A place to start

Descartes, one of the best know proponents of foundationalism, attempted to find knowledge that was sure. From his famous cogito, "I think therefore I am," he established the existence of a world independent of his perception as well as a good god, in the capital "G" sense of the word.

However, since that time many thinkers have put a shadow over all the world that Descartes desired to illuminate. Nothing seems as stable as Descartes would have hoped, and foundation after foundation has proved unsuitable for building a house of knowledge in which we might bed down with certainty.

Mathematics has a field called "Ring Theory" which considers the way we define and understand numbers. This examination of mathematics' most foundational concepts provides mathematicians with solutions to problems that other alternatives could not solve, each also coming with its own unique set of unsolvable paradoxes. If even mathematics is faced with undecidable problems, from where do we expect to obtain knowledge?

This is only one of many evidences that leave me certain of my uncertainty. This uncertainty comes to me as a messenger, like one of Jobs servants who escaped calamity, to tell me, "all knowledge has been destroyed and I alone have escaped to tell you."

I find this point boring, and not even worthy of debate. I only put it down because it seems to be a point whose important implications hide in the background of every discussion. I admit that here a phenomenological approach, or the Kierkegaardian claim, "subjectivity is truth," can play an interesting role, and I am glad, and even blessed, to talk about such things. However, here my goal is not to abandon truth but to rethink it.

Maybe I will be able to redeem this post with a quote is at least interesting to read. If you don't like quotes you probably haven't bothered to come back to this blog anyway.

"The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect--what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! That is a long story even now-- and yet it seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? that we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What in us really wants 'truth'?"

-Friedrich Nietzsche

"natural" language

"[Flowers] are a proud
assertion that a ray of
beauty outvalues all the
utilities of the world."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

My impotency as impetus for these words.

"We expect rather less of philosophy today, since we are content to regard as the Absolute whatever corsets and bras embrace."
-Marshall Mcluhan

"...neither accept nor avoid as rule or principle the empirico-chronological delay of the narrative, the recit.


A bastard course.
Is there a place for the bastard in ontotheology or in the Hegelian family? That is a question to be left to one side, to be held on the margin or a leash when entering a true family or the family of truth. No doubt the question is not so exterior to that of the Klang; at least, without corresponding with the Hegelian concept of exteriority, its exteriority presses another exeriority toward the question's center
A bastard path, then, that will have to feign to follow naturally the circle of the family, in order to enter it, or parcel it out [partager], or partake of [partager] it as one takes part in a community, holy communion, the last supper scene, or part [partager] it as one does by dissociating.
I shall say no more about procession or method. As Hegel would say, they will speak of (for) themselves whil marching.


I begin with love."
- Derrida (1930-
...October 8th, 2004)

From his 1970(?) article "Glas."

"it is in the unknown where knowledge must must bow to love"
-Anonymous