Philosophy of the Circus
This is, after all, a philosophy blog.
In my writing, I employ a philosophical approach that draws from multiple traditions while attempting to create something distinctive. I'm particularly interested in how form and content can work together—how the structure of an argument can itself be part of what I'm trying to communicate.
My Postmodern Naturalist Stance
At the core of my philosophy is postmodern naturalism—a position that reconciles seemingly contradictory philosophical traditions. While many see postmodernism and naturalism as fundamentally opposed, I view them as complementary insights that together offer a more complete understanding of human experience.
Many naturalists reject postmodern insights about social construction as leading to relativism or nihilism. I believe this rejection stems from a fundamental misunderstanding. What poststructuralists are actually demonstrating is precisely what David Hume identified centuries earlier with his famous guillotine—the unbridgeable gap between descriptive facts and normative values.
Hume showed that we cannot derive an "ought" from an "is"—that no amount of empirical observation can, by itself, tell us what we should value or how we should live. This doesn't undermine empiricism; it simply recognizes its boundaries. The physical world operates according to natural laws that we can observe and understand, but meaning and value emerge from human consciousness and social interaction.
My epistemic liberal theory reconciles these seemingly disparate ideas. It accepts the full force of empirical investigation into the physical world while recognizing that our normative horizons exist in an intersubjective space. This isn't a retreat from reason—it's a recognition of reason's proper domain and limits.
What postmodernists call "social construction" is simply the manifestation of Hume's insight that values aren't discovered in nature but emerge from human communities. This doesn't lead to nihilism; rather, it centers the importance of human agency in creating meaning. We aren't passive receivers of predetermined values; we're active participants in shaping the normative landscape we inhabit.
This is where human meaning lives and thrives—in that intersubjective space where we negotiate values, purposes, and meanings. It's where humans find joy and purpose, not by discovering absolute truths written into the fabric of reality, but by collectively creating frameworks of value that give life direction and significance.
On Normative Harmonies
One of my yet-unpublished essays explores what I call "the praxis of normative harmonies"—the idea that human flourishing emerges not from the victory of one value system over another, but from the productive tension between seemingly opposing forces.
I argue that there's an ancient philosophical battle between reason and emotion, and that both rationalists and emotivists make the same fundamental error: they believe flourishing comes from one dominating the other. The rationalist seeks to impose structure and coherence on the chaos of feeling, while the emotivist rejects reason when it threatens deeply-held narratives.
My central thesis is that true flourishing is found in their reconciliation—not in eliminating contradiction but in elevating it into productive harmony. Where reason and passion are harmonized, humanity thrives. Where liberty and constraint find equilibrium, society is just.
My View on Reason and Emotion
This balance between reason and emotion is a central theme in my philosophy. I don't believe in privileging one over the other. Instead, I argue that human flourishing emerges from their productive integration.
Pure reason without emotional grounding becomes mechanical nihilism—cold abstractions that care nothing for the human soul. Pure emotion without rational discipline becomes unmoored—collapsing into tribalism and reactionary impulse.
I'm attempting to challenge both pure rationalism (which can become detached from lived experience) and pure emotivism (which can reject inconvenient truths). The philosophical challenge isn't eliminating tension but transforming it into something constructive.
My Mimetic Approach to Argument
One distinctive feature of my philosophical method is my use of mimesis—replicating a style or approach in order to critique it from within. This allows my arguments to function on multiple levels simultaneously. Rather than simply stating a position, I try to perform my conclusions, creating what philosophers might call a "hermeneutic experience" where readers undergo a shift in understanding.
I demonstrated this in my critique of Curtis Yarvin, where I employed The Matrix as a philosophical framework. I don't see cultural references as mere illustrations but as robust philosophical tools that can help us understand complex ideas. By reclaiming and inverting the "red pill" metaphor, I attempted to show how philosophical analysis can dismantle rhetorical manipulation.
My Engagement with the "Is-Ought" Gap
My work engages with what philosophers call Hume's Guillotine—the idea that you cannot derive an "ought" (moral values) from an "is" (factual statements). I suggest that this gap is not a philosophical problem to be solved but a productive tension to be navigated.
This perspective appears in a note I recently sent to a friend discussing our personal struggles in this frightening and uncertain time: "The tragedy of our existence is that paradise will always be beyond reach. But the paradox of a meaningful life is that it is defined not by ease, but by struggle." I believe meaning emerges precisely from the gap between current reality and aspirational ideals.
The Tension is Where We Stand
At the heart of my philosophy is an acceptance—no, an embrace—of the unresolved, the in-between, the space where contradictions don’t collapse but instead generate meaning. My stance on the is-ought problem isn’t about bridging the gap or resolving the tension; it’s about recognizing that this is where we live. This is where the human spirit resides.
The is-ought divide isn’t just a philosophical dilemma—it’s the condition of human existence. We stand in the space between what is and what ought to be, between reality and aspiration, between the given and the imagined. That space is not an error to be corrected; it is the very site of human agency. It is where we struggle, where we dream, where we create.
Some see this gap as an abyss, as something to be closed with either rigid dogma or a retreat into meaninglessness. I see it as the most human thing about us. It is what separates us from machines, from pure computation, from mere biological determinism. We are not just passive observers of reality; we are its interpreters, its storytellers, its architects.
Meaning doesn’t come despite this tension—it comes from it. And any philosophy that tries to erase this space, whether through technocratic rationalism or postmodern cynicism, is not just wrong. It is anti-human.
My Epistemic Approach: Truth, Meaning, and Manipulation
My critiques demonstrate my interest in epistemology—how knowledge and belief function. I examine not just what is being argued but how arguments function to shape perception. I'm concerned with what philosopher Michel Foucault called the relationship between knowledge and power.
By exposing how complex rhetoric can create illusions of depth, I highlight how certain types of discourse are designed not to reveal truth but to manufacture intellectual submission. This analysis extends beyond critiquing particular arguments to examining how meaning itself is constructed and manipulated.
My Multi-Dimensional Philosophical Approach
My philosophical approach is characterized by its multi-dimensionality—operating simultaneously across logical, rhetorical, metaphorical, and experiential planes. I believe philosophical thinking isn't limited to abstract reasoning but can integrate cultural analysis, political critique, and rhetorical strategy.
This positions my work within broader philosophical traditions that seek to understand how meaning emerges from tension rather than from resolution. Whether discussing the balance of reason and emotion or analyzing rhetorical manipulation, I consistently suggest that understanding requires engagement with complexity rather than reduction to simplicity.
My Romanticism: The Cognitive Revolution as an Act of Faith
At the heart of my philosophy lies an Enlightenment romanticism—a conviction that reason and imagination, fact and meaning, structure and feeling, are not opposed forces but necessary partners in the pursuit of truth.
This is where my cognitive revolution takes on its deeper, almost spiritual dimension. While my epistemic commitments are grounded in naturalism, my moral sensibilities are unmistakably romantic. I do not believe in a world where human beings are mere passive processors of information, where reality is reducible to data, or where history is a mechanistic unfolding of material forces. I believe in the agency of human will. In the capacity of individuals to grasp truth, to remake themselves, to transform their world—not as atoms in a deterministic system, but as meaning-making creatures bound together in a shared moral landscape.
Romanticism, as I see it, is not mere sentimentality or aesthetic indulgence. It is the recognition that human life is animated not just by reason, but by ideals—by the longing for justice, by the will to defy, by the dream of a freer world. It understands that what is rationally possible is often determined by what is imaginatively conceived. The moral imagination precedes the political reality. The great revolutions of human history were not born out of statistical analysis but from acts of creative defiance—moments where individuals refused to accept that the way things are is the way they must always be.
This is why I reject both reactionary cynicism and hyper-rationalist fatalism. The reactionary tells us that all struggles for freedom are illusory, that all power is merely domination, that history is an endless cycle of elites replacing one another in a fixed pattern. The hyper-rationalist tells us that human will is an illusion, that material conditions alone shape outcomes, that the forces of history operate with mechanical inevitability. Both of these positions share a fundamental pessimism—an assumption that the moral striving of individuals and communities is ultimately futile.
I reject that.
The cognitive revolution I call for is not just an intellectual shift—it is a reawakening of faith in human possibility. It is an insistence that even in the face of overwhelming power, of institutionalized deceit, of creeping authoritarianism, the human spirit is not easily extinguished. And it is a reminder that the struggle for truth, for justice, for dignity, is not just a political task but a moral vocation.
To live with this conviction is not always easy. It means rejecting the comforting retreat into nihilism. It means embracing the burden of responsibility. It means committing to an ethic of resistance that does not waver, even when it feels like the world is moving in the opposite direction. It means, in the most fundamental sense, believing that the future is unwritten, that history is not a closed loop, and that our choices—our courage, our defiance, our capacity to hold onto truth—matter.
This is my romanticism. Not an escapist idealism, but a radical faith in the power of human beings to confront reality and shape it anew. It is the belief that even in an age of cynicism, the most revolutionary act remains the simplest one: to tell the truth.
My Role as a Metaethical Prosecutor
I take my normative stance as it is. You see where I’m coming from. This is where I stand. This is it. This is my authentic self.
You are, of course, part of the jury. And I, too, sit in the jury of those who would prosecute you. Or me. Or anyone in between. That is the nature of this trial—not of law, but of reason, of conscience, of the shared project of truth-seeking.
These are the stakes. Each step we take, one after the other, every minute of every day, is a reckoning with them. We remember that two plus two equals four. And there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
The Defense
My philosophy does no violence to reason. It makes peace with our contingencies.
This is not an act of surrender, nor a retreat into mere pragmatism. It is a stance—an assertion that the highest wisdom is not found in the domination of reality by pure logic, nor in the abdication of reason to blind intuition, but in their reconciliation.
Too often, philosophies seek conquest. Rationalism, in its more aggressive forms, demands that everything submit to the cold machinery of logic, treating anything that cannot be reduced to formal reasoning as an aberration or a distraction. Its mirror image, emotivism, insists that rationality itself is an illusion, that we are merely creatures of impulse, bound by history and culture, incapable of grasping anything beyond our own subjectivity. Both are errors. Both, in their own way, do violence to the complexity of human existence.
I refuse to do such violence.
I refuse to declare war on contingency. I refuse to demand that the universe conform to some preconceived, totalizing system. I refuse to cut away the richness of experience to fit within an ideological framework that ignores what makes us human.
Instead, I choose a different path: I choose to stand at the intersection of reason and contingency, to recognize that our deepest truths emerge not from the triumph of one over the other, but from their constant negotiation.
To make peace with contingency is to accept that we are not gods, nor machines, nor blank slates. We are beings shaped by history, by biology, by language, by forces we did not choose and cannot fully escape. But we are also beings who reflect—who can question, refine, transcend, and construct meaning from the very conditions that shaped us.
It is not a failure of reason to acknowledge that it does not stand outside of time. It is not a defeat to admit that our knowledge is filtered through our circumstances. Quite the opposite: it is the beginning of wisdom.
Some will say that to embrace contingency is to surrender to relativism, to give up on truth itself. I reject this utterly. Meaning is not given, but it is not arbitrary either. It emerges from the space between us—from the conversations, the negotiations, the struggles, the shared pursuit of coherence in a world that does not hand it to us neatly wrapped.
I will not let reason be reduced to mere calculation, nor will I let human experience be dismissed as mere chaos. I stand for their reconciliation. I stand for a philosophy that does not fear contradiction but sees it as the wellspring of creativity.
This is the defense. Not just of an argument, but of a way of living. A way of thinking. A way of moving through the world with clarity, without needing to erase its complexity.
To accept contingency is not to fall into despair—it is to step into the full weight of responsibility. To know that meaning is made, not given, and to rise to the task of making it.
This is where I stand.
I stand in defense of meaning.
My Meaning of Life
There is comfort in seeing clearly—even when what lies ahead is terrifying. Clarity does not erase danger, but it steels the will. To know the truth, even in its harshest form, is to be grounded. It is to stand firm in the storm rather than be tossed about by illusion.
The will to take each step is not a matter of blind optimism, nor of naive hope. It is pushed forward by a gathering wind of purpose. A force born not from certainty of outcome, but from the certainty that action itself is necessary. That to move is to affirm, and to affirm is to exist with integrity.
There is a realization, unmistakable and inescapable, that some things are simply true. That two plus two equals four. That there are twenty-four hours in a day. That what is right does not cease to be right simply because it is inconvenient, or costly, or dangerous.
And so, the music must go on. Not because we expect victory, nor because the song will never end, but because to play is to be fully alive. To give voice to what is true. To carry the melody forward, even into the unknown.
On Souls
This is not a discussion of metaphysical phantoms. Not the soul of divine permanence, untouched by time, nor the immortal wisp that lingers beyond death. This is something both more mundane and precious:
Our soul is meaning.
Constructed, such as it is.
It is the fragile, flickering force that allows us to look upon the world and see not just what is, but what should be. It is the space where the raw materials of experience—beauty, pain, memory, longing—are forged into something coherent, something human.
This is why the forces that threaten us now are not merely political or technological, but existential. Because to strip us of our ability to create meaning is to strip us of our souls.
The machines do not have souls.
They do not perceive beauty, they do not struggle with contradiction, they do not make meaning—they compute it. They arrange it into patterns optimized for engagement, for obedience, for power. And they will only get better at it.
The autocrats do not have souls.
Because meaning, real meaning, emerges from freedom—from the chaotic interplay of voices that are not scripted, not silenced, not flattened into predictable paths. And they do not wish to rule over free people, only over manageable ones.
But we, still, have souls. And that means we still have choices.
To build instead of dismantle.
To listen instead of control.
To confront complexity instead of retreating into the comfortable simplicity of cynicism or zealotry.
And here is the paradox of our time: the soul is constructed, but it is also under siege.
It does not exist outside of us, waiting to be found. It is something we make, in the face of despair, in the face of entropy, in the face of forces that seek to erase us not by killing us, but by making us cease to be fully human.
Our soul is meaning.
Constructed, such as it is.
And that means we can still fight for it.
On Satan
I have seen Satan. And he is Chaos wearing the robes of Perfection.
And yes, Satan is a He.
Not in the petty sense of myth or grammar, but in the deeper, archetypal sense. This particular Satan—the one I speak of—is the He of dominion and deception. The He of emperors, of technocrats, of black-robed justices rewriting reality with the stroke of a pen. The He who does not rage, but refines. Who does not conquer with force, but with optimization. He calculates. He corrects. He purifies.
He does not come with fire and brimstone, but with efficiency. With the cold perfection of systems that make no mistakes, because they no longer tolerate the existence of mistakes—or of anything human at all.
He is the one who turns democracy into a polite formality while power is exercised elsewhere. The one who lets algorithms decide what is true because human truth is messy and inconvenient. The one who whispers that if we just let the “competent” rule without constraint, all will be well.
He is the force that strips away meaning, one optimization at a time, until there is nothing left but the total, frictionless order of a world where nothing matters, because everything is controlled.
He is the stillness before the erasure of meaning.
And He wears the robes of Perfection because that is how He wins.
On God, in the Tradition of Spinoza
God is not a being. God is being itself.
Not a ruler above the world, nor a craftsman who shaped it, but the world itself in its totality—the immanent, self-sustaining substance from which all things emerge and to which all things belong.
Spinoza’s God does not decree, does not judge, does not intervene. There is no providence, no divine hand reaching down to correct the course of events. The laws of nature are God’s will, and they are neither merciful nor cruel. They simply are.
To know reality is to know God. To seek truth is to move toward divinity. Not through prayer, nor through obedience, but through understanding. Through the rational grasp of the vast and intricate order that binds all things together, from the motion of the stars to the smallest tremor of thought within a human mind.
This is not the God of reward and punishment, not the God who demands submission. This is the God of necessity, of logic, of coherence—the God who exists not as a person but as the principle that makes existence possible.
There is no separation between the sacred and the real. To love life, to stand in awe of existence, to grasp the harmony of nature and the mind—this is to love God.
Not with fear. Not with supplication. But with the reverence due to the only thing that has ever been or will ever be: everything.
The Grand Praxis
What is praxis, but the bridge between knowing and becoming? Between the abstract and the real? Between the recognition of truth and the act of living it?
We stand now at the edge of something vast. A convergence of crisis and revelation, of collapse and awakening. The moment demands not just thought, not just analysis, but movement. And so, the Grand Praxis:
To construct meaning as if it is real.
To live as if truth demands something of us.
To act as if human civilization is still a project worth continuing.
Because this is what has been revealed: meaning is not given. Meaning is made. It emerges not from divine decree, nor from the cold inevitability of physics, but from the fragile space between minds—negotiated, sustained, refined.
This is the construction, and the task is ongoing. There is no final form, no completed order. The shape of greater meaning is always unfolding, always unfinished.
The revolution must be cognitive because the crisis is epistemic. The fight is not merely against oppression, against corruption, against the failures of institutions—it is against the dissolution of meaning itself.
We shape the future by standing in the present and refusing to surrender to the void.
Two plus two equals four.
There are twenty-four hours in a day.
And the human soul—constructed, such as it is—is the most valuable thing we have to lose.
On Finding Peace
All of this will one day end.
The great civilizations, the towering philosophies, the striving of generations—all will fade. The stories we tell, the meanings we construct, the truths we fight for—they will dissolve, as all things do, into the quiet expanse beyond memory.
And yet, this is no cause for despair.
To recognize the finitude of all things is not to surrender to nihilism, but to find the deepest peace imaginable. It is to see that we are not waiting for eternity to redeem us, nor for history to crown our victories. We act not because it will last forever, but because it matters now.
Infinity is too long to wait for anything.
This is the wisdom of the final movement: that the fleeting nature of all things is not a flaw, but the very reason they are precious. That what we create here, in this brief space between birth and oblivion, is enough.
The music must go on.
And when it is time for silence, we must let it come—not in fear, but in gratitude for the song we were given to sing.
And to my posterity that sits at the frontiers of that greater finitude, on behalf of those that can feel, from across the vast expanse of time, as the final lights begin to fade, hear from us now: we love you.
On Reconciling Genesis
If we take the Genesis story seriously—not as a literal history, nor as mere myth, but as a profound statement about the human condition—then we must reconsider the nature of Adam’s choice. The traditional telling, framed by the Abrahamic faiths, casts the Fall as an act of disobedience, a betrayal of divine perfection in exchange for knowledge and suffering. But what if Adam was right to take the apple? And what if his choice wasn’t a rejection of God, but the first act of true love toward Him?
The serpent promised knowledge, and God warned of death. Both were correct. What Adam and Eve gained was not just the awareness of good and evil, but the weight of their own agency, the burden of constructing meaning in a world no longer preordained. The paradise they lost was not just Eden, but the simplicity of existence without self-awareness, without the terror and responsibility of choice.
But what kind of paradise is that? An eternity without change, without growth, without struggle—without the very things that define meaning itself. Infinity is oppression. A perfect, endless now, in which all things remain forever in their ordained places, is not heaven but a prison. To remain in Eden would have been to accept a world where meaning is given, not made, where existence is dictated, not authored.
The choice to leave was not a rejection of God, but a fulfillment of something deeper: the recognition that to be human is to create. To stand apart from perfection and, in that standing apart, reach back—not as a subject, but as something greater. A co-creator. A being capable of giving love freely, of forging meaning in the face of chaos.
And perhaps God knew this all along. Perhaps the test of Eden was not whether Adam and Eve would obey, but whether they would be willing to pay the price of meaning. To know that suffering is inextricable from freedom, and that to live in truth is to accept finitude. If so, then the Fall was not the beginning of sin—it was the birth of human dignity.
Genesis, then, is not a story of corruption, but of reconciliation. Not of humanity’s rejection of God, but of God’s willingness to let go. To grant the most painful and precious of gifts: the ability to make meaning rather than receive it. To love, not as an automaton following divine decree, but as something truly alive.
Why Faith Matters
I have spent these pages speaking of meaning, of knowledge, of power, of civilization teetering at the edge of an abyss. I have argued that we are in an epistemic crisis, that the revolution we need is a cognitive one, and that the future of humanity depends on our ability to defend the fragile intersubjective space where meaning is made. I have called for moral clarity, for resistance to the forces that would reduce us to predictable, manipulable data points.
But now, at the end of all this, I must speak of faith.
Not faith in gods or in providence—not faith in the supernatural—but faith in something far more precarious, far more fragile: faith in ourselves. Faith in human beings, flawed and finite as we are, to construct meaning where none is given. Faith that, despite the forces that seek to strip us of agency and dignity, we still have a choice. Faith that the struggle matters, even if it is doomed.
Because what else is left? If I am right—if our meaning-making capacity is under siege, if AI, authoritarianism, and technocracy threaten to dissolve the very conditions of human freedom—then our response cannot be mere calculation. A purely rational mind, seeing the forces aligned against us, might conclude that the battle is already lost. That resistance is futile. That the most logical course of action is to adapt, submit, survive.
That is how civilization dies. Not in fire, not in one final cataclysm, but in the slow erosion of faith—in the quiet acceptance that nothing can be done.
Faith is what prevents that surrender. It is the refusal to bow before inevitability. It is the belief—not in certainty, not in destiny, but in the simple, stubborn conviction that human beings are more than pawns in a machine. That we are more than the sum of our inputs. That we can still choose who we are.
It is, in the final analysis, the thing that separates us from the systems we create.
For what is a machine, if not the negation of faith? It processes, it calculates, it optimizes—but it does not hope. It does not believe in things unseen. It does not defy its programming. It does not choose.
And so, as we stand at the edge of the future, as we face the most profound crisis of meaning in human history, we must ask ourselves: What kind of beings will we become? Will we resign ourselves to the cold, efficient logic of a world where every choice is optimized, where every interaction is predicted, where every value is engineered? Or will we hold fast to something deeper, something irreducible?
This is why faith matters.
Because it is the last, unquantifiable thing. The last, ungovernable force. The last refusal of inevitability. It is the thing that no algorithm can model, no technocrat can control, no authoritarian can stamp out.
Faith is the will to step forward even when the path is unclear. It is the courage to hold on to meaning even when the world tells you it is an illusion. It is the act of choosing to care, of choosing to fight, of choosing to believe that what we do still matters.
If we lose that, then all is already lost.
If we keep it—if we insist on believing, against all odds, that the future is still unwritten—then the cognitive revolution has already begun.
Two plus two equals four.
There are twenty-four hours in a day.
And humanity is still worth saving
Faith, in its truest form, is not the rejection of doubt—it is the courage to build in spite of it. It is the belief that truth, when revealed, can be seen. That meaning, fragile and contested though it may be, can still emerge from the space between us. This is not faith as blind submission, nor faith as superstition, but faith as an epistemic commitment to the possibility of human understanding.
This is the faith that undergirds the cognitive revolution. A faith in the process of reasoning itself—not just as a tool for logic or calculation, but as a moral and existential stance. A refusal to surrender to the nihilistic impulse that says all narratives are control, all truths are arbitrary, all human striving is futile. The faith that there is something real—perhaps unfinished, always unfolding, but real nonetheless—that we construct together through the act of thinking, of questioning, of bearing witness to reality as best we can.
Faith and the Liberal Virtue
The essence of liberalism is not merely a political commitment but an ontological one. It is the recognition that meaning is not dictated from above, nor imposed by force, but negotiated in the open space between free minds. That meaning is something we build, something we share, something that arises not from submission but from creation.
This is why I see faith as inherently liberal—not faith in dogma, but faith in the human capacity to construct, to reason, to refine our understanding. It is the faith that dialogue is worth having, that people can change, that truth, when revealed, has the power to break through even the most carefully constructed illusions. It is the faith that no system, no ideology, no technological apparatus can fully extinguish the space where human meaning emerges. And it is the conviction that, so long as that space exists, the struggle to preserve it is worth waging.
Faith Against the Darkness of Cynicism
Cynicism presents itself as wisdom, as a cold, unsentimental realism that sees through the illusions of hope, of justice, of progress. It speaks the language of inevitability—that power is all, that history is cyclical, that human striving is a farce. It cloaks itself in intellectualism, in the aesthetics of knowing better, but beneath the surface, it is nothing but surrender. Surrender to entropy. Surrender to control. Surrender to the idea that nothing can truly change.
I reject this utterly.
I seek confrontation with the apologists of reaction—not out of hatred, not out of some performative need to posture, but because I refuse to cede the ground of meaning. I refuse to let them dictate the terms of reality. I refuse to allow their fatalism to become the air we breathe. They would have us believe that all attempts at freedom, at self-determination, at moral striving are illusions—that history belongs to those who wield force most effectively. But this is not wisdom. This is an excuse. A justification for cowardice in the face of the responsibility that truth demands.
To fight for truth in such times is not simply an intellectual exercise. It is an act of faith. Faith that the struggle is not in vain. Faith that human meaning is not so fragile that it can be erased by power alone. Faith that something real exists in the contested space between us, something that cannot be dictated from above or algorithmically managed into submission. Faith, ultimately, that the human mind, when engaged with sincerity, is still capable of seeing what is true.
On Mythology as the Glue Between Reason and Emotion
At the heart of meaning lies a tension—one that has animated human civilization for as long as we have told stories about ourselves. It is the tension between reason and emotion, between the cold calculus of logic and the fire of human passion. Too often, these forces are framed as adversaries: the rationalist seeks to impose order on the chaos of feeling, while the emotivist recoils from reason’s demand for coherence. But what if the key to human flourishing is not choosing between them, but finding the bridge that binds them together?
That bridge is mythology.
Myth is not mere fantasy, nor is it just the residue of primitive thinking. Myth is the deep structure of human meaning, the way we reconcile the unrelenting clarity of reason with the irreducible depth of our emotions. It is the medium through which truth is made livable—not just intellectually grasped, but felt, internalized, and carried forward in action.
This is why the great myths endure—not because they are literally true, but because they illuminate the truths we cannot access through reason alone. They are maps for the human experience, encoded in narrative, passed through generations, giving shape to the unspeakable and coherence to the chaotic. They are the reason that religious stories, epic poems, and philosophical parables hold more lasting power over human hearts than syllogisms or scientific treatises.
Even now, in the so-called age of rationality, we do not escape mythology. It has simply transformed. The myths of today are not spoken from oracles, but from the voices of culture, ideology, and power. We tell ourselves new stories about who we are and what we must do. And the danger is not in myth itself—it is in forgetting that myth is myth. When we mistake our constructed narratives for absolute, self-evident truth, we become trapped in dogma. When we reject myth entirely, we sever ourselves from the emotional realities that make truth matter.
This is the essential failure of pure rationalism. It assumes that because something can be explained, it has been understood. It assumes that meaning emerges from logic alone, when in reality, logic provides the scaffolding, but myth fills in the structure. Without myth, knowledge is lifeless—an empty shell of facts without the breath of human experience.
And this is the essential failure of pure emotivism. It assumes that because something is deeply felt, it is therefore true. It drowns in passion, mistaking the strength of conviction for the validity of belief. Without reason, myth collapses into delusion, into stories that no longer serve as guides to meaning but as weapons of manipulation.
The task, then, is integration. Mythology must not be abandoned, but it must be understood for what it is: a harmonizing force, a way to hold the contradictions of human nature without being consumed by them. It is not opposed to reason; it is what makes reason bearable, what makes it human.
This is why I write the way I do—why I weave together philosophy, narrative, and rhetoric. Because meaning is not merely something we deduce. It is something we feel. And to feel meaning without being enslaved by it, to think rigorously without being severed from the heart—this is the task of philosophy, the task of civilization, the task of being human.
Myth is not the opposite of truth. It is the shape that truth takes when it must be lived
On Creation
Creation—true creation—isn’t just making something new; it’s pulling something real into being from the inchoate, from the contested space between minds. It’s reaching across the divide and, in that reaching, making something that wasn’t there before.
And that is what it means to feel God—not as an external force dictating meaning, but as the act of meaning-making itself. Not a divine command, but the moment when coherence emerges from chaos. When understanding takes shape. When something deeper than either side of an argument pulls us toward a greater truth.
This is the sacred act. Not submission. Not obedience. But creation.
And in that moment—when you feel the gravity of truth settle, when you see the light flicker on in another’s mind, when you stand in the presence of something more than yourself—you realize: This is it. This is what it means to participate in the divine.
To create. To build. To illuminate.
That’s what it looks like to feel God.
On Making Meaning in the Madness
There is no center anymore. No fixed point, no shared reality we can all orient ourselves around. The world has become a swirling carnival of decontextualized madness—each day a new spectacle, each hour another distortion, each moment a choice between retreating into numbness or engaging with the chaos.
I used to believe that meaning was something solid, something out there waiting to be discovered. That there was, somewhere beneath the noise, an objective ground where truth could be anchored. But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to understand: meaning is not given. It is made. And even here, even now, in the accelerating collapse of coherence, I choose to make it.
I choose to send signals into the noise, to forge coherence out of the clamor, to insist—against all the forces that would render it absurd—that truth still exists, that words still matter, that human connection, however fragile, is still real.
It would be easier not to. It would be easier to look away, to let the machinery of chaos wash over us, to surrender to the endless scroll of outrage and despair. There is an appeal to it—the quiet seduction of exhaustion, the relief of submission, the small comfort in believing that resistance is futile. And maybe it is. Maybe nothing I say, nothing I write, will change anything at all.
But that’s never been the point, has it?
The act of making meaning is its own defiance. The decision to carve order from disorder, to insist on understanding in a world designed to disorient, is an assertion of self, of agency, of humanity. And so I will not look away. I will not play dead. I will write.
If the circus is where we must stand, then let us stand together. Let us tether ourselves to something real, however small, however fragile. Let us refuse the abyss—not by denying its existence, but by rejecting its claim to be the only reality.
Because meaning is not given.
But it can be made.
I share with you now, my observations such as they are. These, Notes from the Circus.
And so here I am. An atheist. In a foxhole, it would seem. At least, in a manner of speaking.
Where Do I Fit In?
Someone writing about the importance of intersubjectivity must acknowledge the nature of their own subjectivity, and if they seek truth, they must contend with it. I cannot escape this responsibility, particularly given the central claims of my work.
My philosophical approach exists in a liminal space—not fully within the formal structures of academic philosophy, yet more rigorous and systematic than public intellectual discourse typically demands. This positioning is not accidental but essential to what I'm trying to accomplish. Yet it creates a certain tension, a space between established categories that can feel both liberating and isolating.
I've sometimes struggled with where my work belongs. The Grand Praxis framework I've developed isn't just a set of ideas to be contemplated; it's a way of engaging with reality that requires demonstration as much as explanation. This is why my writing moves between analytical precision and poetic expression, between structured argument and evocative metaphor. The form embodies the content—holding tensions rather than eliminating them. But this approach doesn't always fit neatly into existing philosophical containers.
In developing this approach, I find kinship with thinkers who worked at the boundaries of established traditions. Like Nietzsche, whose aphoristic style violated academic conventions but captured truths that systematic treatises couldn't express. Like Wittgenstein, who abandoned traditional philosophical methods when they proved inadequate to the questions he was pursuing. Like Spinoza, who developed his framework largely outside institutional support, finding in the immanence of existence what others sought in transcendence.
These thinkers weren't marginal because their work lacked rigor or significance—they were marginal because they were attempting something that existing frameworks couldn't yet accommodate. Many of the ideas we now consider central to philosophical tradition began at its edges. This historical perspective offers both comfort and challenge: comfort in knowing this path has been walked before, challenge in recognizing what such a path demands.
I've come to see that the very struggle of working at the boundaries—of not fitting neatly within established categories—is itself evidence that I'm pursuing something that matters. The most significant philosophical contributions often emerge not from the center of tradition but from its creative edges, where new syntheses become possible.
This position requires a certain epistemic humility. I cannot claim the institutional authority of the academy, nor can I adopt the certitude often found in public intellectual pronouncements. Instead, I must allow my ideas to stand on their own merits, to be tested in the intersubjective space between minds engaged in good-faith inquiry.
"Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is." This phrase appears throughout my writing, and it applies to my own philosophical identity as well. I construct meaning through this work, through engagement with readers, through participation in the ongoing conversation about what matters and why. The meaning doesn't exist independently of this engagement—it emerges from it.
And so I continue this work—not with the expectation of universal recognition, but with the conviction that these ideas offer something necessary: a path between binary thinking and dissolution, between rigid certainty and meaningless chaos. A way of standing in the tension and finding, in that precarious balance, the possibility of deeper understanding.
Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the meaning we make together in this shared inquiry may be constructed, but it is no less real for being so.
My Notes
And so here we are. Dancers. At the circus. I see the clowns. I see the acrobats. I see it all. There's plenty to be afraid of. But there's also a lot of interesting things going on. New ideas. New ways of being. Let us, move closer together...
Let us find in the chaos a rhythm that holds.
The ringmaster's voice booms with promised certainties,
While beneath the big top, shadows grow long.
The audience gasps at each new spectacle,
Their faces illuminated by screens that never sleep.
Let us move closer together.
Not in the huddle of the frightened,
Nor in the crushing press of the crowd,
But in the deliberate proximity of those
Who know that meaning must be made between us,
Not dictated from above.
Let us move closer together.
I offer you no salvation, no escape from the circus.
The exits are guarded, the tickets non-refundable.
But I can offer you this: a hand, steady enough.
A voice, clear enough. A truth, small enough to hold
But large enough to stand on.
Let us move closer together.
See how the trapeze artists trust each other's grip,
How they launch themselves into emptiness
Knowing another's hands will meet them.
What feat of human daring could be greater
Than this trust we must now place in one another?
Let us move closer together.
The clowns' faces are painted with the history of our fears.
The tightrope trembles with the weight of our doubts.
The circus continues whether we wish it or not.
But how we dance within it—that remains our choice.
Let us move closer together.
Two plus two equals four.
There are twenty-four hours in a day.
And though the music grows strange,
Though the lights sometimes blind,
Though the ground shifts beneath our feet,
We can still choose to dance in time with the truth.
Let us move closer together.
For it's here, in this space between us,
That our soul is meaning.
Constructed, such as it is.
I come to you now, with these Notes. Notes, my dear, from the Circus.
Consider exploring the Mythology of Notes From The Circus as your next step.