is the fact that the response to the destruction of the temple was to “double down,” as Biagetti says, on there being only one God.

The covenant between God and the Judeans had said that if the Judeans kept his commandments, He would give them the land of Canaan, protect them against their enemies, give King David an eternal dynasty, and choose the Temple of Jerusalem as His earthly residence. So when the Babylonians destroyed the Temple, this created a profound theological crisis. I might have predicted that this would make them less monotheistic. I wanted to understand this crisis, and especially how God’s apparent breaking of the covenant could lead to more monotheism.

I’ve noted that rationalistic responses to situations often lead to doubling down on strategies which have failed. See Thinking and Sensing for what I mean by “rationalist.” I’ve literally used the term “doubling down” so I found it fascinating that Biagetti used the same term.

To better understand this paradox, I went to find his sources, and wound up at Römer’s Invention of God (2015). This is a profound piece of historical work which looks exactly at this question. How can the God who is the individual God of a small group of Israelites become the universal and unchanging God?

Here’s Römer on the different responses to the crisis. He transplants a categorical schema from writing on the French revolution to explain how Judeans responded to the destruction of the Temple:

Different groups in the Judean aristocracy tried to deal with and overcome the crisis by producing ideologies that endowed the fall of Judah with theological meaning. We can order these attempts according to a model proposed by Armin Steil.1 Steil, who was influenced by Max Weber, developed his model by analyzing the semantics of crisis in the context of the French Revolution; however, this model is also very helpful for understanding the reactions to the fall of Jerusalem that we find in the Hebrew Bible. Steil distinguishes three types of attitude toward a crisis: that of the prophet, that of the priest, and that of the mandarin. The prophetic attitude consists in declaring the crisis to be the beginning of a new era. The main proponents of this attitude are members of marginal groups, who are nevertheless capable of formulating and communicating their convictions. Conservative representatives of the social structures that are collapsing are more likely to adopt a priestly attitude. For those who take this posture, the way to overcome the crisis is to return to the sacred origins of society, given by God, and to ignore the new reality. The mandarin posture expresses a choice by high officials, who are trying to understand the new situation and accommodate themselves to it in order to preserve their existing privileges. The “mandarins” try to objectify the crisis by giving a historical account of it that explains the collapse of the old social structures. (p214)

In short, prophets arise who welcome or at least accept the crisis as a sign of change to come. Priests try to use myths to return to former authority and origins. And mandarins construct a history to explain why this crisis has happened. In Römer’s telling, from which I suspect Biagetti draws, this meant interpreting the destruction of the Temple not as evidence of God’s weakness, but of God’s wrath; God used the Babylonians to destroy His own Temple because the Judeans had not been faithful enough. This is the step that allows more monotheistic views to arise.

It was primarily through the mandarin response that monotheism intensified. By constructing a historical narrative that reframed the destruction of the Temple as divine punishment rather than divine weakness, these scholar-officials transformed Yahweh from a national deity competing with other gods into a universal God controlling all nations—including the Babylonians themselves. This reinterpretation, found particularly in exilic prophetic texts like Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah, preserved God’s power while accounting for national defeat.

Here’s a handy table which Römer provides:

I think it’s not much of a stretch to see that in today’s crises, there are prophets who see the crises as a sign of new things to come. There are also priests, who try to protect the old order. And there are mandarins who are trying to construct a history that makes the present an inevitability from the past.

What contemporary crises do you see these three responses playing out in today? Can you identify the prophets who welcome change and see opportunity in disruption? The priests who appeal to tradition and try to restore past structures? The mandarins who construct historical narratives to explain how we arrived at our present situation? I'd be curious to hear which examples come to mind for you, and which response you find yourself most naturally gravitating toward.

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I’m very keen on the study of history, but there are, according to the late Thomas Kuhn, two types of history: Whig history, which explains the present in terms of the past, and “hermeneutic” history, which attempts to explain the past on its own terms. In the paper we wrote recently, we refer to the former as “present-focused history” and the latter as “past-focused history.” This divide appears in Römer, too. He calls “past-focused history” “historiography”:

There are many other instances in antiquity of a connection between a crisis and the writing of history. Thucydides wrote his History of the Great War between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century, and addressed it to “those who desire an exact knowledge of the past to help them interpret the future” (1.22). Similarly, Herodotus composed his History in order to present the general reasons for the wars with Persia and the reasons for the individual dramatic events that occurred during these wars. Obviously, the Deuteronomistic history is not a work of historiography in the modern sense of that term-for instance, in the sense in which the nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke claimed that history must be devoted to finding out “what really happened.” The Deuteronomist history is, nevertheless, a serious attempt to construct the past so as to explain the present. (p216)

This historiographical distinction helps explain why the mandarin response was so effective—it was essentially “present-focused history” that reinterpreted the past specifically to address the theological crisis of the present. The Deuteronomistic writers weren't primarily concerned with what “really happened,” but with constructing a narrative that preserved theological meaning in the face of catastrophe.

What fascinates me about this historical transformation is how theological crisis became an engine for religious intensification rather than abandonment. The mandarin response—constructing a new historical narrative that preserved divine authority while accounting for catastrophe—demonstrates how humans reinterpret reality when confronted with evidence that challenges core beliefs. This pattern of “doubling down” appears throughout history, including in our contemporary crises. Understanding these dynamics can help us recognize similar patterns in our own responses to collective challenges.

As always, I’d love to hear from you.

Bryan

P.S. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Please also like it, subscribe, or support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!

Recently, I had a conversation with Haneen Khan, a sex coach and fellow thinker, about the relationship between abstract thinking and embodied experience.

The Nature of Abstraction and Experience

We began by discussing the academic paper which Isabela Granic and I recently submitted, which describes my philosophy Neither/Nor. The paper and the forthcoming book focus on the relationship between experience and abstraction, or theory and practice. The paper critiques what we term “latent Platonism,” an unconscious tendency to prioritize abstract, theoretical constructs over direct, embodied experience. This can reveal itself in conversation, for example, when sharing about an uncomfortable experience can lead an interlocutor to leap to broad generalizations rather than discussing the experience itself.

The Need for Balance and Awareness

Throughout our conversation, we emphasized the importance of balancing abstract reasoning with experiential knowledge. Haneen and I agree that awareness is key — awareness of when we're gravitating too heavily towards abstraction at the expense of our felt experiences (or, less frequently, vice versa).

Haneen shared valuable insights from her coaching practice, emphasizing the power of grounding practices that help individuals reconnect with their bodies and emotions. This balance, or oscillation as we’ve termed it, is crucial for a holistic understanding of the self.

Abstraction, while powerful, can become a tool of escapism or avoidance if unanchored by embodied awareness. Maintaining a strong connection to one’s felt experience, on the other hand, can enrich not only personal wellbeing but also interpersonal interactions.

Integration: A Path Forward

We concluded by emphasizing integration — a synthesis of experiential and conceptual wisdom — as a winding path forward. This integration offers a potential solution to the pitfalls inherent in each mode of understanding when pursued in isolation. Concepts like Internal Family Systems Therapy illustrate such an integration, offering a framework where conceptual understanding aids emotional and physical awareness.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic: How do you navigate the balance between abstraction and experience in your daily life? Let me know in the comments.

Bryan

P.S. If this conversation resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Please also like it, subscribe, or support me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!