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< Back Philosophy’s 10 Fatal Fallacies David Cowles Aug 19, 2025 “We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality.” Western philosophy is sick. It’s coming up on 100 years since Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre published the last great comprehensive philosophical systems ( Process and Reality and Being and Nothingness ). They did so at a time when most of their contemporaries had concluded that ‘systematic philosophy’ was an oxymoron and that the proper purview of philosophy was limited to analysis . No wonder! 2400 years after Plato, we were still debating the same tired issues…with no resolution in sight. It is only sensible that folks began to ask whether the very notion of philosophical inquiry was flawed, whether ultimate or even relative truth was discoverable, whether metaphysics could ever be meaningful. My own superannuated contemporaries, the ones who kept me up all night in college dorm room bull sessions, have apparently given up. They are content that existence has no extrinsic meaning : “Cultivate your own garden.” (Voltaire) “A man should eat and drink and enjoy himself.” ( Ecclesiastes ) The fault, however, lies not in the stars but in ourselves. We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality! The intellectual and spiritual diseases of the 21 st century – cynicism, nihilism, solipsism, skepticism, secularism, relativism, hedonism, et al. – stem in large part from 10 fundamental philosophical fallacies. Scattered across multiple academic disciplines – math, topology, physics, logic, ethics, linguistics, theology et al., these fallacies share one feature in common: they are all intellectually descended from Horatio…not Hamlet. Fallacy #1 – Geometry Euclid taught us that parallel lines do not intersect; well and good! But in the real world, all lines intersect. What originates at a singularity (Big Bang) converges at a singularity (Heat Death: Big Crunch or Big Freeze). Frost’s two roads both lead home and ultimately all roads do lead to ‘Rome’. Euclidean geometry is orientable . A sheet of paper has two sides that never meet. Even if we join two ends of the sheet to make a loop (a BK crown), obverse and reverse remain distinct. In fact, now they also permanently split the world in two: ‘inside the loop’ vs. ‘outside the loop’. Closed geometric figures (circles, triangles, etc.) divide 2 dimensional planes into inside and outside areas separated by an impermeable one dimensional perimeter. Likewise, spheres and polyhedra divide 3-d space into inside and outside volumes, separated by a two dimensional surface. We’ve trained ourselves to take these things for granted. But we all know that we don’t live in a world like this. At least since Heraclitus (5 th century BCE), we’ve known that in the real world ‘everything flows’. Nothing corresponding to Euclid’s orientable model exists anywhere ! Every ‘impermeable’ boundary is in fact a dissipative membrane: Ultimately there are no insides or outsides. All bifurcations are local (temporary) and ‘imperfect’: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” (Frost) Even protons eventually decay. Consider a living cell, for example. It takes 30 trillion of them to form just one adult human body. Each cell is separated from every other cell and from the rest of its external world by a membrane we misleadingly call a ‘cell wall’. We have developed a complex science to account for the dissipative behavior of this membrane: once thought impermeable, more than a billion molecules cross it every second. The cell ‘wall’ is biology’s Maginot Line…or its ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. In the Real World, all lines intersect, therefore all planes form loops. Conforming to the fundamental topology of the Universe, all loops ‘twist’ to form one-sided Mobius Strips, and every higher dimensional ‘object’ (e.g. a Klein Bottle ) includes an embedded Mobius Strip. The geometry of the Real World is non-orientable . Orientable , Euclidean Geometry assumes 360° symmetry. Rightly so, but only in certain ‘special cases’, e.g. circular shapes and electromagnetic fields. Let X be a point on a circle. Move X 360° in either direction, et voila , X-again. More fundamentally, though, the Real World exhibits 720° symmetry, a characteristic of non-orientable geometries. Tetrahedra, the foundation of all structure (Plato, Fuller), consist of 4 triangles whose interior angles each add up to 180° (180 x 4 = 720). A tetrahedron is the union of two 360° circles (360 x 2 = 720), twisted relative to each other, so that it is impossible to trace the sides of the tetrahedron without going over one side twice. Fermions, the building blocks of all matter, exhibit symmetry only after rotating through 720°. 360° symmetry gives us access to only half a world (one circle) – we’re like Alice before she stepped through the looking-glass. The Higgs Field creates a ‘mirror world’, unknown to the pioneers of Western mathematics: Euclid, Archimedes, et al., through which all matter must pass. Orientability (flatness) is a fundamentally ‘local’ phenomenon. Just as the round Earth appears locally flat, the non-orientable Cosmos appears locally orientable . If you smashed any globally non-orientable Klein Bottle into pieces, each piece (local) would be orientable …but the whole is not. What is true of the Whole is not true of any of its so-called Parts. Parts are always orientable , Wholes never are. (This distinction may define Wholes vs. Parts.) But as we shall soon see ( Fallacy #2 ), there are no Parts, only Wholes exist, Wholes embedded in other Wholes. Fallacy #2 – Topology We are accustomed to thinking of the material world as a hierarchy of Wholes and Parts: “A whole is equal to the sum of its parts”, or is it “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts”, or “the sum of the parts is greater than the whole?” But in the case of a Klein Bottle ( Fallacy #1 ), what is true of the Whole is true of none of its so-called Parts, taken individually or even collectively. This degree of ambiguity alone should be a clue: something is wrong with this picture! If contradictory propositions about Wholes and Parts are all true, then everything is ‘true’ and therefore nothing is True . In fact, there are no Parts, only Wholes. To be is to be whole and to be a Whole. Some Wholes are embedded in other Wholes but embedded Wholes are not Parts; they are Wholes in their own right, symbiotically embedded. The nucleus of a cell is an independent organism, symbiotically embedded in its host. Same with mitochondria. A human cell in turn is not ‘part’ of a body, it is an independent organism, a Whole, embedded in a broader Whole. These observations lead to four wildly counter-intuitive corollaries: (1) “No two events intersect” unless one is entirely embedded in the other. Unless B and C are entirely disjoint, either B is embedded in C or C is embedded in B. But if one event is embedded in another then they function as a single event. (2) However, if B and C are disjoint, each may be embedded, independently, in A. But in that case, there is no consistent arithmetic relationship (common metric) spanning the volumes of C, B, and A. Even though B and C are embedded in A they are not ‘parts’ of A; so it is not necessarily the case that A > B or A > C or A ≥ (B+C). A, B, and C are independent Wholes, each with its own unique metric. Therefore, the volume(s) of B and/or C and/or (B+C) can be greater than A. The volume of A can even be infinitesimal (hyperreal), or zero, or negative while the volumes(s) of B and C and (B+C) ‘stay positive’…and real. (3) B and C can influence A and A can influence B and/or C but B and C cannot influence each other except through the intermediation of A. A causal relationship ( Fallacy #4 ) is the only relationship between entities (B ↔ C) that is not permitted IRL. The Real World is truly the inverse of the Euclidean World in which all of us live our daily lives. (4) “…it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.” (O. C. Smith) We imagine that the Universe pulls itself up by its ‘bootstraps’, that fundamental particles assemble themselves into ever more complex structures: electron → atom → molecule → cell → organism → community → society → the United Federation of Planets ( Star Trek ). In fact there is no pulling up, there are no bootstraps and nothing assembles. There are only Wholes that construct themselves by incorporating qualities manifested by other Wholes. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, “It’s Wholes all the way down.” Fallacy #3 – Space, Time & Scale We are transfixed by the enormity of space and time and by the c. 60 orders of magnitude separating the cosmic event horizon from Planck’s measurements. In fact, however, space, time and scale are just three different axes on which we can conveniently arrange events to illustrate various pathways of inherited order. Time, for example, allows us to arrange events on a grid that corresponds to a desired ordering principle, e.g. increasing entropy. Until 1964, following Einstein et al., we were certain that the speed of light placed an absolute bound on the degree of integration possible in any universe. In fact, we now know that most events (particles) are entangled with other events across vast tracts of spacetime; and between entangled events, spacetime is annihilated – not that information travels faster than ‘c’ but that spatiotemporal separation is simply irrelevant. It is epiphenomenal in relation to substructural entanglement. Space is an ordering principle that allows us to quantify the strength at which various forces are felt by various entities. Re Scale , 60 orders of magnitude may be just what we need to house all the bits of information that currently constitute the universe. Fortunately, the universe is making room for more; it’s expanding. Speculation : Does the rate of cosmic expansion put a limit on our ability to generate new bits of information? Or does the rate of information generation determine the rate of cosmic expansion? Does the advent of AI mean that we could be headed for a new period of hyperinflation? But all of this is purely relative. According to George Macdonald, “Form is much but size is nothing.” And before him, William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” But just exactly how ‘relative’ is it? According to Roger Penrose’s CCC model of cosmology, the isolated photons characteristic of the Big Freeze may be the primordial fluctuations in the CMB that become/became the seeds that drive/drove the formation of galaxies. In fact, the fundamental structure of the World is neither spatiotemporal nor scalar; it’s fractal . There are patterns that occupy regions of spacetime and repeat over and over again with slight variations - at every scale, in every place, in every timeframe. The rotations of the galaxies around their black holes recapitulate the revolutions of the solar system; the nucleated structure of the Eukaryotic cell recapitulates 20 th century models of the atom. Patterns persist; the universe is a many layered onion. Fallacy #4 - Causality “Everything has a cause.” From physics to theology, this premise was virtually unchallenged (lie quiet, David Hume) prior to the 20 th century’s discovery of relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos and entanglement. Causality and Ontogenesis have become virtual synonyms. In fact, however, there are no ‘causes’, and therefore no ‘effects’; there are only events . Every event is causa sui and sui generis . Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. in the context of its own unique Actual World. “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot) Every event is a cosmos-filling field, a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for The Good, i.e. for Eternal Values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. The probability of any specific event occurring in the Real World is infinitesimal. Yet events do occur. Is this not just another way of saying that every event is miraculous – not a suspension of physical law but the most dramatic possible expression of that law? In every event, the Actual World is both the subject and the object of the event, but it is never the event itself: “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today!” (Carroll) But without Causality , how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First , all events are motivated by a bundle of shared values (above) that naturally lead toward a convergent future. Second , while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the Eternal Values. Third , while every event is novel, no event is entirely new. As noted above, every event is causa sui and sui generis , but no event (except God?) creates ex nihilo . No two events are entirely the same: Creativity is the spark of difference. No two events are entirely different: Solidarity provides a shared foundation. Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are massively enhanced by Stability and Continuity. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values while maximizing Intensity of Experience. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity) as it meets the objective interests (value) of the wider World. The two interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. Intensity and value both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.” Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives: Value, Intensity, Consistency. What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethics: “Accomplish as much as possible by changing as little as possible!” Qualia are conserved without the phantasm of Causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. Fourth , we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). Within that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. But we don’t see things that way. We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy. We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. Sometimes we affix labels like ‘intention’ or ‘tone’, ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ to various frame sequences. But in reality these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon (the event itself). Finally , we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ with ‘cause’. It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and backtrack through an imagined sequence of ‘quantum changes’, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached the ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. Fallacy #5 - Set Theory Around the dawn of the 20 th century, logic and sets met…and it was love at first sight. Suddenly, everything had to be described in terms of sets. By the time my children were ready for school, even basic arithmetic was taught as set theory. They learned symbolic notation before they learned addition. This was not necessarily a bad thing! Set Theory is a powerful tool. But then Bertrand Russell discovered an apparent ‘paradox’ in ‘naïve set theory’ and ‘fixed it’ by adding a ludicrous new axiom (The Axiom of Foundation). AF states that no set can be a subset (or member) of itself. There are valid sets that are not members of themselves. For example, the set of Real Numbers is not itself a real number. But these sets tend to be inert collections, baseball cards gathering dust on a closet shelf. More fundamentally, the Universe consists of sets that are recursive, i.e. that are members of themselves. Example : the set of physical laws is itself a physical law (a meta-law ). Criteria : (1) Changing the ‘value’ (defined as broadly as possible, perhaps similar to ‘qualia’) of any one member normally changes the ‘value’ of the set itself; and (2) changing the ‘value’ of the set potentially changes the ‘value’ of every member of that set. Rule of thumb : Recursion is characteristic of sets that model organic processes. A universe without recursion is sterile…and very likely impossible. What does it mean ‘to be’, Prince Hamlet? To be a difference that makes a difference. (Gregory Bateson) To be many in one and one among many. (Whitehead); all for one and one for all (Dumas). In pursuit of consistency, Russell sacrificed relevance. IRL, every action is recursive, every action is self-modifying, every action acts on the actor. Fallacy #6 - Arithmetic The rules of arithmetic are powerful, but they are also pernicious. 2500 years ago Zeno proved that arithmetic cannot account for even the simplest real world phenomenon (e.g. the flight of an arrow). The next 2000 years of Western intellectual history may be understood as a coordinated assault on Zeno, triumphantly culminating in the simultaneous discovery of Calculus by Leibniz and Newton c. 1700 CE. Alleluia! The multiplication tables, scourge of 8 year olds everywhere, were finally vindicated. Until they weren’t. 200 years after Newton, Bertrand Russell pointed out that calculus does not resolve Zeno’s paradox after all. Both arithmetic and calculus assume that the real world is continuous, which it is not; it’s discrete, it’s quantized. It’s a foam, not a fluid! Later Godel showed that arithmetic is also incomplete: it inevitably labels certain well-formed propositions ‘undecidable’. I wish I had known about Godel’s work when I was in 3 rd grade. Whenever I encountered a problem too big for my Pooh brain I would have written ‘undecidable’ on the answer sheet (with predictable consequences). According to the rules of arithmetic, ‘operations’ are transitive, commutative, associative and distributive. Translation: a quantity is a quantity is a quantity…regardless of its context. Of course, this is only true in the classroom. IRL, the order of operations makes a big difference. Whenever X + Y = Y + X, it is strictly a matter of coincidence. IRL, nothing is ever divorced from its context and no operation is oblivious to its order. Fallacy #7 - Language We take it for granted that language provides a reasonably accurate map of the real world. It doesn’t! Our contemporary Indo-European languages are almost entirely dependent on action/passive verb forms: i.e. action divorced from reaction. In fact, we’ve known for centuries that “every action entails an equal and opposite reaction” (the very same Mr. Newton), that “what goes around comes around”, that “karma is a b*tch”. Action isolated from reaction imitates the sound of one hand clapping. Once upon a time our Indo-European languages were dominated by a verb form that expressed the reflexivity and interactivity of real process (i.e. the Middle Voice ). However, the technological advances of the bronze and iron ages coopted language into the service of engineering and Middle Voice verb forms atrophied. Who needs the interpersonal when we are exploring the interplanetary? As described in the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9), we are left with languages that no longer communicate anything of existential significance. Bummer! Fallacy #8 – Consciousness Some of us imagine that consciousness is a feature of experience unique to human beings. Some think it is associated with an ephemeral substance like the ‘soul’, Gilbert Grape’s famous Ghost in the Machine (Ryle). Still others think that consciousness can be reduced to electrochemical processes. None of these models is even remotely on point. Consciousness occurs whenever one discrete region of the ontological field becomes aware of another such region. I am aware of the people, places, and things around me. A cell is aware of the molecular bath in which it is immersed, a nucleus is aware of the cytoplasm surrounding it, a proton is aware of its companion electron, two entangled photons are simultaneously aware of one another even ‘across the universe’. (Beatles) Contrary to pre-20 th century assumptions, there is no such thing as unconscious awareness (sensation, perhaps, awareness, not). Tweens, relax, there are no zombies! Whenever one region of the ontological field is aware of another region, it automatically becomes aware of itself being aware of that region. Ultimately, all awareness includes self-awareness, so all awareness is conscious. In the real world every ‘actual entity’ (event) is both directly and indirectly aware of its environment – indirectly through being aware of itself being aware. There is an infinitesimal difference between the object of direct awareness and the mediated object of indirect awareness. This is equivalent to what Jacques Derrida called differance . We see the world stereoscopically, resulting in two slightly skew images with a quantum of difference between them. That is where consciousness lives; this is what we call ‘identity’. Therefore, consciousness does not reside in any subject, object, or process; it transcends them all. It is Sartre’s universal Neant (Negation). When Roger Penrose (c. 2010) first proposed that consciousness was a quantum phenomenon, he didn’t know the half of it. We have grown up with the assumption that awareness and consciousness are two different things – and that’s right, sort of. Being conscious is not the same thing as being aware; but awareness automatically entails consciousness. Every action acts on both its subject and its object. An ‘act of awareness’ is no different. When I am aware of X, I am the apparent subject (active voice) of that awareness and X is the apparent object (passive voice). ( Fallacy #7 ) But in fact, as I am aware of X, X is also ‘aware’ of me (Middle Voice). But since I have no access to X’s subjective experience, I experience X’s experience of me as me being aware of myself being aware. I become ‘self-conscious’; I am shy . I channel ‘the other’ (Sartre). Therefore, a conscious being is inherently interpersonal, even if ‘the other person’ turns out to be a stone; been there! (Anaximander, Buber, et al.) The object of my awareness (the world) is in a state of perpetual flux (Heraclitus’ flow); it is coincident with time. The subject of that awareness (‘I’) is in a state of permanent stasis (Parmenides’ Aletheia ); it is atemporal. The object of my awareness is perceived through its qualia ; the subject of my awareness has no qualia : it is one, simple, featureless, eternal. I (object) am different than I was a nanosecond ago; I (subject) am the same as I was at the moment of my conception, the same as I will be at the moment of my death. There is no ‘preferred time’. Self-help gurus notwithstanding, Now is no more real than Then . I am simultaneously and instantaneously who I was, who I am, and who I will be at every moment of my life. I do not need to die to ‘see my life flash before my eyes’; I live that, here and now. YHWH said, “I am what am” (Exodus 3: 14). Descartes said, “Cogito ergo sum.” I say, “ I am I” period, a quantum manifestation of eternal, universal Being. I have no ‘hair’ (Hawking). I am Odysseus, I am Nemo, I am Everyman ! I am Consciousness per se but only as it is experienced over a certain ‘defined set of related events’ which Whitehead called a Personal Society…or a Person. Fallacy #9 – Ethics Admit it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment and so we are direct descendants of Machiavelli, no matter how many ‘times removed’. Regardless of what we profess, we all behave as if ‘ends justify means’. And perhaps they would…if they existed. We’ll work a 60 hour week at a job we detest if it enables us to feed our families…or go to Disney World; but would we do so if we learned that our spouse had just won the lottery…or that Disney World was closing? We’ll move to a Ritzy neighborhood we can’t afford so that our kids can go to the best schools. Would we do so if we learned that the school committee was about to fire all the teachers and open a series of open air academies in the Athenian tradition? (Well, maybe I would do that!) And unfortunately, some of us will shoot a passer-by in the street if it gives us the cash we need to feed our tastes, habits, or addictions. But even we might think twice if we knew the passer-by was skint . In fact there are no ends…and so there are no means. Of course, there are prior events and subsequent events but that doesn’t make the former a means or the latter an end . Without Causality ( Fallacy #4 ) nothing can be a means to anything. “Evening came and morning followed, the first day,” (Genesis 1: 5) doesn’t mean that the darkness caused the dawn. But even if you insist on preserving the idea of causality, Machiavelli won’t wash. For something to be a ‘means to an end’ there has to be some sort of ‘intentionality’, i.e. the end must be in sight, if only virtually, at the moment of means . But in fact, the relationship between specific prior events and specific subsequent events is chaotic and therefore essentially unproveable, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Would you raise a colony of butterflies in Borneo so that a certain Cubs game would be rained out? Neither would I. And yet, unlike Indianapolis, it does rain in Chicago in the summertime! It is entirely possible that Bornean butterflies cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series but there is absolutely no way to know that, much less predict it, much less control it. All we can say is (1) there are butterflies in Borneo, (2) a Cubs game got rained out in the 4 th inning with the Cubs leading 10 – 0, (3) the game had to be replayed, and the Cubs lost, (4) the Cubs missed the post season by a single game. So, “Mission Accomplished, Butterfly?” Because there is no knowable, predictable, controllable relationship between prior events and subsequent events, there are no ends . Therefore Ethics , at least since 1500, is not so much ‘wrong’ as ‘absurd’. Imagine a frustrated parent trying to rein-in a houseful of mischievous preteens. Dad decides to post a new set of house rules on the refrigerator door, and he warns of dire consequences if even one of the new rules is broken. However, the rules are purposely written to ensure they will be unintelligible. Welcome to the Enlightenment! There is only one valid ethical imperative: Create beauty, disseminate truth, act justly…all regardless of any so-called consequences. Fallacy #10 – God Our final faux pas, Fallacy #10 , is fittingly a catch-all for a google of fallacies, i.e. the set of all affirmative propositions, actual or potential, that identify God with any specific predicate. The list is endless, because God is ineffable. That said, it is possible to make meaningful statements about God using metaphorical language. It is as if God were Being, Good, Beauty, Truth, Justice, Love, Freedom, etc. Reason allows us to identify these as Divine Qualities and experience shows us that these qualities permeate, however incompletely and imperfectly, the material world. Therefore, they are an epistemologically valid way for us to talk about ‘ineffable God’ using metaphors grounded in human experience. That said, the millennia old debate, “Does God Exist?” is misconceived. First, God is not an existent among existents; ‘God’ is what all existents share in common, God is their foundation. Second, God does not ‘exist’ so much as ‘occur’; like everything else, God is an event. ‘God’ is the name we give to the ‘Bundle’ of ontological features that all actual entities exhibit, i.e. that underlies the phenomenon of Being itself. ( Grammatical Note : All actual entities share certain ontological features, but it is the Bundle itself that underlies Being per se .) Of course, this turns the matter of God’s existence into a tautology. Est ergo Deus Est , or for the Narcissists among us, Sum ergo Deus Est , and for the more spiritually developed, Es Ergo Deus Est . But is that a good thing or bad? Can ‘analytic’ propositions be meaningful? How many angels do stand on the head of a pin? The entire Bible can be read as God’s ongoing but often unsuccessful effort to communicate his nature to the world, climaxing when his “Word (logos) became flesh ( Xpristos ) and dwelt among us.” (John 1: 14) In the end, no one is more misunderstood than God. We pray for signs, for miracles, for God’s intervention in history and in our personal lives, and when we don’t get what we think we’re due, we accuse God of suborning evil . In point of fact, we have substituted an avatar for God, and we have fashioned it in our own image and likeness. We have set up a straw man (‘God is like us’ replaces ‘we are like God’) so that we can indict God when he does not conform to our own ‘high’ standards of conduct. But “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55: 58 – 59) We are agents, we act, we make stuff happen. God does not make things happen; he removes barriers so that good things can happen of their own accord. God is a liberator, not an engineer; like Jeremiah and John the Baptist, we are God’s engineers. Look at Genesis . God said, “ Let there be light;” then God “ saw that it was good.” And only then “evening came and morning followed, the first day.” This is not to limit or demean God in any way. God is everything God could possibly be…consistent with the created world being what it is, i.e. totally and completely free (Sartre). I am not speaking here only of human free will ; I am talking about the existential freedom enjoyed by every single event in Universe. It is through the intermediation of God that the Eternal Values are available to the World as lures for feeling and motives for action. But only we can answer, “Yes!” History is entirely in our hands…and what a mess we’ve made so far. The Eternal Values, God’s essence, are why (not how) there are events. And it is in so far as those fleeting events manifest Eternal Values that the events themselves are timeless. God motivates actions, curates experiences, and redeems results. Cain founds cities, Noah builds boats, Moses leads an insurrection; Joshua fights battles, Solomon builds a temple, Jesus saves! Judeo-Hellenic civilization goes back almost 3,500 years. Ironically, some of the most philosophically impactful works came early: The Book of Job , Ecclesiastes , Parmenides’ On Nature , Plato’s Timaeus , the Gospel of John , and a selection of canonical Epistles, including Colossians , Ephesians , Corinthians , Romans , Hebrews , James , and the letters of John and Peter. A case can be made that the Golden Age of speculative philosophy ended with Augustine of Hippo c. 500 CE. 1500 years later, we’re still debating a lot of the same issues: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Who R U? Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad or morally indifferent people? And, of course, why is there something rather than nothing? What else would you expect? We’ve been looking at these problems through some seriously dysfunctional lenses. Coke bottle bottoms would work better! It’s no wonder that academic philosophy is held in such low repute. For the most part, it takes for granted characterizations of reality that are obviously (above) false. We pretty much need to start over again. But first somebody has to say it out loud, “The Emperor is seriously underdressed.” *** Rodin, Auguste. The Thinker. 1902. Bronze sculpture. Musée Rodin, Paris. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

Written by David Cowles, Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today magazine and explores short, profound thoughts and discoveries about theology, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, society, and prayer. Subscribe today for FREE! Enter your email address here: Subscribe now! Thanks for submitting! Aug 21, 2025 AI Validates Nietzsche “Nihilist Nietzsche joining forces with Orthodox Theists and 21st century computer scientists…” Read More Aug 19, 2025 Philosophy’s 10 Fatal Fallacies “We imagine we’re seeing the Universe as it is; in fact, we’re looking through a kaleidoscope, mistaking colored glass for reality.” Read More Aug 14, 2025 Memories… “Memories light the corners of my mind, misty watercolored memories…scattered pictures of…the way we were.” (Streisand) Read More Aug 12, 2025 Proust, Derrida and La Differance “Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric.” Read More Aug 11, 2025 Applied Camus “I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system.” Read More Aug 7, 2025 Matriarchy and Mitochondria “Going forward, you might want to tone down that male machismo, just a bit.” Read More Aug 5, 2025 Is My AI Already Conscious? “Ask a chatbot if it’s conscious, and it will likely say no—unless it’s Anthropic’s Claude 4.” Read More Aug 1, 2025 Loaves and Fishes III “…The evangelists outlined an economic doctrine challenging today’s Liberal (capitalist), Marxist (socialist), and Islamic (iqtisad) models.” Read More Jul 31, 2025 The Worst Book Ever Read “In just over 300 pages, this book manages to recycle just about every bad idea since stale bread...” Read More Jul 29, 2025 YOU Make Life Worth Living “Sartre said that Hell was ‘other people’; he was wrong…Other people are precisely what gives life its meaning, its purpose, its value…” Read More Jul 24, 2025 “And Who is My Neighbor?” “If the 21st century is ultimately known for anything, it will for its fresh take on the law student’s question.” Read More Jul 21, 2025 Cause and Effect “Nothing has a cause… Why should one event cause another? How would one event cause another? How could it?” Read More Thoughts While Shaving 31 Page 1

< Back AI Validates Nietzsche David Cowles Aug 21, 2025 “Nihilist Nietzsche joining forces with Orthodox Theists and 21st century computer scientists…” “Who’d a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) One of Nietzsche’s most controversial propositions has been validated by recent developments in the science of Artificial Intelligence. AI has graduated from Algorithm School and moved on to the Academy of Creative Design, finding novel solutions to novel problems. But this raises a more fundamental issue: True creativity cannot be reduced to the mere reshuffling of defined variables, the rearrangement of words on a page, for example. I arrange words on a page. So did Shakeseare. See the problem. To be useful, AI needs to be able to distinguish the melodious prose of David Cowles from the tortured poetry of William Shakespeare. You can do it…but can AI? To be clear, it is not just a matter of noticing a difference between Shakespearean poetry and my prose; it is a matter of assigning a ‘quality assessment’ to each. Cowles – A (of course); Shakespeare – C- (keep trying). A great grandchild finger paints. “Is this good, Boka?” Innately, she understands that all ‘arrangements’ (if I may use that word for it) of paint on paper are not of equal value . She knows she likes Sally’s painting more than Josh’s. But why? And what about her own painting? Is it as good as Sally’s? As bad as Josh’s? To confuse matters further, Josh says he really likes her painting while Sally just said, “Mine’s better!” But is it? Josh, Sally and my great grand all have an innate sense of Beauty. How they apply that sense IRL to actual paintings is another matter entirely. The concept of Beauty is universal and innate; the appreciation of Beauty is the work of an individual’s lifetime. ( Sidebar : According to the Baltimore Catechism, RCC, c. 1955, our existential purpose is to know , love , and serve God. We know God by pursuing Truth, we love God by curating Beauty, we serve God by behaving justly and demanding Justice for all. These values are universal and felt innately by each of us.) But where does this innate sense of Beauty come from? Is it a function of evolution? Is it a product of human physiology? Is it an electrochemical phenomenon? Here’s where Nietzsche weighs in: “…No one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself…The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be… “One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) The fundamental unit (quantum) of Being is the Whole. The Whole is not an assemblage of Parts; there are no ‘parts’ per se . What we call ‘parts’ are just aspects of the Whole. In fact, “Nothing exists apart from the whole.” Therefore, there is nothing in position to judge the whole. Judgment implies a transcendent perspective and according to Nietzsche, there is no such thing as Transcendence. Everything is immanent, the world is ‘ontologically flat’, so nothing is objective and there can be no valid judgements. Of course, no one wants to be told that their ‘Dear Leader’ is naked. Even today, perhaps especially today, people (e.g. A. J. Ayer and Albert Camus , infrequent bed fellows as they may be) argue that objective judgement does not require a transcendent POV. Their bumper sticker of choice reads, “ Good without God .” So who’s right? Nietzsche or the Secular Humanists? A recent article by Rohit Kumar Thakur (7/27/2025), It’s Game Over , settles the score: Nietzsche – 1, Humanists – 0. First, Thakur asks the question, as old as Plato and as fresh as my great grand, “But How Does It Know What’s ‘Good’?” He elaborates: “How do you judge art? How do you judge creativity? ASI-ARCH’s creators knew that just chasing a high score on a benchmark would be a disaster. That leads to ‘reward hacking’, finding cheap tricks to boost a number without creating a genuinely better design.” If evaluative standards were hardwired, our non-linear creative impulses would be straightjacketed by arbitrary, linear ‘objective criteria’. Our so-called ‘evaluations’ would be nothing more than our subjective biases projected onto the material world. “So, they built a ‘Fitness Function’…They use a separate LLM to act as an expert judge . This ‘LLM-as-Judge’ looks at the new design and scores it on things like innovation, structural complexity, and elegance… So, an AI is literally judging another AI’s creativity.” But does that really solve the problem? Relatively, yes; absolutely, no! One ‘Fitness Function’ can be better than another where ‘better’ means ‘more independent’ vis a vis the system it is set to evaluate. In an Ideal Universe, the Evaluative Function would be 100% divorced from its subject; it would be truly transcendent. In a less perfect world, the Evaluation Function can be designed with an eye toward ‘relative’, albeit not ‘absolute’, autonomy. The further an Evaluative Function is removed from its subject, the more its judgements are free to identify true Beauty – and the less they are constrained by the opinions, tastes and biases of its engineers. The probability of any event occurring exactly as it does is miniscule, perhaps even infinitesimal, ε. Now build a second system just as fine tuned as the first and use that second system to evaluate the first. The probability of any one event-evaluation pairing is infinitely less than the infinitesimal probability of the event itself, i.e. ε². If we’re not there yet, we’re getting awfully close. It is frustrating to live anywhere other than in an Ideal World. It seems like we can approach anything but reach nothing. Take Absolute Zero for instance (0° Kelvin). We can get remarkably close, but we’ll never reach it. But in one respect, we do live in an Ideal World. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are Eternal Values that precede (logically and ontologically) the material world. Every Actual Entity (event) reflects in some way and to some degree these Eternal Values. Best of all, these Values are entirely Transcendent. There is no trace of personal bias. Only Beauty evaluates ‘beauty’, only Truth evaluates ‘truth’, and only Justice evaluates ‘justice’. Logically (not ontologically or temporally), the Eternal Values even ‘precede’ God. The Eternal Values absolutely transcend the material world. They constitute the Essence of God who by definition is perfectly and totally Transcendent. A transcendent God is the sole guarantee that the Eternal Values are objectively normative, that they qualify as a Categorical Imperative. Without transcendent values, judgements can only be ‘relatively valid’ and ‘provisionally normative’. Ayer, for example, identifies ‘kindness’ as his core value. He’s certainly entitled to live his life according to that value. But attractive as it might be to us, it is only Ayer’s opinion . I doubt that Nietzsche, for example, would agree. Nor does Ayer’s designation of ‘kindness’ as ‘core’ entitle him to prosecute someone alleged to be ‘serially unkind’. Bottom line : Ayer and Camus shop for values the way I shop for flavors at Baskin Robbins…and according to the law in Massachusetts at least, I am not entitled to impose my flavor choices on you. Bummer! The rapidly maturing science of AI clearly supports Nietzsche’s intuition that Judgement is valid only to the extent that it is independent of the matter being judged. Complete independence requires a transcendent POV – something not allowed in Nietzsche’s cosmology but hard wired into most ‘post-pagan’ theologies. So, who’d a thunk it indeed? Nihilist Nietzsche joining forces with Orthodox Theists (like Pope Leo XIII) and 21 st century computer scientists to combat the ‘humanist heresies’ of the 20 th century. Ain’t metaphysics marvelous! *** Artist Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio, 1855, oil on canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. This painting mirrors Nietzsche’s idea that judgments of creativity are never absolute but always shaped by perspective, context, and the interplay between individual and whole—just as AI’s evaluations of art reflect both independence and relational dependence. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” < Back Eucharist David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” The sacrament known as Eucharist is the cornerstone of Roman Catholic (RC) spirituality. The accompanying theology maintains that in Eucharist Jesus Christ is substantially present, body and spirit, human and divine, under the accidental appearance of bread and wine. RC Eucharistic Theology holds that the consecration of bread and wine (the specie ) during a proper liturgy actually changes the substance of that specie into the Body and Blood of Christ. Appropriately, Catholics refer to this process as transubstantiation . Much of RC Theology can be (and has been?) dumbed down and/or sugar coated to be more appealing to our modern intellectual tastes…but not Eucharist! Here, there is no wiggle room. Believe me, we’ve tried everything over the past 2,000 years – but to no avail. Eucharist does not symbolize or signify Jesus’ body and blood; it is Jesus’ body and blood. Nor are we saying that Jesus’ body and blood co-exists with the bread and wine; it doesn’t! Substantially speaking, after consecration, there is no more bread or wine. There is the appearance of bread and wine but not the substance. Nor are we saying that Jesus is only ‘provisionally present’ in Eucharist. His presence is not dependent on the moral virtue of the celebrant nor on the faith of the congregation or of the individual communicant…nor on the grape or vintage of the wine. Hints of leather and tobacco are strictly optional! See what I mean? No wiggle room! I’m holding a baseball in my hands. It’s a baseball! It doesn’t matter who made it or what that person’s state of mind was at the time; it doesn’t matter whether I enjoy baseball or even understand its rules. Being a baseball does not depend on context; it’s a matter of substance. Of course, there is one difference: the baseball not only is a baseball, it appears to be a baseball as well. Not so Eucharist! It is the body and blood of Christ, but it appears to be bread and wine. Needless to say, few non-Christians share this belief. In fact, most non-Catholic Christians hold a different view of the Sacrament. It is only slightly more surprising (Pew, 2019) that a majority of self-identified ‘Roman Catholics’, and even some practicing Roman Catholics, do not accept the Church’s teaching on this matter. Frankly, the wonder is that anyone accepts so bizarre a doctrine as this. Today, we share an understanding of physics, chemistry and biology that would seem to rule out anything even remotely resembling transubstantiation. It sounds more like Alchemy than Sacrament. But that is precisely the point! Transubstantiation is incompatible, superficially at least, with ‘the hard sciences’. Modern science has given us a compelling model of the physical world, and we have no quarrel with that. However, what science has modeled is, obviously, the world of appearances, attributes, qualities, accidents – Kant’s phenomena - not the world of substance, his noumena . In the Beatles’ iconic movie (1967), Yellow Submarine , Jeremey Hillary Boob famously instructs the Fab Four, “Be empirical, look!” Exactly! And when we do, we see the accidents, bread and wine; we don’t see anything that we would recognize as body or blood, thank God! In this respect, Eucharist is a symbol, not of Jesus, but of Universe. To be clear, Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ, but it is also symbolic of Universe. How so? Eucharistic Theology suggests that the spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word. There is something more fundamental. Christians believe that that ‘something more fundamental’ is God. The world we live in appears to be continuous, flat and inert. We do not need complicated mathematics to plot a trip from Boston to Cleveland; a simple road map, unfolded on the passenger seat, will do just fine. We can ignore contributions to our trajectory from relativity, quantum mechanics and the earth’s curvature. Likewise, modern science has given us a map of Universe that allows us to accomplish just about anything we want…except to understand that universe. Hasidic Rebbe Schneerson spoke of “…t he concept of oneness within the microcosm of the human being—which serves as an analogy and example of the true oneness of the macrocosmos.” He concluded, “All that exists is spiritual. Yet further, everything is divine.” According to modern cosmology, the foundation of the material world is a ‘void’; according to Rebbe Schneerson, it is a ‘person’, aka God. We see the personhood of Universe reflected in the ‘souls’ of things that exist in that universe. According to the Rebbe Yitzchak Luria, even a rock has a soul as evidenced by its self-identification, by its cohesion, and by its discontinuity with the environment. Rabbi Schneur Zalman, founder of the Chabad school, wrote that a rock must have a soul ( persona ) because it exists. Being is an activity. “I seem to be a verb” (R. Buckminster Fuller). Using Eucharistic terminology, Universe is accidentally space and time, matter and energy; but it exists, so substantially (obviously not accidentally), it is the will of God. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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Aletheia Today magazine essays relating to religious writings, beliefs, values, and traditions held by Judaism and Christianity Theology Theology is the intersection of Philosophy and Mythology where we consider matters of ultimate concern. Apr 1, 2025 Miracles “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” Read More Apr 1, 2025 Is There ‘True Religion’? “We confuse a person’s right to express a hairbrained idea with the notion that that idea should be taken seriously.” Read More Feb 1, 2025 Apocalypse Now! “We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!” Read More Dec 1, 2024 Jesus Gets Us! “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” Read More Dec 1, 2024 R U Body, Soul or Spirit? “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Read More Oct 15, 2024 World Without God Amen “God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche) Read More Sep 1, 2024 Mark’s Diary – Notes for a Screenplay “And so they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were filled with awe, while those who followed behind were afraid.” Read More Sep 1, 2024 Is Christology a TOE “Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….” Read More Sep 1, 2024 The Mustard Seed “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32) Read More Aug 29, 2024 Show Us a Sign! “We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!” Read More Jul 15, 2024 God is a Bother! “The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Job Verses God: The Trial of the Epoch “Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Empirical Argument “Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Ontological Argument “Value permeates every nook and cranny of the World. God is Value… No values – no world...” Read More Jun 1, 2024 The Beatles and John “Both Johns looked out their respective windows and saw their worlds on fire. Both Johns situated their profound and ultimately hopeful message in that apocalyptic context.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Marx vs. Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How-To manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Sacramental Priesthood “I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 The Theology of Science-Fiction Can AI have soul ? Read More Jan 15, 2024 Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." Read More Jan 15, 2024 A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Re-Imagining the Magnificat "In our zeal to project our conceptions of The Ideal Woman onto this enigmatic first-century figure, we’ve strayed a bit from the little we do know." Read More Dec 1, 2023 Christ and the Kids “So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Idolatry “An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” Read More Oct 15, 2023 “Is God Dead?” “Right now, scientists and philosophers all over the world are engaged in the search for a ‘TOE’, a Theory of Everything…(but) we already have such a TOE.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 The 7th Day “Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Satan, Mary, and ‘Da Judge’ “Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...” Read More Sep 1, 2023 ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Sep 1, 2023 Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More Jul 15, 2023 The Theology of Mikhail Bakunin “Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Read More Jul 15, 2023 Eucharist “…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Korach Over Dinner "Like most people of my generation, I cringe when I hear the M word." Read More Jun 1, 2023 God’s Will “We can say that God wills the events that constitute the world, even though God does not in any way cause those events to occur.” Read More Jun 1, 2023 Whitehead and Zohar “Zohar and Whitehead, separated by more than 500 years, both deliver us a map of the world where X marks the spot of the eschatological treasure.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 Mary Magdalene, The Witness "That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Growing Into Pentecost "In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Matzah of Hope--Passover Part One "This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Tantum Ergo Read More Mar 1, 2023 Two-Faced God “All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!” Read More Mar 1, 2023 Hell “Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.” Read More Jan 15, 2023 Educating Christians “We must teach our children a totally counter-cultural model of nature. We must teach the doctrines of our Faith, not as exceptions to natural law, but as the highest expressions of natural law.” Read More Nov 30, 2022 Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Read More Oct 15, 2022 What Did John See? The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why? Read More Oct 15, 2022 A Theory of Everything (TOE) Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE. Read More Jul 13, 2022 Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? Read More Jul 13, 2022 The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Read More Jul 12, 2022 The People's Creed But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Read More May 29, 2022 Christology 101 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” Read More May 28, 2022 Jesus Meets Mister Spock Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Order and Anarchy David Cowles Mar 21, 2023 “The order that emerges among self-governing entities is the only real order.” Notice the title, Order and Anarchy . Anarchy is the absence of imposed order, not the absence of order per se . In fact, no one is more invested in the emergence of order than the Anarchist. Anarchism celebrates the spontaneous emergence of order, i.e. ‘self-ordering’ aka ‘bootstrapping’. In fact, to be is to combine an element of order inherited from the Actual World with an element of spontaneous ordering (novelty); every genuine event requires both: Order + Order! Every event is both rejection of an old order and appetition for a new order. Of course, from the perspective of inherited order, emergent order appears as mere discord; and from the perspective of emergent order, inherited order appears as institutionalized resistance to novelty. Yet, every event inherits a settled past and proposes a novel future. That’s exactly what an event is. The reaction of the present (event) to the past is never mindless copying or blanket rejection. Something of the past must be conserved to serve as exoskeleton for the present and endoskeleton for the future. Rejection of inherited order is never blind or capricious. It is always done in the service of a proposition, i.e. a concrete proposal. Sidebar : Abbie Hoffmann notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a Revolution for the Hell of it …except in book(s). Where is the Youth International Party today? What happened to yesterday’s Yippies ? Did they turn into Yuppies ? A coherent critique of the 60’s radical youth movement in the US might include the observation that the radicals lacked a coherent ideology. Sure they had issues: Vietnam, Civil Rights, etc. but issues alone do not translate into a detailed political platform and, per Lenin, “There can be no revolution without a revolutionary ideology.” Something of the past must be destroyed to ‘make room’ for novelty. New order cannot simply pile-up on top of old, like levels of civilization at the site of an archeological dig. Gertrude Stein wrote that mortality is nature’s way of making room for the future. Philosophical Anarchism is the belief that all true order is sui generis , that it emerges in the course of an event, any event, and that it is conserved as the ground from which all future events emerge. True order must be organic and unconstrained. Freedom is prerequisite; imposed order, on the other hand, springs from a desire to preserve what is at the expense of what might have been and could yet be. It is a form of disorder disguised as its opposite. Think 1930’s Germany for example. Some men (sic) see things as they are and ask ‘why change’; others dream of things that are not yet and ask, ‘why bother’. Inherited order is the exoskeleton that protects embryonic order in utero , but later, as imposed order, it functions as a strait jacket. Neither is anarchy synonymous with chaos . In fact, it might be its antonym. Chaos, ab initio , appears as disorder , but upon deeper investigation chaotic systems are shown to be deterministic . Anarchy is neither! Anarchy is order, freely emergent. An-arch-ism is the belief that certain entities are capable of self-government but self-government must include the ability to enter into ordered relationships with other entities; otherwise it becomes a form of nihilism. 2025 NYC Bumper Sticker: “Socialism not Solipsism!” At the risk of repeating myself, the order that emerges among self-governing entities is the only real order. Freedom and order have a dialectical relationship. There is no freedom without order and no order without freedom. Order without freedom is tyranny while freedom without order is barbarism. Pure order and pure freedom are concepts only; neither can be realized alone, by itself, in any actual entity. Taking a page from Sartre, no event can be what was, every event must be what is not yet. Without negation of the past and appetition for the future, there are no events. An event is not the Actual World it inherited, nor is it the Superject it contributes to the future, nor is it the self-satisfaction it hopefully feels. An event is the transition per se from what was to what is not. An event is a double negative: “Not what was, not what will be, therefore I am!” Anarchism then is the gnosis and praxis of Being. Anarchy is the universe in the image and likeness of God. Likewise, Political Anarchism does not advocate the disintegration of society; it merely opposes the mirage of order known as the State . But alleged anarchist plots to blow up critical infrastructure have understandably given it a bad name. We think of order and freedom, past and present as a continuum, a spectrum ranging from the complete absence of institutional constraints on one end all the way to a full-blown police-state on the other. But even that model may be too restrictive. It would be more useful and accurate to ‘graph’ the relationship between order and freedom on a plane with order on the X-axis and freedom on the Y. Every possible non-degenerate social structure (event) includes elements of order and elements of freedom in varying proportions. What then could be our paradigm? How about a Bach concerto? It is as rigidly structured as can be, but every note is astonishing, and every performance is brand new. We understand order and freedom so poorly that we do not see that they are locked in a dialectic embrace that spans all scales and all systems. “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” (Joni Mitchell) But the very next day, green shoots appeared in the cracks and 10 years on, the lot was advertised for sale as ‘unimproved land…some litter removal required’. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. 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Philosophers Philosophers are artists working in the medium of ideas. They function both as landmarks and as signposts in our never-ending search for Truth. After Parmenides What to "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." Read More Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Read More Beyond Pascal's Wager “Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we?” Read More Robert Frost Was Wrong “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” Read More Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More Bakunin Nailed It “Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.” Read More Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” Read More Thrown by Heidegger “Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.” Read More Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” Read More Friedrich Nietzsche “Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.” Read More Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” Read More LEIBNIZ “In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.” Read More

< Back Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” David Cowles Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) may rightly be called the philosopher of the Absurd. In his essays, stories and plays, he mercilessly confronts the world on its own terms and finds that he cannot reconcile his human urge to unify and explain all experience with the world’s incurable plurality and lack of coherence. He finds this situation ‘absurd’! Confronting Absurdity, one has, according to Camus, three options: commit physical suicide, commit philosophical suicide, or accept the absurd and live absurdity to the fullest. So Camus begins his master philosophical reflection (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus : “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” (All quotes in this essay are from The Myth of Sisyphus unless otherwise noted.) If living in this world is incurably absurd, why do it? Why go on? Why not just end it as quickly and as painlessly as possible? “Does the Absurdity dictate death?” Ultimately, Camus rejects the option of physical suicide. Like ‘philosophical suicide’ (below), it negates the Absurd; but it also amounts to running away from what’s real. Camus claims no priority on the recognition of the Absurd. Throughout his essay he acknowledges other philosophers and writers who have confronted the Absurd: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Husserl, Sartre and Dostoevsky, among others. “…All started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antimony, anguish or impotence reigns.” But Camus gently accuses all of them of committing ‘philosophical suicide’, of “hoping in spite of everything”. To paint with an overly broad brush, Camus suggests that each of these men uses the terror of the Absurd to ‘prove’, in the end, that there must be some order, some purpose, some meaning capable of overcoming that terror. This Camus rejects. In fact, Camus’ uniqueness rests on his unwillingness to seek relief in some species of phony faith or false hope – relief from the terrifying conclusions forced on us by the Absurd. “A man devoid of hope, and conscious of being so, has ceased to belong to the future.” What makes Camus’ brand of nihilism particularly heroic is his willingness to maintain his position while freely acknowledging that he does not know whether he is right or wrong. Radical skepticism is closely related to nihilism, precluding any philosophical certainties: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.” Both Camus and Sartre admit that is possible that God exists but, unlike Pascal, they attach no importance to the matter: “Hence, what he (the absurd man) demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows…and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty.” In this Camus reveals himself to be a proper child of the Enlightenment: ‘Live solely with what he knows…bring in nothing that is not certain’. This seems obvious to us denizens of the scientific age, raised as we were on Ayer, Wittgenstein, and Austin, et al. But it would seem very odd to anyone born before, say, 1700. In those ‘unenlightened times’, what was not ‘known’ was a matter of ‘faith’ and faith was the foundation of knowledge. Camus offers a concise exposition of the Existentialist’s dilemma: “Of whom and of what indeed can I say: ‘I know that!’ This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists…I can sketch all the aspects it is able to assume…but aspects cannot be added up …” Camus is dragging Descartes out of the head and into the heart. Furthermore, he is asserting a paradigmatically existentialist doctrine that the sum of all qualia can never lead to even a single etre . In this he bridges Parmenides Hot Link and Sartre: “Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” In other words, my existence will always surpass my essence: “This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction…” Camus may justly be called the philosopher of the Absurd, but 300 years earlier another Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, focused on a similar problem in his Pensees : “We do not require great education of mind to understand that here there is no real and lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly that death…threatens us every moment…There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible…For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal… When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after…I am frightened…” Faced with an analysis of the human condition similar to Camus’, Pascal came to a very different conclusion, known as Pascal’s Wager . From a common starting point, Pascal and Camus draw diametrically opposed conclusions. Camus’ absurd man “has ceased to belong to the future” while for Pascal, there is no good other than the future. Of course, Camus and Sartre would both accuse Pascal of ‘bad faith’, of ‘philosophical suicide’…but I’m not sure Pascal would care. It is also worthwhile to compare Camus with Whitehead and Jung. They both view God as the process of essence acquiring existence. Everything evolves, everything grows, including God. The early books of the Old Testament seem to endorse this view. Abraham argues with God and uses reason to deflect his intentions; Job uses law to force a peevish and recalcitrant God to ‘be God’ and act justly. We are trained to think that all action has a motivation, a purpose, a goal; if there is no future, no transcendent meaning, no objective values, no hope, then how does one go about living one’s life? If we reject physical suicide and refuse philosophical suicide (hope), then what options are open to us? “No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition…All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize it or cancel it. The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.” Contrast Camus’ concept of freedom with that of Pope Leo XIII. Leo, of course, believed in transcendent values, in objective Truth and in the imperative of Justice. Therefore for Leo, the only real freedom is the freedom to do what is right (just) and profess what is true. To do otherwise is to be enslaved (by evil) for who would voluntarily profess something she knew to be false or do something she knew to be wrong? For Leo, that person would be living in ‘bad faith’. By contrast, Camus’ freedom is unfettered by concepts such as transcendence and objectivity. Camus’ heroes are free to create ex nihilo . In that sense, we are all gods. (Psalms 82: 6, John 10: 34) “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning…That idea that ‘I am’, my way of acting as if everything has a meaning…all that is given the lie…by the absurdity of a possible death…Death is there as the only reality.” The foundation of the Judeo-Christian world view is found in Exodus 3:14 where God tells Moses, “I am who am.” Camus undermines a 3500 year tradition by claiming that ‘I am’ is per se a lie. In this he resonates with certain Eastern traditions that reject the concept of ‘self’ entirely. Contrast St. Paul: In the end even death is subjected to Christ and Christ to God. For Camus, death subjects everything to itself; that is the essence of the Absurd. Everything hangs on this point! Paul and Camus would agree that death and meaning are utterly incompatible! In fact, they constitute the archetypical incompatibility: not ‘life and death’ but ‘death and meaning’. Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value. This is the fundamental divide underlying the intellectual history of the Western world. “Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future…He still thinks that something in life can be directed. In truth, he acts as if he were free…” “Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary…In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences. Choices, actions cannot be justified by anything outside themselves.” So given that suicide and bad faith are no longer options, how does one live? For better or worse, Camus tackles that question head on. We explore Camus’ lifestyle prescription in a companion article on this site. Spoiler alert – It isn’t pretty! Image: Portrait from New York World-Telegram and Sun Photograph Collection , 1957. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Summer 2023 Table of Contents https://www.aletheiatoday.com/thoughtswhileshaving/applied-camus Previous Next

< Back Applied Camus David Cowles Aug 11, 2025 “I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system.” In an earlier post, Camus , we explored the philosophical reasoning behind the philosopher’s version of nihilism: the rejection of concepts like ‘the future, consequences, transcendent values’. With no objective values and no concern for the future, we are left to live life entirely as we wish. “Everything is permitted.” (Nietzsche) Of course, that does not mean that we must behave as libertines. Each of us is free to fashion a code of ethics for herself. But we must not imagine that these private codes have any objective justification or that they constitute a ‘categorical imperative’, i.e. that they are in any way binding on others…or even on one’s self. That said, Camus devotes the second half of The Myth of Sisyphus to sketching styles of life that might be consistent with living out the implications of the Absurd. I think Camus gets himself into some serious trouble here…he lets dreaded ‘objective values’ slip back into his system; for example: “I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of renunciation… I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living…value judgments are discarded…A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate…For on the one hand the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urges toward the greatest quantity of experiences.” Sheer gobbledygook, am I right? Let’s enumerate the errors: (1) “I cannot conceive” – who cares what Camus ‘can conceive’ if we are all independent actors responsible for our own lives; (2) “What counts” – value judgments are not discarded, they are front and center here; (3) “Values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences” – so values do have meaning after all, as long as they are ‘Camus approved’; (4) “All experiences are unimportant” – except that the quantity and variety of those unimportant experiences is what gives life meaning: ∞ * 0 ≠ 0. First, Camus dismisses the possibility that asceticism and the absurd could be compatible. This seems strange. If there is no objective value in the world, why mightn’t someone renounce that world (short of suicide), relish his solitude, and focus on his ‘inner self’? Practitioners of Taoism and Zen, well acquainted with the Absurd, often follow this practice. Even more disturbingly, Camus substitutes ‘quantity’ of experience for the forbidden ‘quality’. But isn’t quantity itself a kind of quality? Is ‘large’ a quality or a quantity? If, as Camus asserts, more of some things is better than less, doesn’t quantity then become a value (a quality) in itself? One recalls a particularly crass expression from the 1980s: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins,” as well as Gatsby’s famous exclamation: “Living well is the best revenge”. Perhaps not our loftiest values…but values nonetheless! Camus further explains that the quantity of our experience replaces any consideration of quality…only so far as we are conscious of those experiences: “For the mistake is thinking that that quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our lives…To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them…A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard.” So ‘quantity’ is no longer a variable? Instead, Camus now introduces a new ‘transcendent value’: consciousness! Not the abstract phenomenon of consciousness but the act of being conscious of a particular experience. Conscious experience is certainly different, qualitatively, from unconscious experience (whatever that might be). But is this not precisely the goal of Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and cloistered monastic orders? Is it not the case that many have renounced the world precisely in order to become more conscious ? To immerse one’s self in the hurly-burly of life may not be the best way to heighten consciousness. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) “To the absurd man a premature death is irreparable. Nothing can make up for the sum of the faces and centuries he would otherwise have traversed.” Where are these faces, where are these centuries, where is this sum? They can’t be in the future because, as we show in our earlier essay, Camus rejects the category of ‘future’ entirely. Earlier, Camus referred to experiences as ‘accumulated’. What suggests to Camus that experience can be totalized in this way? And what about the zero term in the equation? (I mean, of course, death.) Doesn’t death automatically multiply all the terms in any equation by itself, i.e., by zero? Isn’t Death the great eraser? ∞ * 0 = 0. Death is not an experience that you ‘add’ to other experiences. In fact, death is not an experience at all. Death is the absence of experience and, even more viciously, the annulment of all experience. “…There is no experience of death…it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others’ deaths…and it never quite convinces us”. Roman Catholic doctrine does not sanction divorce. Once married, always married. But it does allow annulment, the retroactive ‘erasure’ of the marriage itself. Not married, never married. Isn’t that the role Death plays in Camus’ system? Not living… So how are we to live in an absurd world? Camus details several options, but he makes it clear that this does not constitute an exhaustive catalogue of possibilities. First, Don Juan. “Don Juan” is a collector of experiences. He seeks a long, varied and intense life: “Don Juan has chosen to be nothing”, i.e., to lose himself in himself. In fact, as we shall see, all of Camus’ absurd heroes choose to be nothing. This seems odd. What is choosing to be nothing but suicide…or at least renunciation, two options previously rejected by Camus (above)? Second, the Actor: “The actor has three hours to be Iago…Never has the absurd been so well illustrated…There is no frontier between being and appearing… In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.” We are reminded of Prospero’s iconic speech in The Tempest . Third, the Conqueror. This is the man of action, but Camus acknowledges that the project of the conqueror is ultimately futile: “Nothing of the conqueror lasts, not even his doctrines.” Shall we refer to Ozymandias : “Nothing beside remains.” (Shelley) As Camus repeatedly points out, death is inconsistent with objective values. If death is the final reality, then values are meaningless. On the other hand, if meaningful values are a reality, then death is odd man out. Camus suggests that death is not merely the absence of value but the ‘exaltation of injustice’. Here he’s right: of course it is! It’s the primordial injustice. But this observation is revealing because ‘injustice’ implies ‘justice’. By acknowledging injustice, Camus has once again let the camel’s nose of objective value into the tent of the Absurd. What is Justice if not a transcendent value that gives meaning to existence? Finally, Camus turns to art and the artist. He proposes an ‘absurd aesthetic’: “An art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself… The absurd creator…must give the void its colors.” Is Camus distinguishing representational from ‘abstract’ art? I doubt it. I think it more likely that Camus denies that any art is representational, i.e. it is always abstract. Camus is to be praised for his analysis of the Absurd. His description of the human condition takes a back seat to no one’s. Yet his project, in the end, fails. Try as he might, he cannot escape the need to let values seep into his scheme. This raises a question: Is it possible to talk about the world in any non-trivial way without making reference to Value? And if not, does that mean that values are indeed real or is this merely an invitation to remain silent? “My love she speaks like silence, without ideals or violence.” (Dylan) In the course of our lives, we are confronted with facts we think we know, people we think we meet and judgments we think we make. From these nearly universal experiences, three great philosophical questions organically emerge: What is the nature of ‘knowledge’? What is the nature of ‘the other’? What is the nature of ‘value’? These questions form the basis of Philosophy’s Big Three : epistemology, ontology and ethics/aesthetics. They also give rise to the three great ‘null hypotheses’: skepticism, solipsism, nihilism. Camus incorporates the null hypothesis: “The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be enumerated…” Here he is channeling Parmenides’ contrast of Aletheia (Truth) with Doxa (Appearances ). “In one of its aspects, eternal nothingness is made up precisely of the sum of lives to come which will not be ours…” Camus is on to something here! Is he anticipating Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ? Or is he summarizing Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken ? In either case, the World consists solely of possibilities: ‘pure potentiality’ ( Aristotle), ‘the wave function’ (Schrödinger), ‘the sum of all histories’ (Feynmann). When we actualize any one potentiality, when we collapse the wave function, we consign the alternative paths to ‘eternal nothingness’. “Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds. (Oppenheimer…misquoting the Bhagavad Gita .) So life as we know it, like monogamy, consists of actualizing one path and ‘forsaking all others’. In brining one reality to life, we destroy all potentiality. E pluribus unum – is that the real absurdity of life? “In an absurd world, there can be no scale of values, no value driven choices or value based preferences.” In that case Camus’ world cannot be absurd after all, littered as it is with scales of values, value driven choices, and value based preferences. So give Albert an A in Ontology but, sadly, a D in Ethics, or as Sister Martha Mary used to write at the bottom of my report cards: “Needs improvement.” Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Memories… David Cowles Aug 14, 2025 “Memories light the corners of my mind, misty watercolored memories…scattered pictures of…the way we were.” (Streisand) Why settle for memories? The corners of my mind, misty, scattered, baloney! Give me the real thing! “Don’t dream it, be it!” ( Rocky Horror Picture Show ) Turns out, there are two ways of remembering – there’s the misty watercolored kind, enjoyed by muggles everywhere; and then there’s ‘re-membering’, enjoyed by Marcel Proust…and now you! Unwittingly of course, Heidegger set the stage. He distinguished Dasein (that it is) from Wassein (what it is). Sartre translated, as he does: ‘Existence and Essence’. I remember going to what turned out to be ‘the game of the century’: Harvard-Yale, 1968, 28 – 28, both teams ending the season undefeated. (Havard scored 16 points in the final 58 seconds.) Exciting time…and I remember it. I remember the game and how I felt at the end. I remember the people I was with. But I don’t remember ‘being there’. Of course, I know that I was there, I know that I watched the game and emoted at the outcome, but I don’t remember ‘being there’. I don’t remember what it felt like to be me at that moment in time. On the other hand, I do re-member looking out my grandparents’ bedroom window at the blinking red lights atop a local TV tower…and I even remember thinking, “I’m going to re-member this.” And I do. I re-member looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at a friend’s house. I re-member standing at the window of my first apartment looking out at the ‘forum’ below. In these cases too, I thought to remember. But not all re-membering needs to be scheduled in advance. There are hosts of other scenes from my past that, accidentally, I re-member and then there are others that I merely remember. The contents of every memory ( Wassein ), like every experience, are unique. It’s forever thumbtacked to a particular spot on the spatiotemporal grid. What is ‘eternal and universal’ about any experience is its transitory nature: “This too shall pass!” Re-membering is something altogether different. ‘Being there’ is, well, being there! And being there is being there – one and done, now and forever, Amen. Dasein itself is unique. Translated into ‘modern geek’: Wassein = ∞, Dasein = 1. Dasein is one, simple (it has no qualia), eternal, and universal. Hmm, sounds a lot like someone else I know…but that’s a different essay! For now, let’s hear Proust describe his experience: “The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation… “…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other … The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” ‘Seemed to me to be the present moment’, and so it was! Wassein is a function of spacetime. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong) = experience now, memory later. Dasein , on the other hand, occurs outside of spacetime. It is the universal and eternal present whose shadow we see across our continuous, bright-lit, and potentially infinite timeline. While every quantum of experience/memory has a specific spacetime address, the Being that underlies all experience is homeless, a citizen of nowhere, a denizen of everywhere. (Like Jesus in Bethlehem?) As Proust put it, “…(What) had reawakened in me had no connection with what I frequently tried to recall to myself…with the help of an undifferentiated memory…those quite different images that preserve nothing of life… (and) I knew that Lost Time would not be found again on the Piazza of St. Marks… “There is a vast difference between the real impression that we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it that we form for ourselves when we attempt, by an act of will, to imagine it…” (i.e. to remember it). Surprisingly, consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato ( Timaeus ). Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: X ↙ ↘ X’ → Z In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself (X’) being aware of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (X’) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. In short, ‘re-membering’ reveals something fundamental about experience. It is timeless. I am now just as much sitting in my 5 th grade classroom as I am sitting at this computer typing out this essay. Nothing passes, everything endures, not as mere memory, but as it is. *** Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a haunting, dreamlike scene where empty streets and long shadows evoke a timeless stillness. This atmosphere reflects the essay’s exploration of memory as something elusive and misty, contrasting with the vivid, immersive re-membering that brings past experience fully into the present moment. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Proust, Derrida and La Differance David Cowles Aug 12, 2025 “Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric.” La differance ( Jacques Derrida ) may be understood as a bit of information or as a quantum of consciousness. Either way, it is irreducible. The ‘cold’ that I experience directly and the ‘cold’ that I experience through my being aware that I am cold are both the same and different. Whenever A = -A (same = different) we know we’re not in ‘Kansas’ ( aka the Set of Real Numbers) anymore. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media of transmission means that my experiences of that same cold differ slightly. La differance is short for ‘infinitesimal difference’ and infinitesimal quantities lie outside the Set of Real Numbers. How ironic is it that our go-to model of the real world cannot account even for a quantum of actual experience! No wonder I want to repeal the Laws of Arithmetic . Marcel Proust shares a similar insight in his Remembrance of Things Past (RTP): “The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation… “…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other … The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” And so it was! The Proust you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and then the Proust of France but the Proust you know from RTP is the Proust of both Italy-then and France-now. Every there is, potentially, here; every then is, potentially, now and every now is eternal. Proust does not remember Italy, he relives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…but in France. When Proust was in Italy, his attention was divided between his experiences of Venice and his experience of himself experiencing Venice. But when Proust relives Italy from France, his intermediary physical body disappears and now, for the first time, he can fully experience Venice. “Marcel, how was your trip to Italy?” “Fine, except for my traveling companion.” “Who was that?” “Me!” We spoil every experience by being there! (That was Sartre’s insight in Nausea .) When Proust relives an event, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with that event, like a tourist with a smart phone; he recreates the event entire, and like an Ephesian Kierkegaard, he steps into it, re-experiencing all its qualia at once…not from outside-in, as perception and/or memory, but from inside-out, as something unknowable to Kant, noumenal experience . When Proust was in Venice, he was aware of Venice, but he was also aware of himself (as above) being in Venice. Quelle Domage! Likewise, when Proust is in France. But when Proust relives Italy-in-France, he is no longer aware of himself per se . Finally, he can be directly aware of experience itself. But he remains conscious. He does not lose himself in some sort of mystical union with the world. He remains conscious because the infinitesimal separation between Italy-then and France-now functions for him as la differance . Actually, the phenomenon of differance enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinitesimal spacetime separation between France-now and Italy-then. Separated in spacetime, the two moments are united by something more substructural, i.e. experience itself; viva la differance! Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric. A tiny difference in the pitch of the tiles, the tinier the better, ideally the tiniest perceptible difference possible, becomes a worm hole for Proust, bending spacetime to make proximate points ordinarily far distant from one another. I am reminded of p-adic numbers: the closer they are to zero, the larger the quantity they represent. In Proust’s case, the narrower the differance , the wider the wormhole it creates. I am also reminded of Bell’s non-locality (entanglement): two events indefinitely separated in space and time can nonetheless behave as one event. Is this a manifestation of the non-Archimedean structure of the real world? Check it out: If A is the combined experience of France-now and Italy-then, and B is the experience of ‘France-now’, and C is the experience of ‘Italy-then’, then both B and C are subsets of A but, counter intuitively, (B + C), France-and-Italy-now-and-then, has more value/weight/intensity for Proust than A itself…much more! A > B + C but (B+C) > A. In the real world, ‘operations’ are never commutative, transitive, associative, or distributive…unless by accident or coincidence. In every process, order is definitive! Or, for you fans of Doctor Who , the Universe is simply a collection of red ‘phone boxes’…tiny phone booths that house vast, hexagonal interior spaces, like the TARDIS . Either way, this potentiality for heightened intensity is a product of living consciously in a non-Archimedean universe. Revel in it! The competing cosmology is summarized critically by T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday : “Because I know that time is always time, and place is always and only place, and what is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face…” I’d rather live in Proust’s world; how about you? Fortunately, we do ; and for that may I say, “Thank God!” For Proust, space and time are folded so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, may abut. While Proust’s epiphanies are dramatic, we all experience something similar most every waking moment of every day. Consciousness is the superposition of two images, slightly askew - differance as described above. Surprisingly, consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato ( Timaeus ). Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: X ↙ ↘ X’ → Z In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself (X’) being aware of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (X’) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. Does that mean that you are God? Far from it! But it does mean that you, and perhaps every conscious being, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’…and that’s not half bad, is it? Trinity is not the esoteric mystery we have been (mis)led to believe. Rather, Trinity is a fundamental structure of Being itself. It is just one way, an important way, in which creation mirrors the creator and we are indebted to Proust, Sartre, and Derrida for pointing this out! *** Magritte, René. Time Transfixed. 1938, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.René Magritte’s Time Transfixed disrupts ordinary perception by merging incompatible realities, a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, much like Proust’s Italy-then and France-now collapse into the same experiential moment. Both challenge the fixed boundaries of time and place, revealing how consciousness can fold reality into unexpected juxtapositions. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Matriarchy and Mitochondria David Cowles Aug 7, 2025 “Going forward, you might want to tone down that male machismo, just a bit.” If there is a single underlying theme across American TV sitcoms, it may be the proverbial ‘Battle of the Sexes’, or as we might say today, ‘Gender Wars’. Who rules the American family…and by extension perhaps, the rest of society? Is it the ‘perpetually puffed up patriarch’ or his ‘mild mannered but manipulative better half’? Channel surf late night cable stations (the preferred leisure time activity of my fellow insomniacs and me) and you’ll get a graduate level education in gender politics. Typically, a blundering man is skillfully managed by a wily woman. As with Peacocks, the man is all feathers! “Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous/Almost at times, the Fool.” (Eliot) Or you might just put your clicker down and get to know your Mitochondria . These tiny organelles, found exclusively in the cytoplasm of animal cells, reinforce the social prominence of gender. Their rendition is less humorous than the sitcoms they inspire, but it delivers an intriguing and frankly inspiring model of social organization. Who knew that a bunch of degenerate bacteria had so much to do with our survival and timely death? Who knew they had so much to teach us? An article by Jennifer N.R. Smith, published in the June 2025 issue of Biology, literally blew the lid off. Let me summarize her relevant insights, using her own words whenever possible (quotation marks below indicate text from the article) and adding a few comments of my own along the way: “Biologist Lynn Margulis postulated in 1967 that mitochondria descend from a single bacterium that was engulfed by a larger ancestral cell about 1.5 billion years ago. Instead of consuming this tidbit, the larger cell let it continue living within: endosymbiosis .” The emergence of a eukaryotic cell (cell with a nucleus) was a watershed moment in the evolution of our terrestrial biosphere…and it may have happened only once. The eukaryotic cell is the basic building block of all complex multi-cellular organisms. The ‘evolutionary leap’ from prokaryotic bacteria (no nucleus) to eukaryotic slime molds (nucleus) was huge compared to the more modest step from sponges to homo sapiens . Wrap your head around that…if you can! So, if on balance you’ve had a good life, you owe a debt of gratitude to a single enterprising and compassionate cell that treated its prey with respect and offered partnership on generous terms. And if not, now you know who to blame (and it’s not mommy and daddy)! (Had the allied nations treated Germany half so well after World War I, the 2 nd World War and the slaughter of 6 million Jews might have been avoided.) The ‘prey’ became the nucleus of the cell, determining most of the cell’s characteristics, housing its precious DNA, and guiding much of its behavior. Perhaps the oldest fragment of philosophical writing in Europe comes from Anaximander (6 th century BCE). If I read it right (per Heidegger), it states that actual beings ‘emerge’ when and only when virtual beings ‘grant each other reck’, i.e. respect, consideration, etc. When I step back and allow you to be yourself and when at the same time, with no expectation of reciprocity, you do the same for me, we emerge from the fog of potentiality and become ‘who we are’ – and we are neither rock nor island, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. A similar insight is prominent in the New Testament and in the works of Martin Buber, drawing on his familiarity with Hasidic Judaism. Once the phenomenon of endosymbiosis was established, why stop with just a nucleus? Why not invite another cell to join the eukaryotic enterprise? And so a certain eukaryotic cell, a descendant of the primordial eukaryotic cell, spread its wings and absorbed another, entirely independent bacterium, et voila , Earth’s first mitochondrion! And again, it only happened once! Your body is made up almost entirely of eukaryotic cells, 30 trillion of them at any one time, each with anywhere from 100 to 1,000 mitochondria. So all animals have three unique ancestors in common: the eukaryotic cell that curated the first mitochondrion, the prokaryotic cell that curated the first nucleus, and the primordial DNA/RNA molecule that synthesized only once (on Earth). Mitochondria incessantly grant reck, to each other, to the cells that house them, and to the organisms formed by those cells! They are a tangible manifestation of Anaximander’s concept of ontogenesis . They knew 1.5 billion years ago lessons in cooperation that we’re struggling to learn today. So, let’s get to know our own mitochondria. Keeping to our theme, Matriarchy , it’s important to note that we inherit our mitochondrial DNA exclusively from our mothers. The nucleus needs a dad , but the contents of the cytoplasm are all mom . “Mitochondria (in human cells) have their own DNA, which consists of only 37 genes, compared with the thousands of genes in the spiraling chromosomes (DNA) inside the cell nucleus.” Mitochondria build and support community in two ways via two different media. First, they communicate; second, they share resources and respond to calls for help. They not only talk among themselves within a cell, they also talk with their mates across cell walls. They form Trotsky’s ideal International – members communicating with one another in local cadres and then with members of other cadres, ultimately forming a truly global, yet decentralized, communications network. No wonder the biological revolution on Earth was so successful! Intercellular communication is prerequisite for the evolution of multicellular organisms like your own tired self. Unlike contemporary millennials, communication plays an absolutely essential role in the social life of mitochondria: “Mitochondria communicate, both within their own cells and among other cells…Mitochondria from different parts of the body talk to one another, using hormones as their language…The mitochondrial collective operates as a mitochondrial information-processing system, or MIPS. “This bioenergetic state then leads to the production of secondary messenger molecules that are intelligible to the nucleus…The nucleus of your cells can read the environment through the MIPS that surrounds it…They reach out to one another to help their community to thrive and also to support one another in times of distress.” Unlike the familiar double-helix residing in the cell’s nucleus, mitochondrial DNA forms a ring typical of prokaryotic cells. “This ring of mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is sheltered within two membranes. The outer shell, shaped like the skin of a sausage, encases the mitochondrion and selectively allows molecules to enter or exit. The inner membrane is made of densely packed proteins and has many folds, called cristae , which serve as a site for chemical reactions… “…Even when mitochondria looked unhealthy (overall), their cristae looked healthy at places where the mitochondria touched one another…The cristae line up…(they) formed parallel ribbons undulating across mitochondria. “Could mitochondrial junctions and aligned cristae operate like neuronal synapses with the resulting mitochondrial collective behaving essentially like an intracellular brain?” Today, we are breathlessly searching for consciousness beyond Homo Sapiens . Most of us are now willing to grant ‘most favored species’ status to certain other humanoids and primates and to some marine mammals. Many are willing to include certain species of birds, insects, and cephalopods in the big tent. But what about organisms that lack a traditional brain? How could such an organism be conscious? Ms. Smith suggests that networks of mitochondria could constitute an intra- cellular brain, or perhaps even an inter-cellular one! Mitochondria give a whole new meaning to phrases like ‘social consciousness’ and ‘distributed intelligence’. Imagine what our world would be like if we humans shared our brains with other members of our species? Or with members of other species? The Sci-fi potential is unlimited! Supporting this hypothesis is the realization that mitochondria use the same mechanism for communication as neurons in the human brain: microtubules. “Mitochondria send thin tubular structures out toward one another, like feelers that some solitary cells use to search for a more hospitable environment or a healthy fellow cell…” People whose mitochondria are unhealthy have more of these nanotunnels than usual. This suggests that these unhealthy mitochondria might be reaching out for help. “Healthy mitochondria can donate intact mtDNA to mutant mitochondria. In conditions of scarce energy supply, mitochondria fuse with one another into long strands to share mtDNA.” “Interestingly, brain mitochondria have receptors to sense both stress and sex hormones. So we have a population of mitochondria in the adrenal glands that signal directly, via the blood, to mitochondria in the brain. (They talk to each other through their isolating cell walls.) “…Mitochondria show all the features of social beings—a shared environment inside the cell or body, communication, formation of groups or types, synchronization of behavior, interdependence, and specialization in the tasks they perform. “Rather than having supplementary roles like those of battery chargers, mitochondria are more like the motherboard of the cell. Genes sit inert in the nucleus until energy and the right message come along to turn some of them on and some others off. Mitochondria provide these messages… “…Mitochondria not only are involved in integrating information but also give orders. They dictate whether the cell divides, differentiates or dies. Indeed, mitochondria have a veto on cell life or death. If the MIPS deems it necessary, it triggers programmed cell death…a form of self-sacrifice for the greater good of the organism.” Can the wisdom of the mitochondria inform our own debates re end of life care and euthanasia? On the one hand, mitochondria are all about the procreation and preservation of life: They care for the other mitochondria in their cell, as well as mitochondria in nearby cells. They share their healthy DNA with less well-endowed mates. They share energy resources with sick or starving compatriots. They form networks for processing and communicating information within multicellular organisms. They are chemical stash houses, supplying most of the energy that powers their host cells. On the other hand though, they know when to quit, when ‘enough’s enough’, No Mas! and Nature has empowered them to make that ‘life or death’ call for themselves, for their host cells, and for the uber-organism they support. They go ‘all in’ for life, but when the time comes, they do ‘go gentle into that good night’. (Thomas) Do we have something to learn here? We are as we are thanks to the mitochondria our moms passed on to us. Of course, their moms passed it on to them…all the way back to ‘Eve’. So going forward, you might want to tone down that male machismo , just a bit! Chicago, Judy. The Dinner Party. 1974–79, Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, New York. Chicago’s iconic installation reclaims feminine legacy and power, much like mitochondria—passed exclusively through mothers—redefine our understanding of biological and social authority. 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