What is nihilism?

Rahul: … Your first book, After Nihilism. I’ve got to say, I really enjoyed it. I was one of the proofreaders, and the initial draft was a complete mess until I proofread it. Obviously.

Okay, before we get into After Nihilism, what for you is nihilism?

Euwyn: What I normally describe to the laymen around me is this basic proposition. You know how, every time you chat to people and ask them what the meaning of life is, what the future holds, what we should look forward to, whether there’s any hope, they typically respond with some kind of irony or cynicism at its core? What I’m trying to address isn’t the old nihilism, a general sense of spiritual malaise. It’s more the irony people default to these days when there’s too much information. Whether it’s through technology, or because people see too many bad things going on: the climate’s going to collapse, people shouldn’t have kids, there’s so much evil, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Or, as Žižek says, the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.

That’s what I mean by nihilism: this widespread feeling that there is no hope. One reference I like to go to, for those a bit more well-read, is Capitalist Realism. Fisher lays out quite a poignant take on how we’re stuck in a certain way of doing things, a certain system, whatever you call it, and there seems to be no way out. We have to try to find a way out, but we’re not sure how. But we have to try. That prevailing atmosphere is what I’m trying to write from. And the question is: is there a way forward? That’s it.

Rahul: The oncoming train, yeah. Something you and I have discussed before, Euwyn: the modern human condition, whether or not you’re religious, has been... what’s the word, when a doctor finds a symptom?

Euwyn: Diagnosed?

Rahul: Diagnosed, that’s it. This cultural malaise has been diagnosed as a kind of postmodern cynicism, where everything’s a joke. And I think there’s something to it. The tone we most commonly use is cringe, where people live life...

Euwyn: Completing each other’s sentences. There we go.

Rahul: ...with the detachment of a ten-foot pole. You don’t want to be too attached to anything. And it’s funny, because we’re back to one of our master signifiers. It’s the whole Western Buddhism thing: everything is a cosmic phenomenon, let’s just observe the world without attaching ourselves too much to it. It’s the rise of Stoicism in that regard too. Call it a bastardised Stoicism, where you don’t want to commit yourself too much to the world. Don’t be reactive; take it in, then let it go. New-age stuff.

And then, once you’ve diagnosed the symptom, I think the cure is to fall in love. When you fall in love and let the love-event happen, as it were, there’s no detaching yourself. You fall fully into the world. And in the Badiouian sense, the fidelity you keep to that love-event is, I’d even argue, the ethically and morally right act. You commit yourself to it. For Badiou, as you know, it’s politics, science, art and love. I think the theory of the event is his most beautiful theory: this disjuncture that takes place in your being, and you commit yourself to it. Which I find is truly an antidote to what you’re pointing at. Call it being too cool for life. Don’t commit yourself too much to life.

Two rivers of tears

Euwyn: Actually, I have a small anecdote here, which is quite funny. Most of the time when I mention After Nihilism to people, I lay out what I said earlier: here’s the premise, here’s nihilism, this is the general mood today. Then I say the question I’m trying to ask is whether there’s a way forward. And then they ask me: so, is there one? And that’s the moment where I usually go, ah, well, read the book to find out.

Rahul: Your marketing propaganda.

Euwyn: But if you’ve read self-help books, you expect some kind of practical lesson at the end. Here’s an ethic for navigating the modern void, the abyss, whatever you call it.

Rahul: 12 Rules for Life.

Euwyn: Or if you’re more versed in literary books, you might be expecting something like Dante’s Divine Comedy, where you go down through hell, all the way up through heaven, and everything’s okay at the end of it.

I always find it a tricky question to answer. Today everything feels nihilistic. Is there a way forward? I think it’s an interesting question to ask. Is there a simple answer? I don’t think so. There’s what you just mentioned, Rahul: the ethic becomes love. Or, as people like McGowan would say, living with contradiction as opposed to shying away from it. Or Land, who has a different take again: let everything be, let the volcano erupt and consume you. There are many varieties of answers, which is why I refrain from a simple one.

But you mentioned the event. Where my book culminates is quite simple, at least philosophically. At the midpoint, the book works through nihilism philosophically, and the movement is simple: nihilism becomes nihilistic over itself, because it’s a movement that does not complete.

I write about it this way. First, you cry the first tear. This is one small part of the book. You tear up when you realise you’re not happy. You don’t have the job you want, the girl you want, whatever. But then the second tear happens. You cry the second tear when you realise that life itself has the immanent possibility of such things happening. Life has the capacity to disappoint you. So first you become disappointed, you start despairing, and then you’re disappointed over the fact that disappointment is possible. And it keeps redoubling and redoubling.

Through this simple move, I show that nihilism is not the final act. It’s more of a freeze frame: you think the pain of the present is all there is and there’s nothing else to come. And I don’t think that’s only the layman’s nihilism, where people are a bit depressed, everything is grey, there’s nothing to look forward to, no kids. Even with philosophers. Take Camus, to use a more elementary one: one must imagine Sisyphus happy. Countless young people like to cite this quote. But to me, without going too in depth, that’s basically nihilism in the hidden garb of courage. I bear my nihilism upon me like a warrior’s armour. That’s still nihilism. That’s still cynicism. It’s still a freeze frame of today, as something only despair can do justice to, with no place for hope.

And I push this even further. What about what the likes of McGowan and Žižek say, the Christian atheist types? All there is is contradiction. When Christ died on the cross, that marked a primordial puncture where even God was separated from himself, and the fall was reflected in the body and being of God himself. Here’s where I take another tangent towards the end of the book: perhaps that’s not all there is. There’s still a freeze frame, even of the crucifixion. Instead of thinking about resurrection and all the things those people might deem naive tropes or naive optimism, you take the death, the void, the abyss, as the horizon. You take that as the truth, as the freeze frame, and there’s no longer any openness to the event. Whether that’s the event of a resurrection, or a second coming as per Christian eschatology, or, in Fisher’s sense, a new kind of capitalism that isn’t the sins of today, or, in Žižek’s sense, perhaps the realisation of true communism. I’m not sure.

After Nihilism is a meditation on being

Rahul: Okay, I’m going to narcissistically read out my review of the book. I wrote this when I’d read the Descent and just started the Ascent. I was probably around page 73 or 79, but I think it still captures what I felt. You were talking about this notion of... not totality in the philosophical sense, but your analogy with communism. I’d say the ultimate ideology of today, which is now being deeply challenged, is neoliberalism and the markets: the way through is radical decentralisation, which is what all these crypto bros are obsessed with. That’s still a determinate whole. It says, this is where reality stops; it’s fully determined. And it’s a subtle argument, because I think the same thing could be said about... what’s it called, the Buddhist thing... the karmic cycle of birth and rebirth. That itself is a determinate whole. And ultimately, I defend reason. The point of reason is to break through even that determinate whole, to find how determinate being itself leads to contradictions.

So the reason I’m reading this out is that I want you to challenge it. Do you think I’ve got it right? Tell me where I’m wrong, where you’d push me further, or even counter what I’m saying.

“We are told a crisis of meaning blights modernity, a crisis leading to an insurmountable alienation and a despair that stubbornly lingers in the modern psyche. We are all nihilists in one way or another. The rationalist resolutely evangelises science and reason as our salvation, while the conservative has a nostalgia for a past that never existed. The New Ager hopes to find salvation by the euphoric prolapse of the inner, while the technooptimist follows suit vicariously through the machine. Conversely, Euwyn’s metaphysical contention is that reality is non-determined. Ergo, nihilism is far from the end but the beginning. The antidote, as it were, for the nihilist is to recognise they have not gone far enough.”

That, for me, is the beauty of this book. Says me, reading out my own review narcissistically. But this was my sincere take, not a review because someone asked me for one, especially not you. So push me. Tell me where I get it wrong.

Euwyn: Actually, we should have said this at the start. You’re not only my best mate, and we’re not only doing a podcast about the book. You wrote the first page of the book. I have it right beside me. So, no small thing. Thank you.

When I read that, I immediately felt you’d captured the philosophical move I’m trying to make. But as I said earlier, the move is quite a simple one. I don’t think it’s very original, at least in the scheme of philosophy these days. There are much more interesting wedges philosophers are working at, not worth listing, especially over the last two hundred years.

But here’s where I’d reorient the frame. My project as a whole wasn’t only a philosophical one. With After Nihilism I was trying to unify a work of art and a work of philosophy. Again, not very original; many people have tried. Land comes to mind, and Lyotard, whom I’m reading right now. A work of art attempts to put the reader within a certain mood or atmosphere. A work of philosophy aims to clarify something via conceptual means, even if those means are polemical or rhetorical.

If I describe what’s actually in the book: there’s a Descent and an Ascent. It goes down, and then it goes up. But at the very beginning there’s an Overture, which is a set of journals. That’s very important to me. The beginning is meant to put the reader within that mood, like when a film puts you in a frame and tells you: this is what you’re to inhabit, this is the feeling you’re to draw the rest from.

So on the outset, from the title and your brilliant review (you are a genius), it appears to be a polemic on nihilism. But I think it’s a bit more than that. For me, it’s a meditation on being. The whole book is a meditation on what it is to be. Not just the self of the senses, which is what a work of art tries to reach, but being itself: the self as it appears both to the senses and to cognition, as something that first exists and then exists to figure out that existence, or the paradox of its existence. So I’d call After Nihilism a deeply existential text, and within that texture there’s the philosophical move Rahul just brilliantly summarised. I’m building a kind of schematic around what it is to be, especially when hope is lost, when desire feels ambiguous and there’s nothing to anchor it, when knowledge and the will feel feeble, and when faith, any sense of belief or trust, feels paradoxical and all contradiction. That’s being in this sense. So there’s an implicit ontology, an implicit metaphysic.

Rahul: Thank you, Euwyn. I know, I know I’m a genius. Appreciate that.

Euwyn: So it’s not just that we’re nihilists today and here’s how to get out of nihilism. It’s that we as human beings are pulled toward something beyond ourselves at all times. Something we want, which we can’t anticipate, can’t understand. Whether it’s something we once were or something we want to be but are yet to be: a becoming that’s also our unbecoming. Or, to put it in Kierkegaard’s sense: thought wants to think what thought cannot think. Being wants to be what being cannot be; that’s my own spin on it. I know this is along the lines of what people call anti-philosophy: writing philosophically about that thing which is always pulling us from ourselves, which we always try to reach but can’t quite leap across.

So yes, I’m putting up the guise of trying to solve nihilism, to put it naively. But the larger project is to put forward what I see being to be: what being is like, and what being feels like. And there’s an implicit telos in it. We’re trying to move there. When we become nihilists, that’s when the sense arrives that there’s no way forward. That the thought which wants to be thought cannot be thought. And when you say that decisively, you become a nihilist.

Nihilism is not depression

Rahul: Sorry, I’ll let you finish, but this is really important. And here’s where I’ll be a good analytic philosopher...

Euwyn: Go, go.

Rahul: ...and be precise with language. When we use the term nihilist, I think people colloquially equate it with being depressed. They make it a mental-health thing. That’s not something I thought of at all when I was reading the book. But it reminded me of something from one of my heroes, Peter Rollins, a brilliant theologian and amazing storyteller. I think he was doing a livestream on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. And sorry, a side note, I just want to put this out there: this would have been the book Kierkegaard wrote if he’d ended up with Regine.

Euwyn: I take that as a criticism, because I think all of Kierkegaard’s great writing came from the fact that he wasn’t with Regine.

Rahul: So Peter makes this really important point, and this is where I’ll defend philosophy to my death. You mentioned anti-philosophy; I’d count that as philosophy too, but I won’t go on tangents. Peter says that in the human condition, there are biological symptoms. You get sick; we’re physical, biological beings. These can be fixed through medicine, through advances in science and technology. Then there’s the psychological. And I’d say all the terms we use right now have been subsumed into the psychological, which is why I said nihilism isn’t depression, or anxiety, or a mental-health thing. I’m a defender of psychology and mental health, of course. Go see a therapist, a counsellor; to a certain extent, people can deal with these things that way.

But then there’s one other peculiar state of being, which only human beings experience, as far as I know. I’m anthropocentric here, I admit. It’s the existential dimension of existence. Even though we borrow terms from psychology for it, it isn’t a psychological condition. It can’t be resolved through therapy or medication, despite our current ideology. Call it therapism. People try to find cures in psychology. And the other part, which makes me retch, is spirituality. Go to Bali to find yourself, do a meditation retreat. I’m being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

But it’s important that when you write about nihilism, it’s not something that can be analysed and diagnosed via a scientific paradigm and then resolved. In fact, the very idea that it can be resolved is part of the problem: trying to find the answer, to finally get the thing. And I understand, because after all you’re a poet-philosopher, Kierkegaardian in the way you try to express that state of being. I think for you it’s ultimately art: beauty, aesthetic expression. Personally, I believe this can also be explored through philosophy. But philosophy has its limits, in that it’s linguistic. At the end of the day, philosophy is conceptual analysis. So the question is: these states of being we’re trying to articulate, but necessarily fail to articulate, can we have a philosophical project that gets at them? I think some philosophers have done this, to the best of their ability. But maybe here’s where you need something like art. A practice, as it were, to house this. I don’t even want to say survive, because that sounds too biological. To house it.

Diagramming oneself out of a whirlpool

Euwyn: Okay, you’re pulling a lot of threads here. On philosophy and anti-philosophy, I fully agree: it’s not a binary. Not between philosophy and anti-philosophy, and not between philosophy and art. But here’s where I find philosophy uncanny at times. As I described earlier, life, being itself, is always caught up in a forward motion. There’s a pull, a gravity exerting itself at all times. So when philosophy happens, and I mean philosophy in a strict sense, the way Kierkegaard might describe it, since he calls himself a poet and not a philosopher...

Rahul: Sorry, can I interrupt? I think that’s the right move. One always has to speak of philosophy in the strictest possible sense. I’ll explain why later, but I totally second that.

Euwyn: Like the true philosopher. But yes, Kierkegaard calls himself a poet, not a philosopher. But would you call Kierkegaard a philosopher? Yes. Philosophy can absorb everything, even its opponents par excellence. Still, when you try to do pure philosophy, philosophy in the strict sense, a work of conceptual clarification or, as Deleuze might say, of inventing concepts, it feels to me like someone trying to diagram their way out of a whirlpool.

That’s why I have a lot of sympathy for people like Land, who write as someone caught in a whirlpool. Land has this line I love: the floor is also a wall. I want to be fully consumed, fully annihilated, but even the floor is a wall. I can’t get past it. So I’m caught in a whirlpool in which I can’t fully die and can’t fully live, can’t fully rest and can’t fully move the way I want to. And that produces a kind of sublime feeling, of being caught within the movement, which itself started as a paradox, because when you think back to how the whole movement began, you land in further confusion and vexation. You’re caught up in it, and you’re trying to find clarity, a standstill: clarity in the mind, clarity in the soul, some kind of psychological resonance. But you can’t write of the sublime, meaning the feeling of thinking within that gap, in non-sublime terms.

That’s why it feels to me like a double consciousness. Here’s an analogy. When someone sells you a course on how to make money, you’re instantly aware of the double consciousness: you know they’re making money by telling you how to make money. But when we read philosophy, we tend to get seduced by the glitter and sparkle of conceptual heavyweights, and we lose that double awareness. We forget that the philosopher is trying to offer clarity, to sell you truth, while being in the mode of untruth. Playing a sublime game with a non-sublime medium. Having their cake and eating it too.

So I’m drawn to this mode of writing and thinking, and I think my book reflects that. It’s pretty unphilosophical. For one, I resisted the urge to add footnotes. I quoted Hegel, I quoted Lacan out of my ass. Chances are I misquoted and misunderstood them. I didn’t really care. I just quoted people. To me, the best kind of writing is the merging of art and philosophy. Call it a kind of anti-philosophy: inhabiting the whirlpool and writing from out of it, not against it. There are more things from your review I wanted to address, but I’ll pause here so I don’t open too many threads.

Contradiction as a lazy master signifier

Rahul: Two things. First, I want to change my blurb to say the ultimate message of Euwyn Goh’s book is that philosophy is Amway. It’s a pyramid scheme.

Euwyn: It could be.

Rahul: That makes a lot more sense. Next edition. Second: the only way to walk through this philosophically is in the strictest possible sense, starting with the highbrow statement of what philosophy does. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the past couple of months I’ve stopped using the term contradiction in our chats. Two people told me this: [inaudible], and the analytic philosopher Graham Priest, when I interviewed him. Brilliant guy, amazing thinker. It’s a vibe I picked up from people moving around Ljubljana School circles, the Slovenian school: everything is contradiction. Not in their writing, though. I think a lot of people make the mistake of not reading Žižek and that school. You’ve got to read them. That’s where you get the real good stuff. The interviews are frankly just entertainment. The texts are where it’s all at.

Euwyn: Just to interrupt, that reminds me of how Lacan used to run his seminars. It’s a performance. Reading Lacan is different from hearing Lacan.

Rahul: He did the other thing too. In the outer lectures he’d talk about the most esoteric, crazy things, but the inner circle got the most basic stuff. You think when you get to the elite you’ll find the secrets. No, there’s no secret stuff. The inner circle was the most basic.

Euwyn: Not quite.

Rahul: And I realised it’s a mistake, an intellectually lazy approach, to say, oh, it’s a contradiction. Here I’m a good naturalist, an empiricist. There are many things where you can put in the hard work, what I’d call your existential energy, into empirically verifying them. If it’s something to do with society, you can do it sociologically, the way the late Marx did. In a way he went from being a philosopher to a kind of scientist, writing Capital: really careful, analytic reasoning. One mistake we all make is using a concept as a kind of boring, spurious master signifier: oh, it’s all contradiction. That’s why, even though I very much resonate with the crucifixion and the Christian atheist theology, even its orientation to Christianity, it’s a mistake to just say: Christ goes to the crucifixion, God is dead, God dies on the cross. To defeat this nihilism, for lack of a better term, I think it requires something beyond that. Which I still believe philosophy can achieve, because I am, after all, a defender of reason. But there are other avenues one has to explore.

The last thing I’ll say before I give it back to you: that’s why, when it comes to the most technical thinking I do in philosophy, I always appreciate philosophy that’s in dialogue with another discipline. For me it’s usually philosophy of science, and philosophy of AI, which is a subset of it. Or political philosophy, whatever. Because I don’t want to get into metaphysical woo-woo games where you lazily terminate thought using thinking. That could happen to all of us, out of sheer laziness. Anyway, I’ll give it back to you before I continue my yapping.

The freeze-frame of the crucifixion

Euwyn: For sure. Going back to what you said, Rahul, that’s also my gripe with that whole group, and I’d include Peter Rollins. Although Žižek has been interesting lately. I think he wrote something on Substack recently about Christianity, and I found it quite different from the Žižek we’re used to. So things might be changing. Or maybe it always was that way and I need to check again. I’ll check and get back to you.

But I do feel that when you treat the crucifixion as the absolute event, that’s once again nihilism as a freeze frame. That’s why I like to look at the whole myth. The crucifixion didn’t end there. It ended in a resurrection, and in a promise. One thing I find very interesting in Christianity, which I find absolutely lost in these modern Christian atheist thinkers, is the thinking of eschatology and, not resurrection actually, salvation. There’s no sense of salvation or eschatology in these thinkers. I think that comes out of their philosophical influences: you end up at a sophisticated kind of nihilism, where the horizon becomes bleak and the crucifixion says everything. Then you freeze that frame and skip the rest, or call the rest naivety, naive optimism. It also reminds me of Julie Reshe, who has this idea of negative philosophy, negative psychoanalysis...

But there’s a non-naive kind of ascent, which I write about in the second part of the book. You’re not ascending from a descent for good, where all of a sudden everything is sunflowers and sunlight and everyone’s happy. That’s not the case.

Terribly syncopated harmony

Euwyn: There’s a Bataille line I like a lot. But first, the analogy I wrote in the book itself. The piano is a musical instrument, and it’s a beautiful thing. Especially in classical times, people treated it as a medium for worship, for celebration, for joy. Only in recent times, because of our hard scientificity, have we broken the piano down: it’s just wood and ceramic and a bunch of black and white keys. And even more peculiarly, if you go into music theory, the piano is actually out of tune. Ever so slightly out of tune. So what business does an out-of-tune piece of wood have being used for meaningful worship?

Here’s the kicker. If you tuned it perfectly according to one key, it would only make sense in that one key. It would only be perfect there. If you want it to sing in twelve keys, you have to make it not perfect, ever so slightly in error. This structural wrongness is what makes room for what we call beauty. And I think that’s a sublime sort of fact to ponder. But where does that bring us? Let me get my thoughts together.

Rahul: You were talking about the Ascent. Go ahead.

Euwyn: Yes. I landed that whole analogy with a Bataille quote I really like: life, being itself, is a terribly syncopated dance, conscious of the horror it is in key with. But it’s a dance and a harmony nonetheless. So when you get to the Ascent, there’s a non-naive version. Not just that everything is despair, there’s no hope, no meaning, and it’s about living with that. No. You can cultivate a certain relationship to it that’s, to put it in absolutely dumb terms I hate, optimal for your wellbeing. Or perhaps better: a way of relating to it that’s more just.

The Second Coming

In the last part of the book I talk about salvation and eschatology, to go back to how I started. Salvation, to me, looks like something resembling openness to the event. In the beginning you become disillusioned, because you don’t get what you want, life throws you lemons, life is disappointing. Then you become a nihilist and find out that this isn’t quite all there is. The floor is also a wall, and it doubles upon itself; disappointment becomes an infinite regress, a dialectical development of a bad infinity. And at the end of the day you realise there’s something more. Perhaps within the bad infinity itself, within the dialectic, both sides exist, and you can learn to relate to the whole swing, the whole ebb and flow.

But I’m not going to fall into the Eastern philosophical or religious thing where you’re supposed to sit in the middle, like the Tao, and mediate all the forces. I don’t think you can do that. Paradoxically, when you become aware of the ebb and flow, of the goods and the bads, the extremes, and that you inhabit neither at once, you somehow slide all the way up into the good. You develop an affinity, an awareness: that terribly syncopated dance, conscious of the horror it’s in key with, but a dance nevertheless. A harmony in itself, even if a distorted one.

So salvation, to me, is this. You’ve discovered the abyss. You’ve spoken to God. You realise God is infinitely far from you and, at the same time, infinitely deep inside you, as per Augustine. And if you’re open to the event, if you don’t close things up or lock the horizon in upon your disappointment (because the future always tends to surprise and shock you), then that is the event of salvation, when it happens genuinely and authentically in a human being. Salvation becomes the moment at which fidelity to the event, openness to the event, begins to mean something.

And here’s where eschatology comes into the picture, which I end the book with. There is the promise of a second coming. I don’t treat this literally, like a white guy with a beard coming down from the sky and bringing us all up with him. It’s the embodiment of the future itself, which comes to receive everything we desire. To go back to the beginning: being wants to be what it cannot be; thought wants to think what it cannot think. There’s a pull toward something, something to do with clarity. I’m very conscious that it’s easy to slide into some end-of-history theorisation of metaphysics, so I want to leave it open-ended, undetermined. But at the same time there’s reason to hope, because something will resolve it, no matter how absurd it may be.

That’s why I love Kierkegaard. He’s all about fidelity toward the paradox. And I think the paradox, even in the Kierkegaardian vision, is a paradox that comes from the future, even though it can announce itself from all directions of time and space. If you can achieve a certain fidelity toward that, that’s salvation. Salvation grounded on the promise of a second coming: basically, Christian eschatology.

So, a lot of threads. Again, there are a lot of naive ways to take this, a lot of ways to turn it into a metaphysical assumption, and I’m wary of overstepping. But implicit in the writing of After Nihilism, I’m polemically putting forward these suggestions. And hopefully, whoever reads it, if they feel a certain kinship with the thoughts, will be pulled toward it as necessary.

The (un)true, the (un)good, and the (un)beautiful

Rahul: Isn’t it also interesting that when one tries to find this equilibrium, this middle state, it always goes wrong? I mean in this caricatured Eastern-philosophy or Eastern-spirituality way, and I’d argue it is a caricature. It always goes awry. We all know stories of this, probably because of the circles we’re in: people who get into the spirituality stuff and become the most obnoxious kind, the kind you just want to punch in the face. And even worse, they end up going further down into their depression, to the point where it becomes quite self-destructive. Which is quite unfortunate.

And the second thing comes from the point you made. You’re going to think I’m being a bit crazy. When you learn to embody and orient yourself toward this paradox, this contradiction, and mediate it, when you take that ethical stance, you’re driven toward the true, the good and the beautiful, the classic concepts of philosophy. And that’s why I’m against AI alignment. I think if you truly had AGI, it wouldn’t do what the tech CEOs say, that AGI is going to take over the world and make us humans its slaves. The CEOs have that in their own heads to get some kind of jouissance out of, I don’t know, exploding people, I guess. But if you really had reasoning, intelligent beings, machines, I believe the whole point of their reason would be to learn to mediate this paradox, and then even to ethically orient themselves toward the true, the good and the beautiful. Because ultimately what makes life worth living is beauty: the true, the good, the beautiful. I’d even go as far as saying that’s not something we do in spite of life, but because of life. And for me, that’s ultimately my Christianity. I orient myself toward that.

Euwyn: Okay, wait. I just want to make a clarification. The beautiful, the good and the true are amazing, awesome, very uplifting classical principles. But here’s where I’d put the Bataillean spin on it: this is a beauty marred with ugliness, a goodness that’s evil, a truth that’s untruth. When I say thought wants to think what thought cannot think, being wants to be what being cannot be, both are pursuing something eternally elusive. Whether it’s being or thought or a combination of both, and here’s where the neorationalists have a lot to say that I have nothing to add to. And I suppose the ideal there is truth, rather than the classical ideals, which might feel unnecessarily transcendent. Not truth in the objective sense. Truth is subjectivity: the truth that hits you, reorients you from the inside of your intestines, rejects you, puts you in a washing machine. Sorry, just a quick clarification.

Rahul: Yeah. And I want to clarify too: I don’t mean any of this in a transcendent sense. For me it’s something here. I’m a naturalist. I’ve been thinking about these things philosophically, with little regard to my lived experience. It’s very common to talk about lived experience, and I think lived experience is a bit overrated. Get over yourself.

“The Meaning Crisis”

Rahul: I want to touch on the problem of meaning. A bit of context for the listener, because it’s important here: apart from being a writer, Euwyn is also heavily in the startup world. He’s been part of accelerators, and he even did Balaji’s Network School. So, very much in the tech-bro world.

Euwyn: Unfortunately.

Rahul: Hey, I didn’t say it. He said it.

Euwyn: For capital. For capital.

Rahul: He’s one of Balaji’s slaves at the Network School. I can cut that out if you want. Anyway, one essay in this world, for those not in touch with the tech stuff, is Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. In chapter five he talks about what happens once AI, or AGI, solves all our problems. Climate change is solved, cancer is cured, we all live in this utopia. Then the problem becomes the problem of meaning. Where do human beings get meaning from, when so much of our meaning comes from work, from having a vocation? Of course that’s not all meaning is, but it’s a big part of it. At least for me: I enjoy my job, I like what I do, and as alienating as it can be at times, I find meaning in my work.

So there’s that angle: when AGI takes over the world, what are we going to do as humans? That’s somewhat fanciful. But there are also a lot more legitimate, well-thought-out concerns. John Vervaeke talks about the meaning crisis that’s arrived as a symptom of modernity. He might even say it’s because of secularism, though I’d totally push back on that; that’s a different conversation. And then there’s Daniel Schmachtenberger talking about the polycrisis: climate change, economic inequality, migration. That’s its own kind of crisis alongside the meaning crisis. In my view, Vervaeke and Schmachtenberger have thought about these things a lot more deeply than whatever essay Dario wrote.

So let me pose the question this way, Euwyn: how would you juxtapose After Nihilism with the problem of meaning? Or, to put a bit of ornamentation on it, the meaning crisis?

Euwyn: The medium is the message, to put it in McLuhan’s sense. Actually, I have some thoughts on how we should think about nihilism, but I’ll put that aside for now and go through these one by one.

Dario’s is the one I was thinking about most as you were talking. The medium of the message is that Anthropic is probably going to IPO soon. So they’re putting out words that are, and have to be, in their own interest. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what those interests are: the interest of capital. What do you get by putting out a message that the world is going to change, be vastly different from what it once was, tapping into a worldwide anxiety? You get views, attention, people thinking about it. I’m not saying it’s in bad faith. It could very well be in good faith. But truth becomes filtered through capital, because the incentive becomes the game. They’re playing a great marketing game. Anthropic, and I think even OpenAI these days: every single month they’ve invented a new groundbreaking model that will kill us all and replace our scientists and our philosophers. That’s the game. If I were Dario, I’d put out the message that would increase my stock price and pay back my shareholders. And yes, I work in the game. I’m a co-founder myself, and I used to work in venture capital, so I understand how it works.

So that’s the bad-faith part. The good-faith part is him saying: all these things are going to happen post-AI, so what happens then? That’s legitimate. We don’t know what AI is going to do to actual workers, in a Marxist sense. There’s some kind of anxiety: who’s going to make it out alive, who’s going to be able to eat, who are going to be the new overlords. But honestly, I think the good-faith part is overstated, so I can’t help flipping back to the bad-faith part. In every single age there’s a doom and an apocalypse. Our age just happens to be vastly more informed: information travels at the speed of light, and anxiety multiplies with the volume of information. The world was always going to end, ever since the Bible was written. So in a way, this is the modern, capitalist overlords tapping into that, whether in good faith or bad. Is something going to happen? Look, I don’t know.

Nihilism is an attitude toward time

But here’s where I can segue back into what I think nihilism actually is. I thought about this and just wrote it down: nihilism is specifically an attitude toward time. That’s always been the case, whether now in the age of AI or back when the Roman Empire was falling. The present moment isn’t flat. It’s the stretch of the past concaving into the future. Think of whenever we talk about the world ending, or anything to do with the mood of the day, the spirit of the age. That life has no more meaning, there’s no more hope. Cybernetic, climate or environmental doomerism. Or the various spiritual, religious or philosophical coping mechanisms we come up with to handle it. It all rises and falls on the same thing: our relationship to time. How we attend to the present moment as the nexus of the past and the future.

In the book I look at the past and the future as two different consequences. First, the past is always revisable. There’s a chapter in the Ascent where I say: don’t foreclose upon things. Remember not the former things, in the words of the prophet Isaiah. So you never say: we were once happy before mobile phones (in the sense of Jonathan Haidt), the world was okay, the children were happy.

Rahul: This is where it’s very common to blame everything on social media.

Euwyn: Yes, that’s one thing, and there are so many others. Now the world is unsafe because of whatever. No. You could even put Marx in the same category.

Rahul: Right, of course. This is where Marx meets Hegel. But let’s not go there.

Euwyn: So, the past: don’t foreclose on it. Remember not the former things. The past is infinitely revisable. The past as I perceive it right now will be different from the past as I perceive it in ten years. That’s nihilism with respect to the past: not foreclosing on a certain freeze frame, but knowing that things change. Once again, openness to the event.

On the other side, looking to the future, and to put it once again philosophically naively, it’s the possibility of the impossible. That’s what openness to the event is. Openness to a revelation, to put it in more Christian terms, or a eureka, which I used in my book once just for fun. Openness to an epiphany that will reorient me, change me from the inside. Truth as subjectivity, as Kierkegaard talks about it. And to put the eschatological spin on it: God has come, God is present, and God will come again. To ring it in the highest and lowest keys of music. I like to think about things aurally.

So nihilism is an attitude with respect to time. With Dario, I think the message is marred by his incentives. Vervaeke, as you mentioned, is more interesting, because I don’t think he has the same incentives. He’s not out there for views; he’s out there to spread a message. But here’s where I think he falls into what I’d call a situational trap. He says these things are unique to our age because of so-and-so. I’d say no: the world was always going to end, ever since Christ came. Look through biblical history. Why was Revelation written in the beginning, in such an obscure, unreadable, symbolically messed-up way? I think it’s writing the sublime: writing, sublimely, the event of the second coming, which is to come in whatever shape or form, to all the ages that would proceed from the Christian age. So if the world was always going to end, and the Bible had already written about this two thousand years ago, and nihilism is all about an attitude toward the past and the future, then it’s no surprise that today we have the same pattern: Dario doing his thing on the capital side, and Vervaeke doing his on the this-age-is-different side.

At the same time, I don’t like to flatten history into an eternal recurrence. It’s not just an eternal cycle; something is actually happening. But in the context of nihilism, of how we relate to things, I’d prefer to think of it as the same as ever. And with respect to the future: something is going to happen that we can’t expect, and things will turn out for the better. That’s it, whatever it may be.

The Day after the Last Day

Rahul: Obviously I’m with you. We should say that you and I are deeply Christian in this thinking, in many regards. This notion of the end times, the apocalypse, eschatological thinking. There have been many end times, probably ever since we’ve had writing. But the other problem, the annoying thing about the end times, is that the bloody thing never ends. The apocalypse never comes. That’s the worst part.

Euwyn: Oh yes. There’s a line I really like, which I used in the last chapter: the Messiah will come not on the last day, but the day after the last day. I love that.

Rahul: Indeed. And that’s the problem. It would have been a lot more convenient if the damn thing ended. But it doesn’t end, so we’ve got to figure it out.

Euwyn: Okay, here’s one more spin, which actually goes past my book; maybe it’s a future book. In the book I kind of glorify openness to the event, and again, that’s not very philosophically original. People like John Caputo, postmodern theologians, already write in this vein, drawing on both Kierkegaard and Derrida: the à venir, the to-come. Openness to that is the fidelity, the salvation and eschatology. But I think it’s more than that. And this is why I love Kierkegaard: fidelity to possibility is also torture. It’s torment.

That goes back to Christianity. Read The Sickness Unto Death. When you become aware of your own despair, you become more yourself.

Rahul: Indeed.

Euwyn: You become aware of your disappointments, of your capacity to be disappointed, and you become disappointed over that. You become more human when that happens. Kierkegaard places himself as a physician of sorts: you become healthy by knowing that you’re sick, which is also a very Christian argument. That’s the whole concept of sin. Men are sinful creatures. To put it more philosophically: we’re infinitely split apart from that which we aspire to. I don’t know, that sounds Kantian, but I’m sure there are other ways to formulate it. There’s an infinite gulf. That’s sin. We aren’t able to cross it. When we’re aware of it, we become more ourselves, but at the same time we’re tormented by it.

And when we’re saved, we’re saved by virtue of our fidelity to both: that awareness, that despair, and the possibility of the impossible, that one day we might cross that gulf. Though again, I frame it too actively, because we can’t cross the gap by virtue of ourselves. In a way we’re eternally passive. The truth comes at us, relative to our receptivity to it. So the more openness and fidelity you have to the event, the more aware you are of your capacity to be disappointed, and the more torment there is as well. In a sense salvation is a good thing, because your attitude toward time becomes more open-ended and more hopeful. At the same time, it becomes more ambiguous and more absurd. That’s what Camus complains about. And Kierkegaard speaks about the absurd as the paradox: the paradox is the active thing, our receptivity is always passive in relation to it, and we can only ever receive ourselves, as a condition, from the paradox. Which I like, if we put it in the schema of everything we’ve just discussed. But I’ll pause here.

The torment (pathos) of the sublime

Rahul: I agree, I get what you’re saying. But maybe it’s just my punch-on here. I can’t help pushing back a little on the notion of torment, because that’s also its own determination. It’s like you fall in love with the torment. You fall in love with your own suffering: oh my God, this openness is so dizzying, I can’t take how open-minded I am. Part of the reason I’m pushing back is technical, and part of it is probably just my punch-on. It goes back to why I defend reason.

Two examples. One is psychoanalytic. And please, whatever I say about psychoanalysis is just from theory, from what I’ve read. In no way am I saying this is what takes place in a proper clinical setting, the way an analyst would work, or the way you’d go through transference. But here’s one way I understand it. The analysand comes to the realisation that there is no cure. That’s the end, the cure, as it were. You see your split subjectivity, and you learn to house that fundamental contradiction at your core as a subject: split, incomplete, all the terms theorists use. And when you go through the process, that realisation is kind of unspeakable. It doesn’t mean: okay, I’m a split subject, I desire the objet a, the object I’ll never acquire, now I’ll get on with my life. You can come to that place rationally, with reason, but you’re still going to suffer. You’re still going to be heartbroken, still desire things, still have that yearning. But I still think something fundamentally changes in that realisation. It’s similar to how you said you learn to mediate the paradox, and that creates some kind of hope, or even moves you toward the good. So it’s not: oh God, it’s all terrible, and you wallow in your own contradiction. There’s something there.

The other example is the famous one from Sartre, in Existentialism Is a Humanism. A student comes to him and asks: do I take care of my mother, or do I go to England and fight the Nazis? This is when the Nazis had overrun France. And Sartre tells him, essentially, that it’s a decision only he can make. The reason I bring it up is that, yes, as you say, the apocalypse is a motif in all religions. But nonetheless, in our subjective selves, in our time, in our thrownness into this world, we still have to face it. We still have to have the courage to be, to use Tillich’s phrase (I really like that book), and work through the contradictions. Work through the crisis AI is creating, the crisis climate change is creating. Even though, at some formal level, you could say the bloody thing never ends. The world never ends. For goodness’ sake, it’s annoying. It just keeps on going.

Euwyn: Okay, but sorry, I want to pull against that. People like Caputo have already written a lot about openness to the event as the source of salvation and fidelity. It’s somewhat similar to the analysand being told there’s no cure. But being told there’s no cure is, in the Kierkegaardian sense, precisely the sickness, which is the funny part. To put a spin on it, I’m also wary of overstating it. Being saved doesn’t mean you’re going to be happy, whether in a Christian sense or in the sense we just discussed. If you’re aware of your despair and you learn to relate to it, to relate to the abyss, you don’t end up in a happy relationship. In fact, you end up in a very unhappy relationship.

That’s why I like thinking about musicians and artists so much. You go from a day-to-day, practical torment to artistic torment: the torment of the sublime, which you might call the pathos of the sublime. There are two stories I wrote in my book. The first is the torment of Saint Teresa of Ávila, as she was experiencing the transverberation. Lacan actually wrote about this, not me. An angel pierced her heart, and she wailed out of pain and agony, and also out of pleasure. It’s that feeling of jouissance. Pain mixed with pleasure, but pain nonetheless.

Rahul: I do, I do.

Euwyn: And I think she ended by saying her soul was left wanting nothing more. So you come across the truth, the truth is true for you, and you take hold of it. And the gulf remains. But you’re ever more conscious of it, compared with someone who is, in a Kierkegaardian sense, less of a human being, less conscious of despair and the gulf. That’s Teresa of Ávila. The other is van Gogh: artistic torment. If you read his letters, you find he was very attuned to the sublime. He’s always writing about perceiving things he can’t realise in his painting, which is precisely the pathos of the sublime.

Rahul: What’s annoying about van Gogh is that he wasn’t only a brilliant artist. He was also a really good writer. I read his letters and thought, I wish I could write like that.

Euwyn: Yes, true. His letters are quite profound.

Rahul: God, man. Come on. Unfair.

Euwyn: He wrote at one point that God is like an eclipse: I have it and I don’t have it. And at the end of the day, he shot himself. So it’s an artistic torment, the pathos of the sublime. You can be saved; that doesn’t mean you have a happy relationship with the sublime, with the paradox, with the absurd. The absurd remains. In fact, the closer you are to it, the more tormented you’ll be by it.

But once again, say you take this as a freeze frame: torment is all there will ever be, contradiction is all there is, paradox is the only thing. That’s when you land back in the foothold of nihilism. Which is the paradoxical thing, because it keeps coming back, front and centre. I’m not saying it in a Camusian sense. I don’t believe one should imagine Sisyphus happy. Sisyphus is tormented. Look at Kierkegaard himself: all his writing came out of that artistic torment. Read him and you’ll see how much he suffers. But precisely out of that suffering comes his relationship with God. You see it in the lives of monks across the centuries. These aren’t happy people. They suffer, to put it bluntly, for the greater good, for something bigger than themselves. But it’s suffering nonetheless.

So if you want to conclude, you can’t say there’s one conclusion and this is how the world is. Because it’s so easy to say: this is how the world is, this is how it’s going to be, that’s all there is. There’s always an openness to the absurd, that something might happen that you cannot expect. And even by naming it, I’m already inducing that thing where I’m trying to get there but can’t. You and the listeners can probably tell how hyper-conscious I am of these things, for better or worse. We’re always trying to think what we can’t think. We’re trying to achieve the impossible. We know we can’t, but we try. The religious pray, and the artist strives. And even in our incapacity to get there, we still try to harmonise what we can think, or produce, with what we can’t. That’s the pathos of the sublime, which we keep returning to. And if you keep being open to that absurd thing, you’ll have a relationship that somehow looks like salvation, but not one free of torment. I know I’m running in circles here, but at the end of the day this is a relationship that itself runs in circles, so I don’t feel like I’m committing too much of a crime.

“It is what it is”

Rahul: To make up for it, though, God gave him depression. So that’s good.

Let me bring in a political angle. There’s a mutual friend of ours, a newer friend I’ve deeply learned to appreciate. I won’t mention her name, because I don’t know if she wants to be mentioned publicly. I caught up with her and she asked me: do you take yourself seriously? Are you a person who takes yourself seriously? My gut feeling was to say, of course not. I’d hate that. I find taking oneself seriously rather narcissistic. David Foster Wallace said in his famous interview that there’s something deeply narcissistic about depression, the self-obsession. But I did say: I don’t take myself seriously, but I take living ethically deeply, deeply seriously.

What I meant was this. We’ve spoken about contradiction, about split subjectivity, about jouissance and the messiness of human existence, to put it in very cliché terms. We’ve talked about how these apocalyptic things are a motif that keeps coming back. And the reason I always push back against that is that my torment is never to accept sayings like “it is what it is.” I’d say that’s an Australianism. The world is the way it is. If we all accepted the world, with what I see in Gaza... Look, I’m quite privileged, living in Australia, one of the greatest countries in the world. But even here, in one of the richest countries in the world, people are struggling to get by day to day. We see it in the rise of fascism and, more positively, in the rise of socialism and more left-wing manifestations.

So here’s the reason I push back against trying to capture the world in these formalisms. I’m not saying you’re doing that, but one could make the mistake. My torment is that I don’t ever want to accept the world the way it is. I find that not just cowardly. I find it to be a sin, if I can put it that way. To accept the inequality we see, to accept what big tech is doing to people’s psyches: I find it disgusting. That’s why, for me, the torment after nihilism is an ethical one. Yes, there’s something aesthetic there, for sure, but I can’t help being upfront about it. It’s both an ethical torment and an ethical hope. Which is why I’m a leftist. I’m a communist. I think the world can be better. I think we can have the kingdom of God in this world, now. The rebuttal would be that that’s a fantasy. But I want to live in the fantasy, because what else is there? The other side of that is to accept things the way they are, which is why I’m not an essentialist. I don’t accept any kind of “this is how things are.” So that’s my torment.

‘But’ must end in ‘Thus’

Euwyn: Fair. Neorationalism is something I’ve gotten into to a lesser degree. I know they’ve been working things out in very different areas, and I have some thoughts there I wanted to discuss with you. But basically, one reason I keep circling is that it’s always “but this, but this, but this.” I do this, but then I become a nihilist. Nihilism becomes my norm. Then I become saved, but being saved isn’t being happy. But being saved is being aware, because I’m conscious of my despair and I’m more myself than I was before. But then I can be open to the future, to the possibility of the impossible, but with that comes torment. In the Kierkegaardian sense, that’s the aesthetic-religious side of me, which just dwells constantly in this. But the buts have to end in the thus. That’s the ethical side of Kierkegaard. “But this, but this, but this” is an infinite regress, as I call it in the book, a kind of duplicitous movement that just doesn’t stop. But you have to land on the thus: thus, this is what I’m going to do about it.

That’s also why I really like Kierkegaard. It’s not just that he writes about this movement in a clean way. All his perspectives contradict each other. If I tell someone “thus,” someone would tell me “but,” and they’d be right. And I’d still say: but you have to get to the thus. Through all the buts, you land in paradoxes. You believe in God, you don’t believe in God. You’re happy, you’re not happy. You’re tormented. You’re in love, you’re not in love; you love someone, and that’s also the one you hate. I love Kierkegaard because he doesn’t only write from one point of view, which is what I find most philosophers do. He somehow displaces himself as much as he writes about that which displaces him. I find him absolutely unique in that sense.

But at the end of the day we come to the thus. What is the ethic through all of this? Honestly, here’s where I don’t know, beyond being open, being receptive. But what I do know is this: going back to van Gogh, the task of art seems to be openness toward being shocked. You want to be receptive to that which will shock you. And that’s exactly the antidote to what you just said, the world as it is. No: you will be shocked by something that is to come.

The world punches back

Rahul: The world punches back. And here’s where I defend science: the world punches back. It’s interesting. I recently had two guests who came from critical theory, and they were saying that metaphysics, ultimately, is just religion. Just making up a bunch of concepts, especially analytic metaphysics, possible worlds and all of that.

Euwyn: And the world punches back.

Rahul: But they make a good point. These guys have a hermeneutic suspicion of the sciences themselves. But with art, with science, the world punches back. It can’t ever just be a story you make up in your own head. And that punching back hurts, man. That’s a punch from Mike Tyson in his prime.

Euwyn: Actually, that relates quite cleanly to the neorationalists, a strand that’s been making a lot of waves in the philosophy scene, and a lot of your listeners are probably into it. Wolfendale wrote The Revenge of Reason, which says something similar: reason punches back, to put it your way. But here’s the thing. The task of art and the task of philosophy seem to me to be two different tasks. As we said earlier, it’s not quite a binary; something can be philosophy and art at once. But art seems to me to be that which shocks you, whereas philosophy appears to be the philosopher’s preparation for being shocked. Two different things, if that makes sense.

And this is perhaps an interesting discussion, and I’m not sure what you think. But when I read Wolfendale and Brassier and Negarestani, who I think are all the rage these days, it occurs to me that their fundamental project is preparing themselves, or people, however you call it, to be shocked. Laying out the categories, the groundwork, on which surprise can happen.

Rahul: Indeed. There’s the great essay on transcendental realism. It’s very technical; you’ve got to read it carefully. One point is that the structure of thought itself points to a reality outside of thought. That pointing is, in a way, laying out the structure of thought to prepare yourself for this outside, this punching back.

Euwyn: Yes. And I’m interested in your thoughts, because you just had a long chat with Wolfendale. Given everything we’ve spoken about, nihilism is more about being in relation to that outside, in Land’s or Brassier’s sense, whatever you call it. But I think this also has fundamental implications for what truth is. For being, and maybe even for thought, though those might be two very different things a proper philosopher would carefully delineate. I’m not doing that, because I don’t call myself a philosopher in the first place.

I know Meillassoux has this big thing where being is perhaps outside of thought: you have to be able to think being outside of correlation. But I keep going back to that uncanny task of speaking of the sublime in non-sublime terms. It seems like a valid correction, perhaps. If I do a bastardised history of philosophy, at least from my own strand of interest: in the beginning, the ancient Greeks were all about something out there. Then the Copernican revolution of Kant: it’s not just out there, it’s inside, or within, in relation to the outside. Then Hegel came along: no, it’s more convoluted than that; it’s a whole that acts upon itself. And now the neorationalists come in: no, it’s too easy for that to lead to the dependence of what’s outside on what’s inside, when the inside can think the outside regardless of the connection. But that seems to me a nice way to think about categorical or conceptual clarity without regard for truth in the Kierkegaardian sense, capital-T truth. To me, that’s the truth that shocks you, which is still different from the task of preparing to be shocked by it. I’m not sure what you make of it. That’s just my gut, without having read too much of them.

Rahul: Look, I don’t know if you know this, but Wolfendale got into philosophy after he read Fear and Trembling, when he was fifteen.

Euwyn: I wasn’t aware.

Rahul: Yes. He got into philosophy through Kierkegaard, interestingly. The notion of being shocked is something I haven’t done much thinking about. Not necessarily being shocked, but the Lacanian Real, when the Real hits back, that kind of thing. I probably still think you could be shocked while preparing yourself for being shocked, using reason. That’s a cheap get-out-of-jail-free card, I know. That being said, maybe here’s where I’d say love is the ultimate thing. Love is madness, as Plato says. I saw our aforementioned friend saying on her Substack that if people loved the way she did, a weak soul would degenerate, disappear. She said something a bit hubristic. That’s how much it goes all the way.

But I get what you’re trying to say. And look, I’m not going to speak for the neorationalists, even though I deeply resonate with them. If you put it in a hierarchy, in a very bastardised way, they’d still put science and mathematics above art. I don’t think you do that. I don’t think I do either, because for me, reality punching back comes not just from what we discover through science, but also through the arts. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

Euwyn: Maybe just to close this one out. There’s a lot of cultural impact the neorationalists are having right now, not just within philosophy but outside it. A lot of people are reading them.

Rahul: Most of AI. A big, big part of it, especially Wolfendale.

Euwyn: True. So I’m not sure what to make of it, and perhaps this remains an open discussion, a possibility I’m eternally wrestling toward. But it seems the neorationalist trend has lost that transcendent object, or is deliberately trying to get away from it. Which is a fair overcorrection, because for the past two hundred years people have been going transcendent, transcendent, transcendent. And at the end of the day: no, we need clarity here, because nobody understands what they’re saying when they speak of the transcendent, and it becomes a loose metaphysic with a lot of implications.

Rahul: Look, you could say here that they’re the ultimate philosophers. Which is why I personally don’t believe mysticism is part of philosophy. This goes back to my previous point. Philosophy, rightly understood, is about conceptual clarification. It’s about questioning presuppositions. It’s about clear thinking. That’s the hill I’m willing to die on. And then, of course, wisdom.

Euwyn: Yep. But I think you hit the nail on the head there, because there’s an eternal dialectic, or dialogue, between a clear head and that which shocks you, which I’m not sure anything within the game of clear thinking can account for. Sometimes I worry that even the neorationalist strand risks losing that sense of radical openness to the event. I mean the revisability of reason, or Negarestani talking about how reason works itself out in Intelligence and Spirit, which I haven’t read; it’s just my vague understanding. Perhaps Brassier is closer, based on my early reading: the radical sense that we cannot estimate or expect or anticipate what’s going to happen.

And this is actually an age-old critique of Hegel. It’s also Kierkegaard’s critique of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. It’s not about recollection, remembering something already intrinsic within us. It’s being open to that which is infinitely within us and, at the same time, infinitely other to us. And it’s within that outside, if you can even say outside and inside, that we get shocked with a truth. I don’t know where this music is going, but it’s a revelation.

Rahul: Revelation. Revelation. Yay. No, I get what you’re saying. I’ve mostly read Negarestani and Wolfendale, not really Brassier, but I think this is his critique of neurophilosophy too: the Churchlands, who say neuroscience can answer philosophy’s questions about our subjectivity.

An AI startup for writers. Wtf?

Rahul: So, a question for you. We’ve spoken a lot about determinate being, and at the same time you’ve been deeply critical of tech-bro-ism. So why are you co-founding an AI startup called Wordsmith?

Euwyn: That’s a great question.

Rahul: If you think AI is all this stupid thing, why an AI startup? And oh my God, I can’t believe I’m going to say this: it’s an AI startup for writers.

Euwyn: Exactly. What blasphemy, right?

Rahul: Blasphemy.

Euwyn: There’s some stuff to think through here. I’m in capital: capital C, capital everything. But it means I’m playing a game within a system I’ve been born into. I’ve been thrown into it. That doesn’t mean, as people naively say, don’t hate the player, hate the game. I don’t believe that. The player is as accountable as the game. But the reality is that in life, there’s always work. Work is always a source of meaning. I think Wolfendale makes this three-way distinction at the beginning of the book: you can be extremely passive, or you can be Promethean, or... I can’t remember the third. In short: you can let the world do what it does and just let it be. Or you can be Promethean about it and think: these are the interesting ways I want to change what is, to make an impact on what is.

Rahul: I know what you’re talking about: Prometheanism. In fact, he was talking about the classical rationalists, not the neorationalists, and the notion that reason goes beyond itself. The classical rationalists were more, to put it in a Bayesian sense, Aristotelian: reason discovers the world out there, you update your priors, that sort of thing. He was critical of that too, to be clear.

Euwyn: Yeah. So there are three fundamental attitudes. I’m extrapolating here, perhaps in a completely different context, so forgive me. Either you let the world be what it may be, completely passive, detached from the world. Which I think a lot of Christians actually do: there’s the afterlife, I’ll just wait for that, I’m saved, it’s all going to be well and fine. Which I think is kind of BS. Then there’s the second, where you try to be active, work within the realm of things and just do your thing. But at the end of the day you still get consumed by the system, because the system isn’t detached from you. It sucks you in. And then, if you’re a true Promethean, you try to change something on a meaningful level.

Interestingly, I like to go back to Camus here. He wrote a small piece called Create Dangerously. To me it’s almost a mantra. I’m born into a system I both love and hate. It’s good and bad, all kinds of intensities. And, to put it in a naive tech-bro sense, I’d like to leave my mark and do something I think is worth doing. And at the end of the day, I guess, be a servant of truth as it comes to be. That’s the sense in which I’m born into capital, into this game. I started my career in business. Now I have the choice. Do I just live detached, because I don’t like capitalism? Do I go out and protest against it, even though I don’t think protesting does much? Because if you read Fisher, capitalism is so sophisticated. It’s like philosophy: whatever argument you pose against it, it absorbs into itself. That’s the amazing thing about capitalism. So what can you do? I think you can be Promethean about it and try to change something meaningful within the system. It doesn’t mean we’re going to override capitalism and make the world better for everyone. But we’re sure going to try. And going back to nihilism: we can try to be open to the possibility of the impossible. That something might change, or that you might discover yourself in doing so, or that something violent might happen that upends everything and creates a new world, for better or for worse. And in doing so, you prepare yourself to be shocked in meaningful ways.

Rahul: I couldn’t agree more. This is why I’ve said I’m a communist, but I’m not anti-AI. I’m not anti-technology in any way. In many ways, we’ve got to sublate it. And that point you made about Christians, brother, is very perspicacious. That kind of infinite resignation, that detachment from the world, is again the nihilistic act. But there’s something after. Same thing I see with Wordsmith. Any writer worth their salt hates AI with all of their being. They hate LLMs, really, but they use the term AI broadly. And you’re committing almost the ultimate transgression: building an AI. Not just any AI, but an AI for writers, for publishing.

Euwyn: Okay. I’m committing the ultimate sin. Correct. For the sake of your listeners, I’ll explain a bit. The philosophical angle is there; I know why I’m doing it. So the question is the what and the how. I grew up starting businesses. It’s familiar to me. I also played a lot of sports and music, so I was very engaged naturally, and I went deeper and deeper into the startup sphere. So I have a natural advantage there, in the scheme of capital and getting things done. And if you want to create dangerously, you have to have impact, and you have to have an advantage.

Rahul: Tell them what Wordsmith does, by the way.

Euwyn: Right. Sure, I could just write books in the corner of my house and hope someone reads them. It might be the best thing in the world to me, but I don’t think that’s the best way I can create an impact. If I want to create dangerously, to actually become a Promethean and affect the way things are done, I’d better lean on my advantages. Startups happen to be that. And naturally, AI is all the rage. Not only that: I’ve recently written a book, After Nihilism, and philosophically I’m thinking a lot. Not just about nihilism and existence, but about what the new state of the world post-AI might be, and how we might take advantage of it. Not in an extractive sense, but: here’s an opportunity to build something that’s actually dangerous, in a good sense.

The basic pitch is this. Even the world of capital goes around by ideas. Sure, the after-effect of good ideas is attention, the attention economy, money and capital. But good ideas are, to me, the fundamental unit of how things go around, whether things begin as a thesis, an academic paper, or a book. Or something like Gibson’s Neuromancer, a sci-fi book by an early tech-bro writer that ends up stealing the imagination of the modern mind. Or the postmodern mind, at this point. Ideas are what make the world go around, and I don’t think that’s ever going away. A lot of people say writing is doomed, because people will just listen to their AIs and watch more TikTok. I don’t think so. At the end of the day, people will always want more meaning. They want richer content, richer material, because ultimately they want to set themselves apart from everyone else. It’s a natural human instinct. So they want something richer, something deeper, and the richest medium for communicating something rich and deep right now is words. If you want to learn about atomic bombs, the best way is a whole thesis about atomic bombs.

So my goal is: how can we help more of that happen? How can we help writers write without having to suffer through the whole monumental process of getting a book out, getting past all the obstacles? Without going into too much detail about the publishing industry, the first bottleneck we thought we could solve was this. Normally you fork out three to eight grand on an editor. Or you risk the wrong editor, one who doesn’t understand you or the ideas you’re trying to put forward, because they’re primed for something more normal. You can waste three months with the wrong editor, or with any editor. So how about we use AI to get you some of the way there?

The claim isn’t that AI will become the best writer or the best editor. It’s that if you’re a writer with good ideas, extreme ideas, sometimes the institution doesn’t like that. They want you to conform to the norms. But I think we all know the best ideas come from outside the norms, at the right time and in the right place. Not sometimes, actually: all the time. So the editing tool targets that bottleneck. It ingests a writer’s work and edits in a similar vein to a real editor, except it’s an AI that’s hyper-customised to what they’re trying to write and do. It’s not going to flatten them. It’s not going to moralise at them. It’s going to do decent work. If they find someone who’s a perfect fit, they should go with that someone. But most people, including me, struggle to find that someone in the beginning. That’s the basic goal. And we’re going pretty well. We’ve got a couple of hundred users, we’re still growing, and we’re learning a lot from a lot of people. So if anyone’s interested, I’d be happy for you to check it out.

Rahul: And I’m not just saying this because Euwyn’s my mate, but be a scientist about this. Direct your hate comments to Euwyn; go tweet at him about using AI in writing. But try it out and see what you find. I think that’s the best way. I don’t use AI in my writing. I use AI to assess my writing, and it’s been fine. I don’t feel it lessens my writing. But that itself is something I’m constantly struggling with: not letting the AI take over me. And I embrace that struggle.

Euwyn: Like a true Landian. Less of you, more of AI.

Rahul: I don’t know. Probably like a true masochist, to be honest.

Euwyn: It’s a big topic, so I’m obviously not going to resolve all the open threads. I do believe people should write. AI shouldn’t be the one writing; it should be a good supplementary resource. That’s the very safe way to say it. There’s also Nick Land and others, and a lot of people are suspicious of this right now: that AI is doing more to you than you’re getting from it. Which goes back to McLuhan and Heidegger: the tool isn’t agnostic. It’s not innocent; it’s not a neutral medium. It imposes itself on you. So there’s a lot to work through. But at the end of the day, I accept the risk. For anyone who can’t find a good editor, to me the benefits outweigh the cons. Sure, it might influence someone to write in a certain way. I still think that’s better than not having an editor at all.

I won’t preempt all the arguments. But we live in a society where there’s capital, and now AI is perhaps the child of capital. Or, as Mikey Downs would say, following Land: capital is AI, or AI is capital. And we’re still in the age where we can afford to be Promethean, because this child is still being formed. It’s not quite let loose yet. The singularity hasn’t happened. So we’re in an exciting period where we can build and try things that will hopefully affect the world for the better, and we’ll see how it turns out. It’s also an act of not being a nihilist.

Rahul: Not a neutral medium, without a doubt. I’d say the singularity will never happen, unfortunately. But that’s a whole other can of worms.

Euwyn: That goes back to what we discussed earlier.

Rahul: Indeed. Actually, not unfortunately. Fortunately. I think life without the singularity is quite fun, in a way. But that’s just me speaking from privilege. Brother, this has been wonderful. I’ll leave all the stuff we discussed in the show notes, including the book. Obviously I’m going to recommend it. No, don’t worry, it’s a book. Burn it. It’s terrible. No, I’m kidding.

Euwyn: Don’t buy it. That’s the final order.

Rahul: Don’t buy it. There’s the provocation. Bro, this has been just the best. I love you, man. Thank you for your time. This was so good.

Euwyn: Much love to you. Thanks for having me.

Rahul: A hundred, man. And thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

Podcast Begins — Introducing Euwyn and After Nihilism

Mark: My name is Mark, and this is Euwyn. Today, we’ll be covering some stuff.

Euwyn: This month, I’ll have a book published under my name titled After Nihilism. The basic idea is that right now, in the world, everything feels default nihilist. People are suspicious of meaning. Like, does life have any meaning? Is there, you know, some higher thing about this universe? Most people might greet that question with some kind of suspicion.

So I’m kind of addressing it from that level. Everything right now is questioned, and people are very cynical. The basic premise, by the end, is to explore whether there’s a path forward for meaning.

Five years ago, I started writing it from the position of having a lot of thoughts, because that was a whole maybe five- to eight-year journey of figuring out my faith. So background for everyone: I grew up as a pastor’s kid, right? Born into a Christian family. Indoctrinated is a fair term, right? Like, I was basically brought up in the church and indoctrinated into the creed.

But then over time, I encountered a lot of doubt. I’m like, hey, you know, I’m not so sure about all these things. Why shouldn’t I do this? Why should I do that? It all feels like something that I was molded into versus something that I fought for myself.

So alongside a lot of that questioning came a lot of reading and questioning and figuring things out. I fondly remember one shower I had, where I think I was showering in the dark for some reason, and then I had so many thoughts. They all kind of just spilled out in my head as like, oh, one bullet point is this, and then second bullet point, third bullet point, and then this first bullet point adds into micro-bullet points.

And then my immediate thought was, I have to write this down. So that was the birth of the book. I would say it’s all born out of that personal wrestling with, at first, my faith. But at the end of the day, in the final form, it’s completely agnostic. So whether you’re Christian, Buddhist, I don’t know, a Satanist, you can read it the same way, right? It speaks to the same fundamental human condition that everyone has.

Growing Up as a Pastor’s Kid

Mark: So if I zoom into your own faith, it’s a very unique situation: pastor’s kid. You grew up as a Christian, a certain kind of Christian. If it’s okay with you, could you share some of the philosophical struggles that you went through?

Euwyn: For sure. I grew up in a church like many other pastor’s kids. I was forced to serve.

The way I’m saying it now makes it sound as if I was traumatized or something, but not really. It was quite a pleasant experience, honestly. So I was super involved that way, right? All the music stuff, the youth stuff. I was also very playful, so I was always running around the church, and everyone knew me as the naughty pastor’s kid.

But yes, over time, where my struggle started was really only when I moved to Australia. When you get out of a certain environment, or maybe people would say echo chamber, then you realize, oh, there are other signals or other forces or other possibilities out there.

And I always tell my dad, “Hey, Dad, I actually really applaud you because you sent me to Australia.” At one point, when I was 19, I had this really strong sense that I could have really gone either way. Like, I could have been a really good kid. There was a 50/50 chance I could have been way down the other side, whatever that looks like, right?

So yeah, I tell that to my dad and he chuckles. But a lot of the struggles came because people would ask me questions, being outside of the echo chamber. Nobody just takes what my reality was for what it was anymore. You know, “Why do you go to church every Sunday?”

And then at the time, I was also wrestling with those questions, but I found myself answering what I always answered, which is like, “Oh, you know, I think God is real.” And I found myself like a ventriloquist, I think. My mouth kept saying things that I didn’t actually think.

After a while, it became more and more apparent. There was this gap between what I was saying and what I was actually sure of. The feeling is very much like when you’re in school and you don’t know the answer, but the teacher calls you up to answer the question. Then you’re kind of making up an answer on the spot, you know? And it sounds good. It sounds like something you’ve said before. But is it correct? You have no idea. Is it actually honest? You have no idea.

So it’s that kind of feeling, I guess.

Mark: So is it like, you know, just now you used the word indoctrination, right? Is it like the indoctrination comes out, but then you doubt it in a way?

Euwyn: Yeah. Maybe it’s because when you’re in different circles or different environments, then you are also given different ways of looking at this thing that you’ve been brought up into.

It’s like you’ve always seen an apple from here and it looks good, but then you learn to see it from the other side, and it doesn’t quite look the way you expected.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of the doubt came mainly from questions, or just from being around other people. And then obviously, once that was born, the more I sort of had it within myself. I think the biggest moment that came to a head was actually also how I start the descent part of the book.

At one point, I just looked at my hands and I’m like, what is real? Like, I don’t even know what this is.

Mark: This was how many — one year in Australia?

Euwyn: Yeah, one or two years in, about there. I was like 20, 21 maybe. People would call that an existential crisis of sorts, or something.

Mark: Yeah, so it was quite a struggle, and you felt lost?

Euwyn: Yeah. Like, I don’t know what is real anymore. What is honest? Is there anything?

And I think this is where a lot of what I’m trying to write about is for people like what I was during that stage too. Because then the easy answer, the easy way out, is like, ah, you know what? There’s no meaning in life. Nothing exists. All these things you see out here, everyone else is just figments of your own imagination.

Which is, I think, more prevalent than we tend to think it is. I think a lot of people actually think that even when they are much older.

What Is a Spiritual Identity?

Mark: Yes. There’s this term that came up: spiritual identity. Just using those words, could you speak a little to that? What aspects might have changed? Because I bet you’re a very spiritual person. That’s why you’re struggling with this. What was the “before” spiritual identity? What was in the middle?

Euwyn: Yeah, I think every journey has a similar pattern, and that’s the one I also went through, right? First, you don’t question it. You just kind of grow up in it.

And then the next position is you start to question it, and then you go the other way around. You’re like, that is all wrong.

And then when you grow older, or you mature a bit, you learn to draw the line between the two. You’re like, you know, this is correct, but this is also correct. There’s something there. And you learn to have a higher perspective over the two.

Same thing with my spiritual identity. When I grew up, I was very much like, ah, you know, gung-ho Christian boy. I was telling my classmates, “Don’t swear. You can’t say swear words,” and stuff like that.

And then when I went through the existential crisis of sorts, I went the other way. I’m kind of like, you know what? I don’t know what is real. I don’t think anything exists, actually, and I can just do whatever I want.

Mark: So you went the other way. Let’s say you’re talking about vulgarities. You just went—

Euwyn: Yeah. I mean, I think I still kept myself grounded as far as I could. I didn’t just go crazy. But my internal view was that all of that was kind of questionable. I was indoctrinated, and now I’m veering the other way, and the honest position became like, you know, nothing is real, right?

But then it was only after thinking a lot, and actually, Kierkegaard — one of my favorite writers — I came across him, and I was like, he kind of helped me understand a lot too.

Discovering Kierkegaard

Mark: Okay. Because the listeners may not know — I only knew when we went to your house and you had these books. I know the guy Kierkegaard is a philosopher, but I didn’t know the connection to Christianity at all.

Euwyn: Kierkegaard is a very, very complicated figure. But I think one of the threads that is quite powerful even for me now is truth as subjective truth, basically.

So what is true is not just, you know, oh, there’s some scientific God-object out there in the universe that’s watching over you and trying to compel you to do what he wants you to do and all that. The truth is what is true for you, right?

Now a lot of people will say, like, oh, does that mean anything that’s true for you is right? Okay, let’s put that aside for now.

What that helped me realize too is, every time you’re wrestling with God, and you’re wrestling with spiritual identities and all that, all you’re wrestling with really is what is true for you. There’s always something that you’re trying to wrestle with, and that’s, I think, how I think about spiritual identities.

If you’re not a Christian, you’re something else. And if you’re not that — if you’re a Satanist, if you’re not that, you’re something else. I always like that Bob Dylan line about how you “must serve somebody.” I think like that, right?

So basically, the spiritual identity there is that, at the end of the day, you’re always looking for this truth that is true for you. And where you find that is kind of where you find God, in a way.

What that helped me realize at the time, when I started getting really deep into Kierkegaard, is: the church — it’s funny, because backstory is, Kierkegaard kind of hated the church too. He thinks the church basically imposes a lot of things on the individual that make them more like part of a crowd than actually a true Christian.

And that’s where he starts to say, no, actually being a true Christian means wrestling with God, and learning to wrestle with what is the truth. There is always a gap, right? You’re never like, “Oh, I’ve finally gotten God. I’ve finally gotten what is true for myself.” You’re always wrestling with that, but it’s how you attune yourself to that that makes all the difference.

Is Faith Supposed to Be a Struggle?

Mark: Okay, this is very interesting. There’s some meat in there. So you’re saying this Kierkegaard — I think there are many Christians who might be going through what you mentioned. There was something that caught me: part of the whole Christian journey is to continue struggling to find your own truth. The monolithic church truth is not it.

Euwyn: Yeah, correct. That’s quite complicated.

But yeah, Kierkegaard was known to hate the church. He hated the church because it represented the crowd, basically, right? It’s always like, ah, you must do this, you must believe this.

Kierkegaard, at the end of the day, identifies truth as something internal. So that’s where he’s like, the church is at fault for making truth external. Instead of you really going deep into yourself, truth in the eyes of the church becomes something like going to church every Sunday, being ingrained in the community, serving, and then going up the ranks — I don’t know, being a pastor and all that.

Mark: Yeah, there are some rules involved.

Euwyn: It becomes very — truth becomes flattened into some kind of adherence to a norm, right? And that’s where Kierkegaard, in a separate philosophical tangent, writes about Abraham as his hero, his big hero.

A lot of Christians who go to church treat truth as something very safe. Like, you just go to church, you abide by the right thing, you’ll be fine. You go to heaven. Okay, cool. That’s a done deal.

But then he writes about Abraham. Abraham, actually, in his book called Fear and Trembling, is the guy who obeyed God to the point of an absurd command, which is, I think, God said, “Go and sacrifice your son,” right?

And then Abraham was like, yes, cool, I’ll do that. And Kierkegaard basically writes about 100 pages saying it was such an absurd command because he couldn’t even tell anyone this. If he told Sarah, his wife, or other people that, “Hey, God told me to kill my son. I’m going to kill my son tonight,” it would be like, what the hell is wrong with you, right? You’re insane.

And so that is where Kierkegaard also writes that your true relationship with God is something you wrestle with internally, but it’s also sometimes very absurd. It might be very questionable too.

Going back to what we mentioned, a lot of pastors today will preach about Abraham in a very flat sort of way. They’re like, “Oh, you know, Abraham is the father of faith. He was the guy who really obeyed God. And so everyone must be like Abraham,” without actually reckoning with, no, Abraham was actually batshit crazy, you know — almost insane, if anybody knew what he was going to do before he did it.

So yeah, I think it’s that big separation between what’s subjectively true, and that is their relationship with God. And then the church sometimes flattens that a lot and makes things very safe, and then kind of imposes itself on this thing. It makes Christianity cheap.

Mark: Makes Christianity cheap.

Euwyn: Yeah.

Mark: Can you — cheap means what?

Euwyn: It cheapens or flattens what is supposed to be — I would say something like, it finitizes what is supposed to be infinite. It makes a big relationship feel like just adherence to laws, or participation in an in-group, or stuff like that.

Can Your Personal Truth Look Crazy?

Mark: Okay. Just now you said something that caught me also. You said something about your internal truth in relation to God. It can be quite ridiculous.

Euwyn: Yeah.

Mark: Okay. So how I understand it is, you could be living in a certain way or understanding the world in a certain way, and other people look at you and they’ll judge you. You can say you’re a lousy Christian, or you are spiritually wrong, or whatever.

There’s something about your internal life, or someone else’s internal life, that can be judged by others because it’s a bit weird, or it’s wrong, or it’s a bit crazy.

Euwyn: Yeah. That’s quite a contentious topic, even within the world of Kierkegaard, I would say.

Mark: You don’t mind sharing?

Euwyn: Kierkegaard was also writing in a world where a lot of philosophers were creating systems that boxed the individual in a concept, right?

For example, before Kierkegaard, a lot of philosophers, whether it’s Hegel or other people, would be like, this is humanity, and this is human consciousness. It’s like this, and this is the system that all human activity falls under.

And then Kierkegaard basically came as the knee-jerk response, like, you know, whatever systems any human can build, whether it’s a thousand-page textbook on what a human being is and what a human being should be, I am somehow still outside of that.

So his impulse is like, no matter what people say I am, I am something else. I am something deeper inside me. The truth is what is true for me. And then he writes at the end that he doesn’t know what this truth is yet, but he desires it.

Kierkegaard, I think, is really representative of finding your inner truth, basically.

Mark: For example, one might say — and this is a bit controversial — what about jihadists, right? What if your inner truth is to go and bomb something?

Euwyn: I see. Then that’s actually a good question. That’s actually a good rebuttal to Kierkegaard, but that’s where a lot of other things come into play. Perhaps that’ll be a separate rabbit hole.

But at the end of the day, I think where Kierkegaard comes in, and where that reflects in my journey, is like, okay, let’s forget the institution. Let’s forget morality, what people think is right and wrong. Let’s just learn to look deep within and reflect.

And when you look deep within, it’s never quite so simple as excavating. Some psychologists like to paint it as like, oh, you go into your childhood and all that. I don’t think it’s so simple.

It’s always like you go deep within and you kind of wrestle with something. Something that’s not there, something that’s there, something that I need, something I don’t have, something I should be but I’m not.

And to me, that’s just some version of saying that you’re wrestling with God. It’s a secular way of saying that, or a psychological way of saying that.

Mark: Yes.

Wrestling with God, Calling, and Purpose

Euwyn: And so the main thing is that turn, for me, was like the later stage of my journey, where I’m like, okay, at the end of the day, I am wrestling with this thing. I might do a lot of things that I feel are true for me that other people might question, and that’s fine.

I guess another secular/spiritual way of calling this is calling, right? You know, I’m here to find my calling, and then I’m going to exercise it even if it’s questionable. I’m not going to go and kill somebody. It’s a separate rabbit hole.

But at the end of the day, I’m trying to find that stake in myself where I’m like, I’m doing what I should be doing, which is also to say I’m doing what God wants me to do, in a convoluted sort of way. And then, yeah, just living out that sort of stance.

Mark: So I’m just thinking of a modern-day Christian, and I don’t know, the way you say it allows that person who feels like his journey, or his worldview, or even his morality, is a bit not like what the institution says. So then that gives this person a way forward, I feel.

Euwyn: Yep.

Mark: Because it allows, if I’m that person, then I can feel my way through. It could be a lifelong thing, and I can go to different congregations, or different spiritual leaders, pastors, or churches, and say, okay, I may not agree, but I learned something that is useful from here. Or I can go to others and disagree with most things, but I can still appreciate it.

It doesn’t have to be too black and white because I just take whatever works for me. That’s what I sort of take away. Is that it, essentially?

Euwyn: And I think that’s what everyone goes through too, right? Because even whether it’s a church or a family, actually.

Yeah, we just watched Michael, the movie on Michael Jackson. And I guess the church for Kierkegaard would have been like Michael Jackson’s dad. Because in the movie, basically, the whole of Michael Jackson’s life — without spoiling it — was spent trying to evade his dad’s control, right?

But then I guess if you put that in a way that reflects what I got a lot from Kierkegaard, but also from my own life, it’s like, hey, there are all these forces out there. A lot of things out there are there to box you into something, but you’re always slipping outside of that in search of the truth that’s true for you.

And you might end up challenging a lot of norms. I think that’s the whole point, right? Because, for example, what is right and wrong now was not the same as 300 years ago. So that’s a self-revising process, right? And perhaps you can play a part in that.

Final Reflections

Mark: Okay. Thank you for this conversation.

The thing that hit me was the truth that is true for you. Very clear.

So thank you for listening in to this convo. Kierkegaard and what’s true for you. I learned so much as an acupuncturist from Mr. Euwyn.

And thank you for listening. Bye-bye.

“Consider this question: how do you know you are not dreaming right now? When you are immersed in a dream, everything feels real, until—a moment of lucidity breaks the spell. You say, “Oh, I am in fact dreaming”.

But what guarantees that you are not dreaming right at this moment? You might point to consistencies, details, or sensations of the present moment that seem too vivid, too coherent for a dream—but these ‘headful’ arguments falter under deep scrutiny. Can you be completely sure? Or is the chance that you are dreaming always nonzero?

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi captured this paradox in a simple reflection:

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither… conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”
— Zhuangzi

So, are we real? What is certain is not any one particular answer, but the feeling the question provokes: a strange kind of uncanny (unheimlich).

This word, “uncanny”, is now commonly used in the context of animated films and AI-generated graphics. This type of “uncanny” is in effect what Mark Fisher called the ‘weird’, a nausea-inducing encounter with something alien, robotic, or artificially intelligent that doesn’t belong in our world (‘uncanny valley’). But Zhuangzi’s dream—and the lucid awareness of our limitless uncertainty—creates another longer-tail, breathier, stranger kind of “uncanny”.

As Cioran writes: “When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal.”

It becomes more and more apparent that everything as we know it turns around the axes of the unreal and the unverifiable: the walk of life becomes more and more of a dream-walk. Whereby, everything we think to be practical suffering—per the Buddhist expression ‘all is suffering’—is transmuted into its actual horror: all is nightmare”…

Read the rest over at Hyperspekulation.

In this way, even if a thinker tries to be extremely neutral, extremely holistic, extremely factual. Tries not to have his radical parts, his edgy parts. Tries to pay his dues to every single party. Tries to represent his thought in the most holistic way, the way with the least possibility of being construed in the wrong way. Still then — by trying to sit at that precarious balance, he ends up covering the sharp edges with a piece of cloth that feigns (well-)roundedness. Nevertheless, whether conscious or unconscious, the thought when wielded is sharp as a dagger. It is impossible to create innocently; one only feigns innocence, a sleight of hand of rhetoric in order to lower the reader's guard and focus the dagger — either by opening up the space to make the thought more widely accessible, or by sharpening the edges to make it more technically pointed. Whereafter it is pointed out into a certain void in the space of thought, threatening the pre-existing order of the moment.

That void in the space of thought — that’s the dimension that is the life of all politics. It is the eternal threat of thought’s expression, which implicates the daggeredness of every thought. “Create dangerously”, Camus says, because there is no such thing as undangerous creation, or safe creation. Thought is a dagger. Ideas are forces. All ‘plausibly neutral’ thought merely masks its dagger-ness and renders a covert operation. And the dagger always cuts and births a new configuration — like God performing Ent-scheidung [a cut] upon the void before the universe explodes into being with all its force, in an operation equally energetic and destructive.

What this means is — all forcible, rhetorical, or provocative thoughts are simply thoughts that have embraced its daggeredness. But the implication, then — every thinker sharpens into every wrong reading ever made of them. Because that is the nature of a dagger when confronted in a world of daggeredly activity. It can always be said to be pointed in the wrong way. Sharpened in the wrong way. Made too sharp, too edgy, or exposed for its covertness. This is how everyone disagrees with everyone; and will continue to disagree, for all time to come.

What is the alternative? The dagger does not pierce. And if the dagger does not pierce, it simply does not exist. I mean, it might exist in a physical sort of sense — like a neighbour that wields many daggers but bears no threat — it is as if the bluntness renders the dagger far removed, residing in the far corners of the universe. Like ghosts that reside in the piping of the house or underneath the tiles, it does not quite affect us. It exists, but it does not insist upon its existence. Which essentially means that it, practically speaking, does not exist to us. This also means — to exist is to pierce. To exist is to cut through. To exist intensely is to torture, to brutalise. Those who live poetically are, whether they like it or not, crusaders. Gandhi is a crusader.

“Is this a dagger I see before me?” It is now at this same void that I stand, one among many, with the same dagger in hand — swinging into the space of thought, slicing across every idea that takes itself to be pure and wholesome, twisting it into the sides of “plausible neutrality,” pruning every thought into what it is nakedly.

Daggers.

Caputo, in The Insistence of God, calls for a new species of theologians — “theologians of the ‘perhaps,’ a new society of friends of a dangerous ‘perhaps.’” Not the old theologian — the one who stands behind the pulpit and points upward, who reads the Bible as if God wrote it in stone and handed it down from the sky. Not the theologian who tells you what to believe and guards the doctrine. The new species is something else entirely. A Christian Übermensch, so to speak. Someone who inherits everything that came before — the whole crisis of faith, the death of God, the collapse of certainty — and doesn’t flinch. Someone who reads the wreckage and still finds something worth saying. We don’t know who this person is going to be yet. We don’t know what they’ll look like or where they’ll come from.

And to be clear: this is not a call for a return to the old, or a resurrection of the dead. If Nietzsche says “God is dead”, then so be it. We are not concerned with plugging the tomb or protecting or saving the dead. The buried deity does not need our protection. As Kierkegaard put it, to defend Christianity is always to discredit it. “He who defends it has never believed in it. If he believes, then the enthusiasm of faith is not defense, no, it is attack and victory.” We are not here to defend. We call for a renewal in the terms of the new — what comes to us where we are, what meets us in the present. What follows is attack, not defense. And so, inspired by this charge and Caputo’s call for the new theologian, what follows is a radical re-read of the Bible in the new terms, written in conversation with Kierkegaard, Tillich, Caputo, Derrida, and others.

Genesis to Revelation is not the Word of God. It might be perfectly heretical to say. It is the Word of every single human being. The Reformation gave us sola scriptura — Scripture alone. Kierkegaard already pushed this further: the Bible, the Word, is not something you read at a distance, as if about somebody else, or the world at large. The Bible is addressed to you. You read every single scripture as if it addresses you. He makes this vivid in For Self-Examination through the prophet Nathan. King David — the greatest king of Israel, the one who slew Goliath, the man after God’s own heart — sees Bathsheba bathing from his rooftop and wants her. She is married to Uriah, one of David’s most loyal soldiers, fighting on the front lines of David’s own war. David takes her anyway. And when Bathsheba falls pregnant, David tries to cover it up — he calls Uriah home from battle, hoping he’ll sleep with his wife and assume the child is his. But Uriah refuses to go home. He sleeps at the palace gate instead, out of loyalty to his fellow soldiers still fighting. So David sends him back to the front and orders his commander to place Uriah at the point where the fighting is fiercest, and then withdraw from him. Uriah dies. David takes Bathsheba as his wife.

And then Nathan comes to David and tells him a story: a rich man with many flocks steals the only lamb of a poor man — a lamb the poor man had raised like a daughter. David is furious. “That man deserves to die!” And Nathan says: “Thou art the man.” Thou art the man. Not someone else. Not the rich man in the story. Thou art the man. That’s the point Kierkegaard makes about the reading of the Bible. You are always tempted to read it as a scholar, as an observer, learning about someone else’s life, extracting wisdom at a safe distance. You read the story of the rich man and the lamb and you’re outraged, just like David was. But you’re not reading about someone else. Thou art the man. The Bible is not some external wisdom, it’s a mirror. And this is how, as Kierkegaard says, all of Scripture is to be read. But to radicalise it further: it’s not just that the Bible addresses you, the way Nathan addressed David. It’s that it is you. The Word becomes a life, your life. Not sola scriptura, but scriptura viva — Scripture alive. Every character — every protagonist and antagonist — is literally an element of you, a page of you. David is you. Uriah is you. Nathan is you. The lamb is you. Every chapter in the Book of Life is a series of events of life itself playing out. The beginning to the end of the Word, the beginning to the end of life itself.

Lineage of interpretation

There have been innovations through history in the way we see the Bible that have led it to here. Pre-Christian philosophy began with substance — what is the stuff of reality? The pre-Socratics asked: is it water, fire, atoms? Everything was about what’s out there. And fair enough, that’s where you start. Then when Christianity began spreading like wildfire, the crown of that thinking was, naturally, transcendental: God as the ultimate substance beyond everything, the unmoved mover. Aquinas and the scholastics built the whole medieval world on this — the great chain of being, everything referring back to a God who sits above and outside of it all. Then Descartes — the great doubter — turned the starting point inward: I think, therefore I am. Suddenly the subject, not the cosmos, is where we begin. And once you open that door, you can’t close it. Kant brought it to a head with his ‘Copernican revolution’: instead of assuming that our knowledge must conform to objects, he asked whether objects, as they appear to us, conform to the structures of our knowing. And that humbling opened up a new question — not what is the substance of reality, but how does reality appear to us from within our finitude? Hegel took it further: spirit realises itself through the march of history, not from above it. And then Deleuze — the philosopher of pure immanence — who flatly rejects transcendence altogether. There is no outside. Everything is surface, fold, becoming. No hidden God behind the curtain. Whether you agree with him or not, the trajectory is clear.

And this is exactly where Caputo’s call for the new species of theologians comes to the fore. We do not read the Bible as a pre-Socratic figure would, looking for the divine substance out there. Not as Aquinas would, pointing to the God above. We read the Bible as read through Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Derrida, and everything that followed. So we’ve gone from looking at God and the Bible as claims of beings beyond history, outside of time, on the eternal plane — to looking at it as something active within time, just as how we are. From outside time to inside time. God is not the sovereign patriarch in the sky anymore. Gone are the days where he revealed himself by striking lightning from heaven. He becomes the Spectre. He’s that which haunts everything about being and all the events of life itself. A kind of Christian ghost story, after all — God is also named as the Holy Ghost. This is what Caputo describes in The Weakness of God as going from “strong theology” to “weak theology”, wherein, power is not privileged, as much as the latent possibility of the unforeseeable event — wherein God reckons as the Spectre behind all the activity of history.

And biblical hermeneutics — the way we interpret and read Scripture — went through the same journey. In the dominant premodern imagination, Scripture was treated as revelation from above. The Word was God and God was the Word. Everything with reference to the Word as transcendent power. Creation ex nihilo and all those glorious manifestations of awesome power that theologians have been addicted to for centuries. The Bible was read as if dictated from above — a transcendent document pointing to a transcendent God. But that’s suspicious today. It’s not something we quite trust anymore, especially with the advent of science, historical criticism, modern technics, and the ability for humans to create on a god-like scale. And so the Bible becomes not the seat of transcendent power but a spectral series of unforeseeable events playing out in an almost Hegelian complete swing of history — the Geist, the spirit, pervading the whole progression from beginning to end. So, if Genesis to Revelation is the Book of Life, literally speaking — the Word of every single human being — then let’s start at the beginning.

Adam

From darkness, the first words bring about the birth of light. Then, the world in parts — until Adam, Eve, up to the inevitable fall. Traditional theology — the Augustinian line that runs through most of Catholic and Reformed thought — treats Adam as categorically different from us. Adam’s sin was a unique event, a singular rupture, and we merely inherit the bad fortune of guilt. But Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, says no. Adam is not absolutely different to us. He is the first instantiation of being — the first, but not different in kind. He sinned in the same way every human being sins. We can’t think of Adam as different, and if we do, we risk misinterpreting the point of Genesis entirely — because then the fall becomes someone else’s problem, and we are back to reading the Bible as if it’s about someone else.

But here is where I would radicalise it further: Adam is not only one of us. We are literally Adams. The Genesis of the Book of Life is the genesis of our lives. When we are born, that is Genesis. We are Adams. Every newborn enters the world the way Adam entered Eden — in a state of original unity — where there is no boundary between self and world, no “I” and “not-I,” just undifferentiated wholeness. Lacan showed where it breaks — the mirror stage, where the child first recognises itself as a separate being, and the entrance into language seals the split. You become a subject, which means you become divided. And Kristeva named what was there before it broke: the semiotic khora — the pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic space of drives, rhythms, and tones. The maternal space before language fragments you. That’s the Adamic space. That’s Genesis.

The Fall

Indeed, the fall happens. But the fall is not a one-time historical event. Adam and Eve are not the villains of history to be blamed for all eternity. Everyone repeats the same original sin. Kierkegaard, again in The Concept of Anxiety, shows us how. In innocence — in Eden — Adam is given the task of naming every animal. Every name is a choice. The whole world is open, unnamed, and God says: you name it. That is the exercise of freedom within innocence. But innocence already contains within it the possibility of freedom, and that possibility generates anxiety — what Kierkegaard calls the “dizziness of freedom”. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff: no one is pushing you, but you feel the vertigo of realising you could jump. And the serpent’s temptation is essentially: there is even more freedom than you think. “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The fruit is the dizziness reaching its tipping point. And being slides into it — almost innocently.

The serpent speaks to Eve conversationally, as if he belongs. Eve sees the fruit is good for food, pleasing to the eye, desirable for gaining wisdom. She takes it. She gives some to Adam, who is with her. He eats. It’s quiet, mundane, and almost completely innocent. Not the dramatic ‘crime scene’ Christians tend to make of it. The fall is something being slides into almost superficially. The fruit, the eyes opened — “and they knew that they were naked, and they were ashamed.” The traumatic beginning of self-consciousness. The traumatic beginning of shame. Kicked out from Eden — kicked out from the semiotic khora, from the Adamic unity — and into the world as it is. And the fall is not behind us. Every person reproduces their own fall — their own awakening to self-consciousness, their own exile from the unity they started in. The past protracts forward into the life of every individual, repeating as a kind of origin story that never stops originating. It all happens in the past-present — the fall is always happening now.

What happens after the fall? Death gains ground. The first thing that happens outside Eden is the first murder — Cain kills Abel. Brother kills brother. Then it escalates: Lamech boasts of killing a man for merely wounding him. The Nephilim appear, corruption spreads, until every inclination of the human heart is only evil continually. Fast forward many generations — the Flood comes. Noah represents the remnants of innocence after the Flood. Noah walks out into a world where the covenant comes with a rainbow, which is a promise, but a promise after total destruction. Innocence is dead. And after the great reset, the remnants look outward at the world as it is given. (In parallel, the earliest instantiations had the richest treasure trove of life ahead of them — Methuselah lived to over nine hundred years, and most others lived up to around the same lifespan, but gradually there was a sharp decrease to 120 years. Sure, one could owe the sharp decrease in lifespan to environmental degeneration or bad genetics. I take it as phenomenological — death taking ground is what comes naturally with the death of innocence.)

The Search

After the death of innocence, what comes is bondage. The Israelites end up in Egypt, enslaved — the condition of being in the world after the fall. You’re alive, but you’re not free, and you don’t know who you are. Exodus is the first great act of the search: liberation, then forty years wandering in the wilderness looking for the promised land. Manna from heaven, day to day, no permanence. The golden calf. Complaints. Wanting to go back to Egypt. Pure immediacy — living hand to mouth, moment to moment, with no horizon beyond the next meal and the next complaint. This is the aesthetic stage, and this is where Kierkegaard’s stages of life’s way come into the picture: the world of being in the moment, seeking pleasure, the world of The Seducer’s Diary. The aesthetic is erotic — in the sense of pure, unmediated desire for what is right in front of you. And Song of Songs is the obvious biblical reservoir for this — desire that exceeds sexuality and becomes metaphysical longing: ‘I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not.’ That’s Israel. That’s the aesthetic stage. The conquest of Canaan. The spectacle of judges and kings — chosen and fallen, one after another. Solomon at the apex: seven hundred wives, three hundred concubines, legendary wealth, the temple built and overlaid in gold. The longing is real but the object keeps receding. One journeys from one kingdom to another, always serving something or someone, always seeking but not finding. (Per Bob Dylan, “it may be the Devil, it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”)

But what am I, per the Book of Life, really searching for? I’m in the process of finding the true self that I lost in the fall, the Adamic unity, the semiotic khora. What Tillich calls the “ground of being”. Not a God up there, not a figure or a person in the sky — but the “depth” dimension of reality itself, the ground underneath everything. You think you’re searching for pleasure or power or wisdom, but what you’re really searching for is what you’ve lost of yourself. Your “ultimate concern”, as Tillich puts it. And the Old Testament mirrors this exactly: amidst the arc of heroics, villainy, and anti-heroics — there emerges moments of profound introspectiveness. Psalms. Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Always trying to find something that can ground us. Always trying to ground ourselves in our being. As in Ecclesiastes: ‘He has put eternity in their heart, yet so that man cannot find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end.’ The stretch toward wholeness is there — eternity is in us — but we cannot master it. We feel the pull of gravity but can’t name the origin or destination. This realisation is how the aesthetic stage of immediacy starts failing. The motor starts sputtering, short-circuiting. After Solomon, the kingdom splits — Israel and Judah. Two kingdoms where there was one, and neither holds. One king to another, one war to another. A lot of destruction ensues. Impermanence gains ground. Anxiety turns into pessimism, which is what Nietzsche might describe (in my words), as an ‘early onset nihilism’.

The Crisis

And then the age of kings and judges turns to the age of prophets. When the throne fails — when anointed rulers and military victories and territorial expansion all sputter out — there is no longer the spectacle of conquest and riches. The prophet no longer rules by spectacle or office, they speak from an alien place irreducible to institutional power. And what they speak is judgment and promise simultaneously: this is how bad it is, and here is what’s coming. And it is bad. Ezekiel is shown a valley of dry bones — “Son of man, can these bones live?” The temple, symbol of divine providence, is destroyed. Nehemiah comes to rebuild it, before it is destroyed again. Everything becomes more impermanent, more despairing. The Babylonian exile — the people uprooted, displaced, identity shattered.

This is what Kierkegaard writes of in The Sickness Unto Death. Despair, for Kierkegaard, is a structural condition: the self is a “relation that relates itself to itself”, and when that relation goes wrong — when the self can’t align with itself — that’s despair. And the worst form of despair is not knowing you’re in despair. The self has lost itself and doesn’t even know it’s lost. Israel at this point is going through the motions of temple worship, but the temple is empty. The form is there but the ground is gone. Dante, at the midpoint of his life, finds himself in the same place: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.” Virgil takes him downward through the circles of Inferno — past the gate that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The ground of being is nowhere to be seen. One could even risk the claim: Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, has already come. Not someone prophesied for the future. He is in the Old Testament, recorded thousands of years ago — and yet it was not a historical event — for thou art the man. The Last Man repeats in every one of us.

But the crisis is always absolved by the promise. Isaiah comes and prophesies: “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given.” The Messiah is prophesied — not yet here, always to come. This is Derrida’s à-venir — the to-come that is never present, never guaranteed, and yet insists with enough force to keep hope alive amid the ruins. Caputo’s dangerous perhaps is already at work here: the event that has not yet arrived, whose possibility keeps the whole movement from collapsing into nothing. The promise does not resolve the crisis. It is not mere fantasy. It is what Deleuze would call the “virtual” — something real but not yet actual. The Messiah is not yet here in actuality, but the promise is already real in virtuality. Israel lives inside a virtual future.

And then, the intertestamental silence: roughly four hundred years where God goes quiet. The Spectre stops haunting. Nothing.

…

The Messiah

And then — after four hundred years of nothing — the dangerous perhaps, what Caputo calls the perhaps, suddenly makes itself known. The promise ceases to be only promised and becomes flesh. And the scene is so unforeseeable that it is comical. The Messiah arrives not in kingly robes, but as a baby in a feeding trough in Bethlehem — a poor peasant town. This is how the absolute event shows up, defying all our expectations. Israel had been trying to save itself — through judges, kings, prophets — and every spectacular attempt at self-rescue had sputtered out. Everything from the outside, everything from the world of the immediate, had failed. And then God doesn’t send another judge or king. God comes himself. From the bottom. Not a revolution from above, but an insurrection from below — the ground of being exploding onto the scene from the inside out. This is Tillich’s “ground of being” and Caputo’s “event” merging into one: the separation between man and God, or being and its ground, is reckoned with through the unforeseeable event.

And the reckoning is not something abstract — it works itself out in every sphere of life. The Sermon on the Mount overturns every assumption about power, blessing, and righteousness. The miracles address bodily disease, but always reveal that it is the spiritual disease that stirs at the root. The blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised — but the real work is deeper. The event is working itself out from the inside. As Jesus said, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.’ This is what the psalmist had been longing for all along: ‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.’ The whole search — from the fall through the judges through the exile — was this panting, this thirst. And the ground of being, the water — or, if I may, the fount of being — which had gone missing through the whole arc, is suddenly present. (This is what Kierkegaard was writing toward all along in The Sickness Unto Death. The despair — the structural condition of the self that could not align with itself — is a necessary precondition for salvation. There is no Easter without Good Friday. Christ is the salvation event that simultaneously reckons with despair when it is complete.)

The key term for this reckoning is what Christ says to Nicodemus. “You must be born again.” And Nicodemus — a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a man of the law — is bewildered. “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” He does not understand. What Christ is saying is that the beginning of the New Testament — the realisation of the perhaps, and the arrival of the event — is the beginning of the second part of life. You do not go back to the womb. You do not return to Eden, to the semiotic khora, to the Adamic unity. You are born again — from above, from within, from the ground of being itself. And Nicodemus, in his disbelief — thou art the man. We are all Nicodemus. We cannot fathom how the self can be remade. And yet the salvation event always completes itself and becomes true — regardless of whether Nicodemus understands it now, he will understand it in time, and then retroactively realise he is reborn. This is how the person is fundamentally transformed — one is reborn as if by an insurrection from within and without, and the rebirth is only realised when it is complete.

The cost of the insurrection is as radical as its impact — it is total. The Messiah is nailed on the cross. And here René Girard becomes indispensable. Girard’s thesis, across Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, is that every human community resolves its internal violence by projecting it onto a single victim — the scapegoat. The victim bears the collective guilt and is sacrificed so the community can be at peace with itself. And this is not merely sociological — it is existential: every part of ourselves that we had lost, every fragment of the split subject, every sin, every piece of the self that was lost in the fall — we need someone to place our burdens upon. If we were to bear our own guilt, it would be unbearable. “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you” — and that is meant literally, not metaphorically. Christ is the lamb — the ultimate scapegoat for every part of ourselves that we do not have reconciled to ourselves. We nail him to the cross. Every single moment we are placing our burdens on him (which is why the Messiah comes not only for the Jews, but does the work for us all, in a sweeping reckoning of all past and all future). The cross absorbs it all — our iniquities transposed onto that single image. ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.’ The whole creation had been groaning — ‘the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now’ — and the cross is where the groaning is finally heard.

Now, Christ dies, like all humankind — but as the Romans began to think Christ was another martyr, another impermanent figure in the long line of Jewish judges and kings and prophets who came and fell, just as nihilism closes its grip and the promise seems to die on the cross along with him — Christ resurrects. And even then, doubting Thomas, who saw the risen Christ with his own eyes, could not believe it. He needed to touch the wounds. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, I will not believe.” This is spoken of Thomas — but thou art the man. We are all Thomas. We see the ground of being standing in front of us and we still doubt. And yet Christ doesn’t condemn the doubt. He says: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Stop doubting and believe.” The resurrection is the refusal of nihilism. Not an argument against it — Kierkegaard would remind us that God does not need our arguments — but a sheer event that overturns it. The sin of man was nailed upon the cross, but the promise of his salvation did not die there and then. It came back with a new body, a new being. Christ does not return as a ghost, or a memory, or a martyred ideal. He eats fish on the beach with his disciples. He is bodily, material, present. And in doing so he proves the promise is still in play — that the ground of being is not subject to the same impermanence that swallowed the judges and kings before him. Every prior figure came with a promise and the promise died with them. Christ came with a promise and the promise resurrects with him.

The Commission

And then he ascends. The embodied salvation — the physical event — departs. And here is the key difference: unlike all the judges and kings of the past, Christ does not leave us alone to languish in impermanence. The embodied event departs, but we are left not so much metabolising the interaction as perpetually wrestling with it — wrestling with it still today. And the Holy Spirit arrives as the spectre of that insurrection — the Hegelian movement of spirit, which brings everything true within the gears — always continuing, always preparing the way for Christ’s return: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever — the Spirit of truth.” Here, the structure of à-venir becomes conscious of itself. Salvation makes known to us the possibility of possibility — that Christ will come back, as long as we hold on to it.

And from here — the Apostles, St. Paul, and the expansion of the kingdom. They remain in sin, separated from their ground (which has now departed), but their activity became inspired by the à-venir. Grounded in hope and the possibility of reconciliation with the ground of being, the apostles take hold of the promise and go out into the world. This is how they endured all manner of suffering — torture, imprisonment, mutilation, martyrdom — not as masochists, but as those grounded by a resurrecting ground that does not give way. The Great Commission: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” In secular terms, we confuse the Commission with divine purpose, mission, meaning — but it’s basically what Kierkegaard describes as “the truth that is the truth for me”. Our subjective truth, as inspired by the salvation event which has taken place within and without. What Kierkegaard calls, in Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, the one thing — the single orientation of the self toward the good, the refusal to be double-minded, to serve two masters. The calling, the mission, the meaning — it’s all the one thing. And for Nietzsche, of a different spirit, it is the will to bring about the Übermensch — as confused as it is powerful. But here is something worth noting: if Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, the Last Man, was already fulfilled in the Old Testament — recorded thousands of years before Nietzsche wrote a word — then his Übermensch was already fulfilled in the New. The becoming, the overcoming, the new dawn of man — it is already here, in the coming of the Messiah whose commission he has left behind, and whose work of “revaluation” has been conducted and is continually being conducted.

And so the whole bow of being is trying to reconcile with itself: the first Adam being reconciled with the second Adam, who has left and is to come again to receive us in a new form. We’ve had salvation. But the physicality of salvation has departed. We are left with a promise. We are left with Derrida. The à-venir continues and inspires all our activity. God remains as the Spectre — the Holy Spirit — pervading and permeating every single one of our desires and actions. And this is the only ethic that remains post-salvation, the only mode of ethical being after the transformation: not our own aimless striving, not the revolting against the absurd, but “the purity of heart to will one thing” — to will what the spectral “ground of being” wills through us. This is what the Bible crowns as the Great Commission. And at risk of sounding like a broken record, it is not a Great Commission for the Apostles. Thou art the man. It is yours and my Great Commission. And yet the Commission is not a clean march forward. The insurrection is transformative, but not final. The search doesn’t end — it is reinvented post-salvation, given new life, but the failure is still of the essence. As Paul himself confesses: ‘I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.’ Even after the resurrection, even after the Spirit comes, the being does not perfectly reconcile or coincide with itself. The old pattern repeats — the fall is still protracting forward. But now it repeats within the promise, not outside it.

The End

And then comes Revelation. Revelation is always apocalypting. It has always been polarising because of its mystical tone — difficult, almost impossible to deal with. It never ceases to puzzle religious leaders and theologians of every single age. But why? Because it is spoken in a future-past tense, and the content fits the tense: the unforeseeability of the future, the à-venir, the event to come, can only possibly be rendered in mystical symbolism — the four living creatures, each with six wings, covered with eyes all around, even under their wings, crying “Holy, holy, holy.” It is utterly inconceivable to us in the present day. It only appears as such to us because it is the speech of the future-past — a retroactive prophecy, so to speak. This is to say that the Book of Life is not something that works sequentially — Genesis to Revelation, stage by stage. If Revelation is spoken in the future-past, then it follows that death has been present throughout the whole arc — and in the same way, in a life, death is not a future event but a possibility of possibility that is present throughout (Freud names this the ‘death drive’.) The Book of Life encompasses all the time of our life, and this is where Kierkegaard’s sub specie aeternitatis — the eternal mode — comes into play. The Bible writes from the mode of eternity, where God occupies the whole movement and bends the bow of time from that seat of eternity in which he is absconded. Revelation is the last book but not the last stage; it is the last book only because it speaks from the most distant future (past), it is the prophecy of the unforeseeable cranked up in intensity.

This is also where the death-of-God theologians were right in their own way — when we refuse to acknowledge the dizzying to-come of the afterlife, we say that it’s just the humbling to-come of death. That’s where radical theologians like Peter Rollins move. And Nick Land — who I like to think of as a radical techno-theologian — takes it further still, privileging the event unmistakably in the tone of Revelation. Except Land’s event, the accelerationist’s event, is not one of the afterlife but one of death. The nihil spirit working through us and winning. Not even a humble mortal’s death — that’s Cioran — but a capitalist-cybernetic death, the dissolution of the human into the machine. Same postmodern lineage. Same manic form of the unforeseeable. On the other side stands the afterlife theologian — certain that glory is coming, that the chariots of fire are literal, that the symbols can be decoded into a timetable. The first may safely be called a ‘realist’ (in the true philosophical sense) — he works within the motor and is certain about the motor, but does not inhabit the Kierkegaardian sub specie aeternitatis. The second may safely be called an ‘idealist’ — he tries to match form to content and content to form, but in doing so becomes too certain about the unforeseeable. Both are wrong from the mode of eternity. Revelation is not just an apocalypse that brings about death, nor a rapture that brings about some utopian afterlife. It is the reception of the Second Coming that has been promised — revealing itself from the very end of time as unforeseeable to those of us who are living.

This then is the faultline par excellence: whether what comes after is life or nothing. And here we must be precise about where we stand. If we take Caputo’s perhaps on its own — the openness to the event, the dangerous maybe, without the eternal view — and follow it through, what do we get? If it’s perhaps after perhaps after perhaps after perhaps, arbitrarily — it’s a loop. Caputo without Tillich is the perhaps unmoored from the ground of being, and the perhaps without ground becomes indistinguishable from nihilism. For Caputo, the posture is always yes, perhaps — yes to the openness, yes to the maybe, yes to the event that may or may not come. But eschatology reverses the order. It is not yes, perhaps. It is perhaps, yes. The perhaps trembles — but it trembles toward a yes. A yes that is already prophesied in the future-past: the yes of reconciliation, the yes of the ground of being. This doesn’t mean that the answer is to abandon the risky perhaps for the idealist’s certainty. But what we do need is the eschatological perhaps: the dangerous ‘perhaps, yes’ held within the arc of the eternal view.

This is where I usher in Heidegger from the back door: there is still this overarching metaphysic of Being seeking to realise itself — of “being-toward-death”, which is being-toward-the-faultline. In Tillich’s words, our telos toward the “ground of being”, toward ultimate reconciliation. The movement wants to rest, to reconcile being with its ground — even the Eastern traditions, in their own way, converge on this same point: stillness as the ultimate horizon. We cannot see the destination. We cannot deduce it. But the Book of Life, read sub specie aeternitatis, shows us that the arc bends. And the true power of Revelation is that it does not prophesy like Nietzsche. In this light, Nietzsche’s Übermensch is not an unforeseeable being to-come, but an unforeseeable future-present that has come — a retroactive prophecy from the future. If the Last Man [Letzter Mensch] was already fulfilled in the Old Testament, by Revelation the Übermensch has already come to pass, and all we have to say is perhaps to the accomplished work.

And when we read the Book of Life as a whole, sub specie aeternitatis, the ghost of Wittgenstein returns: “telos“, “teleology”, “purpose”, “meaning”, “movement”, “direction”, “orientation” — it’s all linguistic moot, trembling around the question of where a movement is going, and whether it goes anywhere at all. What all these words are groping toward is this: dialectic cannot be movement for movement’s sake. Even the groping itself implies a direction. That’s what Hegel decisively meant by the “end of history” — and I don’t think his end of history is something to come forever, à-venir forever. Žižek reads Hegel as this perpetual negation without arrival — a dialectic where the end of history is always deferred. But perpetual negation without arrival is indistinguishable from the nihilist loop we’ve already refused. Perhaps Žižek has not read Revelation — or is pre-Revelation. The eschatological perhaps is not perpetual negation. It is not perhaps after perhaps after perhaps with no ground beneath it. It is ‘perhaps to the yes’ — a perhaps that trembles toward the bend and bow from the end. We cannot name the destination. We cannot describe it from this side of the faultline.

And this is where Kafka’s parable of the Messiah becomes indispensable: the Messiah will come not on the last day, but on the day after the last day. Because every time Žižek’s dialectical motor turns, it is not yet the last day. But when the Messiah comes — and you have noticed that he has come, and Žižek himself has noticed that he has come — that is when the Messiah has most truly come. The realisation is always retroactive. What is to come will have always been meant to come. And the Bible already shows us this structure at the first salvation event: on the road to Emmaus, two disciples walk alongside the risen Christ without recognising him. They talk with him, they listen to him, they share the road — and it is only later, in the breaking of the bread, that their eyes are opened and they know who he was. The event was present before it was recognised. Meaning becomes legible retroactively. Revelation becomes embodied after the fact.

And that’s the end of the Book of Life. The whole movement is the swing of an existence through life’s stages to reconcile with itself. The structure of a human life recapitulates the structure of salvation history and salvation future. Caputo’s events live as the unforeseeable moments, but in the scheme of an entire life, they rest as intervals. And here is where I will add to Caputo’s charge: the new breed of theologians must not shy away from eschatology and from the ethic of Revelation, that is, to live the eschatological perhaps. We do not know what comes after the faultline. But we know the movement bends toward reconciliation. This is what the ending of the Book of Life shows us in future-past tense. What, where, why, when, how? — we do not know; this is the truly unforeseeable event — the death that comes that brings about the afterlife, the new day, the new dawn. This is the true reckoning of the unforeseeable. Everything else sits within the dialectic: being trying to reconcile with its ground.

And so we circle back to where we began. The Bible is not merely addressed to you. The Bible is the whole arc of your being, from the first Adamic unity through the fall through to salvation, and then every reconfiguration and back again, going past the stroke of death, just like Christ himself did. Yes! The Bible is not something you read. It is not a historical document. It is not your prophecy, nor is it your biography. It is your Book of Life. The Bible is you — here and now.

Coda

The Bible is an impossibly rich document. If you try and read into everything I’m writing here to figure out how I’m wrong in this or that way or are doing scripture in bad faith, you will most definitely find it. But if you try and read it for what I’m trying to do — as inspired by Caputo’s call for a new species of theologians, giving us a new reading of what has been dormant for hundreds of years — then you would see what it is I’m doing here, and you would most likely have either something to chew on or something to change about it. After all, as Paul writes: “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Sola scriptura is the letter. Scriptura viva is the spirit. Perhaps this is exactly why Caputo calls for a new species of theologians — our great commission has never been to clean the dust off old parchments, but to spread the living Word. This is the task that I have undertaken — to spread the living Word in a manner true for me and, I hope, true for others too. If you look for bad faith in what I am writing, you will find it. If you look for heresy, something to spit out, you will find it. But if you look for aliveness and good faith, I sure hope to — and pray — you will find it too.

And here maybe we need a caveat — I am not discounting medical cases, not saying everything reduces to a tic. But a tic is the smallest absolute unit of the psychological loop — and in that sense, all differences between people are only quantitative, so to speak. The morally insane, the crazy, the suicidal person — they are only tuned to different degrees than the monk at a church. They aren’t qualitatively different, even if everything in us wants to believe so. You believe you’re different to the suicidal person you saw on the news. You believe you are different to Hitler, Mao, Stalin — at risk of sounding cliché — none of us are different, we’re all only tuned differently, in terms of quantity, never quality, right? You are the same as every traumatised patient who has ever been on Freud’s couch, on Lacan’s couch. Every single one of them. No one is ever qualitatively different — only quantitatively tuned differently. And what we call qualitative difference is just a symptom of quantitative hierarchy. If it were possible — and maybe it is — one could quantify all the elements of the human mind, body, and psyche, and render a bell curve. Wherever there is a peak, the tics should naturally follow.

So everything is a habit. But not all habits are destructive like depression or Tourette’s — what is the opposite of destructive here, is it not instructive? In the sense that the habit is an affirmative loop that compounds and works to the benefit of the subject. Loops have given rise to all the good, beauty, and truth of humanity. But all loops have a dark side. A shadow, so to speak. There are no perfect loops in nature. Perhaps this is the one-liner that can be the grounds of everything I’m saying here. There are no perfect loops in nature. And so when I’m always seeing myself as needing to relax, I’m affirming myself as fundamentally unrelaxed and unsettled, right? ‘Impact’ and ‘hustle culture’ are two sides of the same coin. What destroys me is what allows me to achieve, to accomplish, to go out there and get shit done. But for the need to relax, anxiety becomes the shadow. And this is what’s been happening in my — let’s say the past year or so — where certain things have led me to be slightly more psychosomatically self-aware in a negative way. I don’t want to go into too much detail. But this is where transformation or ‘healing’ looks like a critical reframe.

The first bait I can dangle for myself and see if something in me picks it up is this: what if the trauma is not that I’m fundamentally tense, wound up, anxious, and need to relax? What if the trauma is that fundamentally I am not doing enough, or not doing what I need to be doing with my life, or feeling what I need to be feeling deep within? You sense I’m going down a questionable track, perhaps reinforcing the wrong kinds of behaviour. But loops do not expire — they only get sublated into superior loops. So the question becomes, what loop is superior to the one of mindfulness or presence-seeking? And here the question turns the loop from presence-seeking into a kind of psychological excavation — with the implicit understanding that whatever the superior loop is, it will come with its own dynamic of instruction/destruction. Because self-awareness is, after all, itself an imperfect loop bearing its own instruction/destruction, right? Self-awareness breeds self-consciousness. Self-consciousness breeds infinite regression — because a lot is happening unconsciously, and becoming conscious is not so much awareness as it is a kind of motor interruption — and one eventually slips and loses oneself, continually. The loop of self-consciousness shows its face as being destructive as much as it is instructive. Like a philosopher who tries to understand not only everything, but his own terrible need to understand, and in doing so falls into a kind of intellectual cancer. Like a poet who continually searches for something higher and more profound but continually hits his head on an invisible wall. Perhaps he discovers God, but as he does, he also discovers the devil.

Heidegger posits the clearing — where we dwell in the silence, in almost an eastern religious sort of way. Buddhism, meditation, all that jazz. But when you are dwelling in the silence, are you really just being mindful, or is it yet another imperfect loop? Because there are no perfect loops, right? There is peace and rest, and I just ought to dwell in it. But then this becomes monstrous — I need to dwell, I need to dwell, I need to dwell. Back to square one. Within the loop sits something destructive as much as something instructive. So the answer isn’t more awareness, more mindfulness, more inwardness. It’s always in a certain kind of redirection, which the behaviorists understood very well. A ‘reframe’ in common terms, or a ‘transformation’ in spiritual terms. And something of it always leads back to our plasticity — the fact that we are eternally changeable, no matter what happens, no matter how sick we are, morally, psychosomatically, mentally, spiritually. Something can change. And it’s always this breath of fresh air — the aeration of possibility, so to speak — that causes the imperfect loops to loop up on themselves and short-circuit, potentially leading to a wider, bigger one that encompasses and sublates the prior. But the sublation is never without contradiction in Hegelian terms, which is to say the sublation is never without the same dynamics of instruction/destruction. This is what Freud calls the duality of the pleasure principle and the death drive, the life drive and death drive, right? Every loop that affirms life is never without its shadow, the loop that affirms death. No loop is free of the other.

Take cancer. Cancer is this drive rendered in purely destructive terms, right? But if we think about it agnostically — cancer is not only destructive, it’s also instructive. Cancer is its own form of life. And this is where the new film Project Hail Mary (no spoilers) does something interesting — the astrophage is exactly like cancer in that it spreads, but the movie renders it at a cosmic level, which makes it a bit less personal and a bit more cosmic. So it isn’t so touchy in terms of ethical feeling and all that. It renders the cancerous as almost completely indifferent. It doesn’t care about us. It just happens. It’s got its own life. We don’t know what its interests are, but we can kind of surmise that it has interests — though that might just be our own projection. Maybe it’s just spreading for the sake of spreading, like a Darwinian gene. In any case — a tic is a tic. It’s a life of its own, in the absolute smallest unit, within the psychological universe. And so a cancer is basically a tic that spreads, that affirms itself, indifferently, multiplying until it becomes a core loop — which carries its own instruction and destruction per se.

And this also means something even for something as innocent and upright like creativity, right? Creation is its own kind of loop, just seen in a positive light, and this is what Deleuze saw so well. When we have a sense of a certain idea or feeling or thought as something that can be transmuted or transfigured into creation, then the loop arrives that turns the battleground — God and hell, the world that comes to us as a tic, or as a multiplicity of tics — into a matrix of profound generativeness, which Deleuze calls the ‘virtual’. As if reality shapeshifts from a Lovecraftian monster into a set of piano keys. It retains the horror, but what is new is the infinite playability. This is why the artist always has something that everyone else does not. The artist has something that the moralist does not — because even if the world is unplayable, it ultimately communicates itself to him as infinite playable. The unbearableness becomes a fragment of its own playability. Now, it does not mean that everything would suddenly become bearable in that very instant. It does mean that creativity, the attitude of the artist, is the embodied posture of one who sees the possibility of possibility in all things. Hence the genius of the artist — not in fact his own genius — but a genius of his fidelity to chaos, and chaos in fidelity to him.

And so I suppose where that leads us is not just to be open to what might be — to the dangerous maybe, or what Caputo calls the ‘perhaps’ — and to be self-conscious in a minimally destructive sort of way. But still, one cannot minimize self-consciousness in the same way one cannot not hear things, right? It’s possible to look away from something to negate it, as Nietzsche says, but it’s not possible to unhear something. Once something is heard, it is known. When something is known, or heard by knowledge, it is thereby rooted in the ground of knowledge — as an opinion, a feeling, a sense, a vibe, right? A ghostly set of immanent tics! When it instructs, it immediately destroys. And so where that leads us — I don’t know, shockingly — but that’s where God comes into the picture. We are never ourselves, on our own. The loops are not ours to create nor ours to remedy — they are the battleground of God and the devil, which is awake and active at all times, instructing and destroying even when we are asleep. Prayer is simply the insistence to opening up to the possibility of possibility — of being saved from ourselves — even if being saved means we are still caught within the same loops and their instruction/destruction. But post-salvation, those loops are never final in their instruction/destruction. Something always comes and changes it. And that is where God alights from the seat in which he is absconded, to arrive on the scene and perform an insurrection, from within as much as from without.

Indeed, there are no perfect loops in nature, and this is something Nick Land got right. Because while all philosophers since Kant have been theorizing about what we know, what we can know, and what we can’t know — as if we are the origin of all things — what Land chanced upon, or nailed upon vehemently, as if a heretic prophet, was that everything comes from outside, even if outside is inside and inside is outside, and not from us. That means everything is, as he says, ‘providential’. And acceleration is — to me, in my interpretation — the speed of receptivity at which we receive, accept, and embrace that which is hurled toward us. And obviously, where we are caught in the battleground between God and Satan, heaven and hell, we are always subject — subject to instruction/destruction — and there and then we find cover, we find protection, we find grace, we find mercy, however we do, as much as we find ourselves in the crossfire. And to say that God always wins, to say that God is victorious, is to say that no matter what happens, possibility always wins in the end. And the insurrection that comes from outside, that enters through the inside — it’s always the best that it could have been for us. This is what it means to say this world is the best of all possible worlds like Leibniz, which is to say this reality is the best of all possible realities, which is the same thing as saying my being who I am as of today is the best of all possible beings. Not because I am perfect, but because I am where I need to be.

And here is where all those clichés come into the picture as something absolutely correct, even if not actually deeply thought through. All coping mechanisms, in this sense, are the coping mechanisms of the one caught in the crossfire and absolved by one “learning to see what is necessary in things”, as in Nietzsche’s amor fati — which is only intensified in the amor fati to oneself. Or, if you were to transfigure the coping mechanisms from death-talk to life-talk — there and then the coping mechanisms appear as affirmations. Affirmations of grace. Affirmations of one in radical receptivity. Affirmations of the one who lives at the absolute speed of receiving everything that throttles towards him, and who is graced by the insurrection of providence at the end of the day. In other words, there are no perfect loops in nature, but grace is the absolution of knowing that the loops can always change for the better, right? Old traumas can be replaced with newer, better ones. And even if it is absolutely incredulous to say — tomorrow there will be a new dawn. But it should be clear by now, with this hope, all this life-talk or yes-talk — yet another millenia-old psychological habit — comes the inevitable malady of instruction/destruction. With God comes the abyss. With hope comes hopelessness. With meaning comes meaninglessness. With relaxation comes anxiety. And this whole monologue, well — it’s not spared from it either. Is there however the possibility of an insurrection within this loop of loops? Perhaps — and this is the point at which I should just stop talking.

But then I think about badminton. Unlike football, I’m actually much better with badminton. I’ve always been up there in terms of skill and technique. When I was maybe five years old, my dad and my brother — who’s nine years older than me — they used to play badminton at the front gate. We’re in Malaysia, so you know, there are gates in front of all the terrace houses, and I used to sit on the couch inside looking out the window, watching them play. Over time I got a bit older. I tried hitting the shuttlecock. Obviously I was dogshit. But then I played once, I played twice, and apparently — so my dad says, I don’t know if he’s lying or not — he said I was pretty good considering how new I was. Maybe I had some good ball sense, yada yada whatever. So he took me to training, and I never said no. What happened was I ended up learning and learning and training and training and over time I kind of slid into the aspiration of becoming the next Lee Chong Wei. Lee Chong Wei was the biggest thing in Malaysia at the time, the biggest sports figure, and I was like, hey, I’m gonna be the next one. I trained from eight to maybe fourteen — maybe three times a week — under Han Jian, who was like a former world number one from China. And the first six months, twelve months even, was just technique. I didn’t even really hit the ball. I was just swinging my arms back and forth to make sure I got the right technique. I guess it’s characteristic of learning under a Chinese trainer — you get it right, or you don’t. If you don’t, you get punished. If you do, you just keep doing it —

And then I got a small injury. Bottom left of my back, pulled a small muscle. It wasn’t actually bad, I don’t have it anymore. But I told my dad: I think I like football more. Maybe because of the influence of my friends, or the feeling that football was cooler, more youthful, more tasteful. So I stopped. I don’t know what my dad felt. I don’t know if he was sad, disappointed, or relieved. He did say once, much later, that he was kind of happy I didn’t end up becoming a badminton player — too much stress watching the tournaments, the blood pressure, you know. But even if I did keep going — and this is the thing — the fact that I like taste more than power, which also means wit and subversion more than stamina and sheer endurance, it meant I kept losing tournaments. Not always, but sometimes. Because when people were watching, when the gaze was on me and I had to perform, sometimes my own feeling would get the best of me and I just wouldn’t. My brother, my dad, whoever brought me to the tournament that day — they would always come back a little more sad or let down than I was. And that became a theme for the rest of my life. (Even years later, when I got fired after three months at an accounting internship in Melbourne — one of my dream workplaces, suddenly, one day in a random meeting — and my dad ended up crying more than I did. So yeah.)

Anyway. Just like in football, power has never been my strong suit in badminton, but I’ve never really leaned into it or even desired to. I think about Tan Boon Heong and his most powerful smash. Power kind of gets you there a lot of the time, but it’s the same thing with shooting a gun really powerfully, or being an archer shooting an arrow with everything you’ve got, right? Because you don’t need that much power to kill somebody. What you need is sheer accuracy. Pinpoint accuracy. You know exactly where it should land and you’re able to make it land there even when you’re hindered by obstacles. To be very tasteful, almost subversive about the situation. Nimble. A you-can’t-catch-me sort of thing. Taste is full of this sort of restraint. It’s just the same with football, I really like to playmake. I like to pass the ball and play with wit. And in badminton I’m always that person where I can move the shuttle around wherever I want to, and I hardly smash. If I don’t have to smash, I don’t smash. I get more enjoyment out of placing the ball where I want to. And it’s funny — I find it the most fun when someone really tries to smash hard and that’s their only strong suit. As if they keep shooting an arrow at max power and keep missing the mark. Especially when they put real pride in their power. I love seeing them go all frustrated about it. People who take pride in their power — there’s an egotistical equivalent there, right? If they don’t place it well, they make mistakes, the more they fail the more angry they get. And I’m like, look, honestly, you wanna win the game, you don’t even need much power. You just need to dance around and prance around and be like Ronaldinho, dance with the ball into the right place. (Maybe someone could say it’s how I dealt with my lack of power, like a coping mechanism. But I say it’s a damn effective one. It’s a damn fun one too.)

And then I thought — that’s also why I love Federer. Roger Federer. I know David Foster Wallace wrote a piece on him that was so nice. I’d tear up if someone writes that of me someday. That I played life itself, brushing the ball and dancing on the court. As if I’m — I don’t know — loving or fucking the ball. In fact, I’m actually starting to pick up tennis now, with my girlfriend, maybe because of Federer. And I know Nadal hits the ball hard, runs around, plays like a very strong and energetic monkey (I mean that affectionately). And Djokovic just seems more stoic, more upstanding about it. But something about Federer stands out as the most artful. He plays the way a painter approaches a nude woman — attentive, unhurried, like the point isn’t to finish but to keep finding the right place to put it. The erotics of Federer hitting the ball is kind of what’s going on there. The others feel more like sheer penetration, sheer endurance in penetration. Which doesn’t really impress me as much. There’s a lot of eros and eroticism going on here. Maybe I’m over-romanticising it. Maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. Subjectively. And based on everything I’ve said, I think you can extrapolate why I don’t really care about how others see me, as much as how I place the ball, right?

Same thing with work. I started in accounting. My dad pushed me toward it, and I didn’t say no (mirroring what happened with badminton). And look, I liked business. I’d read a couple of business books when I was young, my brother had bought me a few books, prompted me to start a couple of Facebook pages and Facebook shops that sold absolutely zero units of anything, and he also prompted me to learn graphic design (I ended up freelancing as a brand designer for a few years, and I did unexpectedly rake a few bucks in). So I studied accounting and finance, ended up in Melbourne, and fulfilled the minimum I needed for my working visa before I moved to a co-working space. Because I love startups. Startups, to me, are kind of the ultimate subversion — you build what people want, but don’t have, and can’t even think to ask for yet, right? That’s the perfect trifecta. You could slog it off as an accountant for ten, twenty, thirty years, or grind as an investment banker, but that isn’t it for me. That’s power over taste. I’m all about taste, and the trifecta of desire, lack, and unimaginability. So I moved to startups and technology, where taste gets you a hundred percent of the way there.

At some point in my early career, I ended up curating the Australian startup ecosystem when no one else did. Whenever you searched for the top accelerators in Australia you got a block of five recommendations but never a source of truth, a real library, a curation. So I did that. And my actual goal was to get a job at Startmate, the largest accelerator in Australia. I got it. I was elated. They sponsored my visa. I worked there two years, and then I realized I got disillusioned with being “industry-agnostic” — it was always B2B SaaS, and even what they called “deep tech” felt like the B2B SaaS of deep tech. Everything felt obvious, and there and then it ceased to be interesting. I wanted to be part of something more deliberately subversive. So I left to join Hansa, a family office with a very clear conviction around open societies (as in Karl Popper) and that was full-on subversion for a while. Then some things changed, and I left to join Headquarters, a crypto fintech startup in Singapore, where I led go-to-market operations and customer success. I also moved partly because my girlfriend was here, but also because the work felt like the right intersection of everything — the perfect ikigai overlap, if you want to be that kind of person about it. Much later, we got acquired by Gnosis. (Which is great, honestly, and very useful for pitching myself, but that’s not really what I care about.)

With work, I’m never the guy who pushes for something with a hammer. I work with wit. Per corporate speak, what’s the 80-20? What’s the 20% of effort I can expend to get 80% of value — perceived value, because everything is about perceived value — and what can I do to maintain that level. What’s the 90-10? And what’s the smallest absolute unit of that 10? That’s a frame I find within a lot. The smallest absolute unit of value I want to deliver on, and how do I get there as fast as possible. Once I get that smallest absolute unit, what’s next, see what’s next. Kind of be very nimble — pass the ball, pass the ball, tiki-taka. Corporate elegance. I know people who are pure hustle. They want funding, five mil, hustle day and night, go to all the events, get in front of investors. Same thing in dating, they probably just approach the girl straight up. Maybe they get the money faster. Maybe they get the girl faster. I don’t know. I’m more the dancier and trickier one, that’s for sure. I’m Ronaldinho.

With dating — well, I’ve always been popular with the girls. It’s probably because I had a baby face growing up. And it didn’t help that I was the pastor’s kid who told sex jokes in church at fourteen and got funny reactions out of people. My community also meant I was always a bit older than I was. Most of the church’s youths were older than me, as is my brother who is nine years older than me, and so I got inducted into life nine years ahead of schedule — the music he was into, the games we played, the football club we supported. My dad says sometimes I didn’t have a proper childhood because of it. I don’t think so. I think my childhood was fun precisely because of my brother — we invented games together, played all the computer games together, and he practically inducted me into my psychological being without meaning to.

Anyway, when I was in primary school and high school, there were a lot of crushes that never went anywhere. Because I didn’t know how to bring them anywhere, I guess. Like a dumb teenager. Many could-have-beens. Not much has-beens. Although it wasn’t pitiful — there was good lovely moments, and tension, real tension, it just never got to that orgasmic feeling I find so endearing. I started dating seriously in my early twenties through to my mid-twenties. Did bachata. Asked acquaintances out. Which, in a way, embodied everything I’ve been saying here. I’ve never really been the guy who approaches girls on the street, straight up. (I’ve seen all the YouTube videos, I don’t like it, it strikes me as earnestly distasteful.) I put myself in situations, something comes up, I am full of wit, something comes to me and I pass it back in a very subversive way, and that works perfectly well, right? I have that hidden agenda — same thing with funding, same thing with dating. I have the hidden agenda, I wanna put you to bed and enjoy your being, body and mind. And I try to do it the smart way. Climbing the ladder, piece by piece. You see the diamond, you climb piece by piece. You see what’s next, you do that. If you fail, you adapt. I’ve gotten that feedback since I was a kid — hyper-adaptive. Maybe it’s part of being the youngest, the second kid. My brother is much more gung-ho. He wants to get what he wants, sheer energy, let’s work, let’s get it. But me — I’m “feelings-based”. That’s what my dad always says, and I agree. If I feel great, I play great, I do great. Maybe that’s where wit comes from. But it’s not always so reliable.

This is where I think about my philosophies, and it all starts falling into place. I was most enamored by Kierkegaard, right? Born a Christian — my dad a senior pastor who founded a church I practically grew up in, my mom also a pastor, and now my brother is a worship pastor too. A whole family of pastors. I grew up in that church, went to school, and eventually got kicked out of Malaysia to Melbourne to complete my higher education. And what happened was I started questioning my faith. Doubting my beliefs. My ground was debilitated. I started staring at my hands and questioning reality itself, and eventually went through a kind of existential crisis where I didn’t know who I was, and being didn’t know me, right?

I never really let go of my faith. I always prayed like the Psalmist. I always returned to the abyss and, through the abyss, found God, but through God, also found the abyss. I read a lot, watched a lot, saw a lot, and eventually fell onto Kierkegaard. I learned about him, I read about his journey, his life story. I forced myself to read Either/Or — practically a difficult book to read — and I spent a whole year going through it. I would say nothing has changed my life quite as much as Kierkegaard, or reoriented me, or helped me realize what my faith is. As Kierkegaard would say — and I can’t even quite remember the exact formulation, but it’s in the spirit of him — his books are not the Bible, he’s not the pastor, but he’s kind of a physician who tells people they’re sick and tells people where to look. A Christian Socrates. And then I also loved how his entire corpus, is as I would say — and as Kierkegaard scholars would probably agree — indebted to how he took his “leap of faith”, saw Abraham in himself, and cut off his engagement to Regine. From which all of his writing, all of his philosophy, all his brilliance came as the after-effect. The tragic after-effect. Or the tragic-comic after-effect. But also, ultimately, a figment of ultimate religious faith and fervor. He became the embodiment of existential passion. And that passion is what I so fell for, or rather — was struck by. (I’m now writing a 100,000-word manuscript inspired by this. One whole freaking manuscript! Do I wish that being an author didn’t come with all of its spectacular characteristics? Do I wish that philosophy didn’t feel intellectual? I wish so, yes, because then it would be more poetic — but maybe then I wouldn’t have done it.)

And so I came onto Kierkegaard in this way. Kierkegaard is kind of the ultimate subversive anti-philosophy philosopher. He writes so romantically. Now I don’t like people who are just controversial for the sake of being controversial — I don’t think I’m a jester. I take my wit seriously. I take my jest seriously, so to speak. Kierkegaard does too. Irony is of the essence, but fraught with seriousness. Not irony for the sake of irony like a comedian or a jester, right? I love Kierkegaard. I love Nietzsche to a lesser degree — I read him a couple of times during that same period of crisis, but he always feels a bit teenage to me. Same thing with Camus or Sartre. Almost like a badminton player trying to hit balls where it’s just a bit subversive — always trying to get there but never quite. The great philosopher of power isn’t tasteful enough. Kierkegaard hits that element much more; he himself moves around as much as he moves the ball around. He’s more romantic, more witty, more subversive. But far less efficient, that’s for sure.

Same thing with my relationship to God. My dad’s a pastor — hard-hitting father figure. My mom is very soft. Perhaps I’m embodying more of my mom there. But also, same thing with theology, with philosophy — people come at it with hard-hitting logic. The same thing as smashing hard, right? Mathematics — I’ve never loved it. In my O levels, it was my only C. Everything else was B’s or A’s, but mathematics, just a C. It always arrives to me as a hard-hitting force of rationality that cannot be argued against. Maybe I haven’t discovered the dance in it, perhaps I should read more Gödel. But I love poetry. I loved bachata when I did it. I love dancing with women, because I feel like that’s in a way embodying everything I’ve said. And sex, making love, the whole dance up to the point of an orgasm — that’s kind of like what I try to experience in almost everything I do. So this is almost, at this point, an entire philosophy of my inner being. An erotics of me, maybe. And ethics is downstream of that. Whereas for other people, ethics is a big thing — to me, ethics is also that hard-hitting logic thing. Ethics is never quite the hard rule. It’s all part of the same relation. Part of what I’m trying to become by suspending my being in my wittiness, or something like that.

All the same, even if I grew up in a church, and I still go to church, I find my relationship to God different from other Christians — so different it might as well be called something else altogether. And yet I believe in that. That’s almost where I find myself back in the faith, just like everybody else, in a way. Like if I’m Ronaldinho playing football — a different kind of football than everybody else — but then in that kind of football I feel like I’m playing a deeper, crazier kind of football than everyone else, and everyone’s still playing the same kind of football. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a bit overwrought. But it’s something like that. But still, I go to church — and similarly, Kierkegaard likes his eternal enemy. Hegel, and I too like Hegel. So when people say, you like Kierkegaard, you don’t like Hegel — I’m like, look, actually, I really like Hegel. And perhaps you can say the same thing: I love my dad, you know? I think he’s onto something. He just doesn’t quite see as far as I do. Maybe he does see further, but what is for sure, I am absolutely indebted to him — and this is where my witty, subversive part is coming into play, because I refuse to let you put me in a box. I’m not a rebel, nor am I a sheep. I’m like a third thing, or a fourth thing, or a fifth thing, right? If you generate a third thing, I’m probably a fourth thing. You might say I am an ‘aesthete-existentialist’. Honestly, I think that’s what I am, but yet — that only works because the label flips upon itself. Kierkegaard is like, “don’t put me in a box”, thus, Kierkegaard can be put in the box as ‘the one in the out-box’. Sure. Whatever. And so I keep slipping, and there is the threat of what I like to call ‘infinite regress’. I need to anchor myself onto something, but I keep slipping, wherever I see myself, there I am not. And that’s where the Kierkegaardian swerve comes in where Nietzsche keeps hitting the post. And I just say, that where I am not is, honestly, just God. But then what is God, right? Who? Where? Why? How? That’s the second question. And this is where you get into all the rambles and theological issues and linguistic issues per Wittgenstein. I think God is just kind of like your true self — who it is, everything that it is you aspire to be, but you’re not. Approaching God from an apophatic, existentialist sort of angle. Except God is not me. I’m not God. God is that thing within. God is that thing without. God is the absolute within and the absolute without, so to speak. And it is that which I always aspire to, and that ultimately generates all my movements. Maybe “God is dead”, but he sure seems alive even in death.

Look, this is all just rambling again, right? Philosophy, anti-philosophy, theology, heresy, blasphemy, irony. Where do I land? Kind of in the moment, in time. And this is where my chief archetype is a jazz pianist. You feel all of these things, all the polarities, you play them. And, okay, I haven’t spoken about music. Which is funny because music is maybe where all of this started. When I grew up in the church — my brother had learned the organ when he was five, before I was even born — Chopin, Rachmaninoff, yada yada whatever. And eventually the church lacked musicians. I was the youngest pastor’s kid. My brother played practically all the instruments by then. So I was kind of conscripted into the band. I was taught drums. Learnt piano for a bit. But drums stuck and became my main instrument. I played drums in church for something like ten years, maybe more. Later on, I also taught a couple of students in church, made a bit of money from that. But the main thing was I loved the drums. I loved the drums. I listened to a lot of drummers. Larnell Lewis. Nate Smith. I played a lot, and felt a lot. I liked playing in the pocket, playing in-time, but in a manner that was subversively out-of-time. If the song was four-counts, I would try to play in seven, and I wish I could play polyrhythms, wittily, but I haven’t done enough paradiddles to get there. Just like I wish I could play like Roger Federer.

All the same, after a couple of years playing in church, I fell in love with gospel music — because worship music, contemporary Christian music, became a bit boring. You listen to Hillsong, you listen to Planetshakers, all the builds are the same, all the fills are the same, and even when they’re marginally different they occupy the same moment, the same vibe, the same tension. I got tired of it the same way I got tired of B2B SaaS. Gospel felt more alive, like true subversion. Like everything else I’ve described here, it felt more like Ronaldinho in a worship band. The recently-departed pianist Quennel Gaskin was one of my favorites. If Nietzsche listened to Quennel Gaskin instead of Wagner, he might have said “God has resurrected”. And that was around the same time I was really getting into jazz, which is also around the same time I got tired of contemporary Christian music, and yeah, that’s where I landed. Out of everything I’ve said, you probably know — without me having to explain — why my favorite music is jazz. Bill Evans. Keith Jarrett. Errol Garner. I love them. I don’t just love them theoretically. When I listen to them, I feel so much in my head, my heart, and it just somehow encompasses my existence. And I love Jacob Collier — he’s somehow the embodiment of play to me, but Bill Evans feels more Kierkegaardian. He’s more melancholic. Jacob Collier is Kierkegaard in the major key. Someone who has discovered God and just understands the minor key but rambles and rambles all about the goodness of God. I don’t know what the philosophical or poetic equivalent is, but I think you catch my drift.

And even now, quite often, when I dream and I’m at my freest, I’m either flying in the air or playing an impossible solo that I can’t actually play in real life — but that I hear all the time. I can never reproduce it, because every single time I hear it and play it in my dreams, it’s always different. But somehow it is always the best damn solo in the entire universe. And Keith Jarrett — sometimes I don’t even like listening to him, but I love the experience of listening to him. Someone caught in the act of being serious, witty, subversive. I love the experience of being in time, occupying time, having sex with time. And I think jazz is kind of the embodiment of having sex with time. And yeah — every new explanation I can generate from here is just self-diminishing now. It’s too obvious and it doesn’t really mean anything. Am I not still performing that same act — having sex with time — even as I spew all this like an orgasm of words, and get off on my transgression? But now, meaning is at stake here. And if meaning is at stake, what should I just do? I should just stop talking.

In an ocean of books, why should you care about this one? Because:

THIS IS THE LAST PHILOSOPHY BOOK YOU EVER NEED TO READ.

Yes—you heard that right.

For thousands of years, humanity has been asking the same VEXED QUESTION. That 3am moment in the mirror: "Who am I, really?"

It comes in a thousand disguises:

• Why do I want to live a life I won't regret?

• Why does my happiness still feel incomplete?

• What is this restlessness that won't go away?

• Why do I feel fake even when I'm being real?

• Why do I want to be seen so badly—and hide just as badly?

• What if I've built my life on something I never really chose?

• Who am I trying to become?

Every philosophy, every theoretical system, every self-help book, every therapy session—ALL OF IT—has been wrestling with variations of the same fundamental question that refuses to let us go. We've built libraries full of answers. Entire civilizations of thought. Mountains of words upon words upon words.

All futile.

All missing the point…

“THE LAST EXISTENTIAL CRISIS” IS THE FINAL SYNTHESIS.

The culmination of everything that has been written across millennia. The END of philosophy as we know it.

No matter the stances:

• Conservative or revolutionary

• Left-wing or right-wing

• Atheist or religious fundamentalist

• Capitalist or communist

• Antinatalist or natalist

• Realist or idealist

• Optimist or pessimist

• Individualist or collectivist

• Rationalist or spiritualist

• Stoic or hedonist

• Humanist or posthumanist

It doesn't matter. This is where ALL roads lead. This is where all questions converge. This is where philosophy becomes the Ouroboros that eats its own tail and discovers the fumes at its mouth.

In short:

EVERYTHING IS CORRESPONDENCE.

Not answers. Not frameworks. Not a performance. Not a theory of forms. Not an absolute system. Not academic jargon. CORRESPONDENCE.

The end of philosophy is not another philosophy. It's the recognition that we were never solving problems to begin with. We were always in conversation. With ourselves. With each other. With the Vexed Questions. With—most of all—what we cannot name.

What happens at the end of philosophy?

All words fall into silence and implode into glossolalia.

Every exposition and proposition meets its reckoning, as it does in the following:

• The moment when meaning becomes too much for language.

• When jazz pianists grunt and convulse because music exceeds words.

• When mystics babble incoherently because they've touched the infinite.

• When lovers dissolve into wordless moans.

• When "AH!" and "OH!" become more truthful than any argument.

• When all philosophical systems collapse into aphasia.

And there—THERE—something better begins. Something wiser. Something fuller. Something less futile. Not that brittle weapon called ‘philosophy’.

CORRESPONDENCE begins.

In this way, “THE LAST EXISTENTIAL CRISIS” is not just another book to add to your shelf or device.

Rather, it is a book which—I will say this shamelessly and ecstatically—renders all philosophy, all systematic theory, all self-help: UNNECESSARY.

This is the END (OF PHILOSOPHY).
And the BEGINNING (OF SOMETHING FAR MORE ALIVE).

The Last Existential Crisis is coming 2025. This Substack will share exclusive excerpts, behind-the-scenes insights, and ongoing correspondence about what it means to be human in an age of infinite, lossy answers. → HERE IS THE MANIFESTO ^.

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