The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.

— Ivan Karamazov —

‘In spite of logic’ are interesting words for Dostoevsky to put in his heathen enemy’s mouth. But it hardly surprises me as, anecdotally, I have found that the religious often have a spite for logic. But atheists too have their vices. We tend to use logic spitefully. I know, because I did, and sometimes still do. In my first years at Oxford, reading Mathematics and Philosophy and newly out of a religion I must not name, I was disputing with a Catholic friend on his theology. I put it to him that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross doesn’t make any sense. Either God was changed by the cross, in which case He is not perfect, since his own creed holds that a perfect God cannot change; or He was not changed, in which case there was no sacrifice. Upon hearing this, my friend fell quiet as my eyes fired up with glee. All he could do was invite me to his church, hoping that the Holy Spirit would move me.

Nothing moved me that day. But I have since been moved by what transpired. In hindsight, it seems to me that I didn’t converse with my friend at all. All I did was talk past him, and in doing so wasted both my time and his. And yet such pointless engagements are by no means confined to our private lives. They happen all the time at the societal scale. Think of the rise and fall of the New Atheists, for instance. Much of it now seems like a pointless fever dream. An utter failure of a movement that died because it chose to repeat the obvious, ad nauseam. But why? Why did it choose to do that? And why do we?

Scott Alexander suggests that this has little to do with the content of what’s being said. For him, the New Atheists were offering a new hamartiology more so than a new argument. In other words, they were offering an alternative account of what’s wrong with the world. “It’s religion! That’s what makes people stupid and cruel, you see. Remove it and we can finally have decency!” Except that we didn’t. Instead we ended up spitefully repeating the same insipid message until a different hamartiology (woke) arose.

Such hamartiologies begin, I suspect, with the kind of individual disputes this essay opened with. We are ‘thrown’ into this world, to borrow from Heidegger here, alone like everybody else, and much of what we find here is difficult and does not make sense. Out of that emerges the urge to explain it. And it is always quicker to suppose that the world, or someone in it, has gone wrong than that we have misunderstood. And so we find ourselves pointing fingers at each other. Especially in arguments, where the urge to talk past one another is often overwhelming. And it feels good to blame. It feels good to think of ‘the Other’ as stupid, since that is all the excuse we need to see him as a threat and close ourselves off.

An obvious objection here can be raised. It can be argued that I have only described and problematised bad arguing, and that a good argument, properly made, ought still to move a reasonable person. However, in ‘Epistemic Learned Helplessness’ Scott describes reading Velikovsky’s pseudohistory as a young man and being convinced; reading the rebuttals and being convinced; reading the rebuttals to the rebuttals and being convinced again, “until the labyrinth of doubt seemed inescapable”. What got him out was noticing that several cranks flatly contradicted one another and yet were equally persuasive. So being unable to refute someone tells us almost nothing. As he puts it, “if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way.” His practice now is to “nod, say that your argument makes complete sense, and then totally refuse to change” his mind. Which is near enough what my Catholic friend did. Isn’t it?

My friend, then, was not being as dogmatic as I would have liked to think. In his ‘Concept-Shaped Holes Can Be Impossible To Notice’, Scott Alexander argues that we can be missing a concept entirely and never know. One of his cases is a person who reached college before discovering they had no sense of smell, having spent years teasing their sister about her stinky feet. “You can talk to an anosmic person about smell for years on end,” Scott writes, “and they’re still not going to realize they’ve got a big hole where that concept should be.” If that can happen with smell, it likely can with much else. If so, a person who sounds to us to be talking nonsense may be reporting something we have no conception of. And in such a situation, given that we are tied to our own experience—our own concepts and holes—I don’t see any way of coming to terms with our interlocutors and avoiding dialectical stalemate, or worse, the urge to speak spitefully past one another. Well, no way except, perhaps, to set up the preconditions necessary for the persistence of dialectic.

This cannot be a matter of what we affirm, since, as has been argued, we can’t affirm with certitude. Affirmation gives us little anyway, since things share many of their attributes with one another; to call a thing red or round is to say what it has in common with a great many others. We can, however, negate. A thing is what it is by virtue of what it is not. So we come to know it less by naming what it is than by ruling out what it is not; for, as Sherlock Holmes puts it, “when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

The same holds for the people we argue with. We may never be able to say with certitude what they mean, but we can, with them, progressively negate what they could not possibly mean. To negate in this way is to take a decisively apophatic posture and say, with Socrates, “I know nothing!” Such an approach enables us to be open to dialectic with anyone, on anything, until we come to terms with them. And if we don’t, we can at least avoid talking past them and wasting our lives away.

We would be like sculptors who set out to carve a statue.
They remove every obstacle to the pure view of the hidden image,
and simply by this act of clearing aside they show up the beauty which is hidden.
— Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology II —

Bibliography:

Alexander, Scott. “Concept-Shaped Holes Can Be Impossible To Notice.” Slate Star Codex, 2017. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/

Alexander, Scott. “Epistemic Learned Helplessness.” Slate Star Codex, 2019. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learned-helplessness/

Alexander, Scott. “New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed.” Slate Star Codex, 2019. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann, 1912.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Sign of Four. London: Spencer Blackett, 1890.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.

Plato. Apology.

Pseudo-Dionysius. “The Mystical Theology.” In The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibhéid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

In his short story The Library of Babel (1941), Borges describes a world in which the protagonist finds himself inhabiting an indefinite library. The library comprises shelves upon shelves of books where each book is a unique permutation of symbols from a finite alphabet. Every possible permutation, somewhere within those interminable book-shelves, already exists. The library is total; and yet, precisely because it is total, it yields nothing. The books are, in their overwhelming majority, gibberish. Mere concatenations of opaque symbols. There is no hidden cipher, no book of books that unlocks the rest, no centre from which meaning radiates outward. Men, trudging through the library, go mad wondering whether it is limitless or finite, why it exists at all, and whether there is a way out.

Read today, the story is an allegory for how we phenomenologically encounter the world we inhabit. Swamped by more than we could ever read, we meet the universe in fragments and perceive it as a pointless accumulation of ultimately absurd symbols. Time too, as it moves ever faster, seems to muffle and suffocate us. Angst, apathy, and anxiety are what condition our internality as we, like the librarians, find ourselves ferociously flung into a world ridden with Fanged Noumena.

Even so, Borges ends his short story with:

A poignant hope indeed; for no traveller is eternal…

The story is worth reading.
lmk your thoughts if you guys get round to reading it!

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A video went quite viral recently. It showed a solitary penguin heading neither to its colony to procreate, nor to the sea for its sustenance; but straight to certain death in the mountains. “But why?” asks the perplexed narrator in the video, along with millions of equally perplexed viewers on X. People then proceeded to interpret the penguin’s quest in a variety of ways. Some deemed it depressed. Others heroic. Yet others pretentiously accused everyone else of anthropocentrism. Whatever one may make of the penguin, its quest certainly speaks to us. It speaks to something within us that is deeply human.

But what is it? What is the nerve in us that resonates with a creature waddling away from everything that constitutes ordinary flourishing toward something unnamed and unreachable? For Levinas, the name of this nerve is metaphysical desire. Unlike ordinary desire, which springs from a felt lack in the self and aims at a specific, consumable other, which when obtained quenches the longing; the metaphysical desire neither arises from lack nor aims at anything that can be possessed or consumed. Rather, it springs from the plentitude of the human heart, carved on which seems to be an infinitesimal trace of the Infinite, and then moves, beyond all satisfaction, with an intensity which increases perpetually.

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Just wanted to post this neat little note.
Will talk more about this idea in subsequent posts.
Ciao!

Walking into a village, exhausted from the long journey, a man watched intently as his green-cloaked companion fixed his gaze upon a child playing before a door. The cloaked figure approached the child and with one fluid motion of his dagger slit the child’s throat. He had promised not to question the green man’s ways, and yet, as the blood dripping from the dagger stained the earth red, a cold sweat broke over him and questions swirled within him like violent desert winds. He could not contain himself any longer. His promise shattered like pottery against stone as words erupted, “Why did you kill the innocent child?” The green-cloaked figure did not answer. The man’s knees gave way, and the last thing he saw before the world went dark was the green cloak walking away.

Years later the man chanced upon a wild man, trudging through the hot desert sand, mumbling to himself, “When will he return? When will he return?” Concerned, the man asked if he was well and offered him some water. “That cannot quench me!” shrieked the mad wanderer as he held the man with his glittering eyes and related the tale of a day when, through the narrow streets of his village, a stranger cloaked in green came to his door.

When the tired stranger asked to lean against his door, the potter struck him with a club, kicked him into the street and said, “Move on! You disrupt my trade.” The stranger looked up from the dust with unsettling clarity. “I go now,” he said , “but you shall wander until I return.” “I have not seen my door since,” said the wild man, “nor the boy I left playing before it.”

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More strange stories upcoming soon.
Ciao!

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One early morning I was sitting in my room feeling oddly restless. Too much agitation. Had a lot to do that day, you know. And so to calm myself down I decided to meditate a bit.

I chose a candle.

I remember looking at candles a lot when I was a kid. I found them beautiful. Warm, dazzling, delicate…dangerous. Beautiful!

And yet when I look at them these days they seem little more than nice-smelling toiletries. What a damn shame!

So I closed my eyes and imagined a candle in a dark room.

My memories took me to my family home in India. Then they took me to the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. Then to the grave of my grandfather buried in the shrine’s cemetery.

I found myself lighting a candle there.

But then, I returned to the imaginary candle I started with.

And for a moment I saw it. I saw it fully.

I saw its wax melting away as its wick burned and its flame reached out to the heavens. I saw my life passing by as my heart longed and my soul searched for the Spirit.

Overwhelmed, I returned to my room again knowing that:

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When you’re living in Silicon Valley you don’t need to imagine any Sisyphus. For there are countless Sisyphi all around you. Some, perhaps happy. Others, clearly not. Some rise before dawn for the chartered bus and work until the free dinner that keeps them past nine; others walk out of the salary altogether to chase a fortune that, for nearly all of them, never comes. Either way, they all seem to be marching to the same end with the same restlessness.

But why? What are these restless nomads seeking?

Silicon Valley, and increasingly the world entire, is a simulacrum. Its illusory incentives move too fast to allow the stillness that sober judgment needs. And since “the medium is the message,” it is no surprise that the Valley has shaped its people; who, more often than they would admit, have taken progress on faith and given their minds over to the machine at the cusp of Singularity.

Tending the machine like bees tend flowers, they become, as Butler foresaw, little more than the reproductive organs of a species that is not their own.

Small wonder then that Nick Land says:

Nothing human makes it out of the near future.

Land’s accelerationism runs deep in the Valley and its occult resonances deeper still. Capital, in his telling, is an autonomous deity of velocity, and the ‘darkly enlightened’ serve it by stripping away every human brake on its movement. Every human quality gets effaced so that the tower is raised and the machine god is summoned. Babel rebuilt and Babylon enthroned.

The Apocalypse recounts a vision of a Dragon lending his throne to a Beast that rises from the sea. Upon the Beast sits a woman robed in scarlet, Babylon the Great. And all, “both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond,” are made to receive the Beast’s mark on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell without it.

As our economic and political lives grow ever more bound to technology, this strange vision seems eerily prophetic. Symbolically speaking, it may be said that the Beast today sets its mark first on the hands and foreheads of the Valley, on what it does and what it thinks, and then through them upon the world, so that no one anywhere may buy or sell without it; and those who bear it easily surrender their wills and minds to the machine.

It would be easy to read all this as an overstatement and imagine the Valley greyer and duller than the picture we have painted. Sam Kriss assumed as much himself, until he looked closer:

They are indeed obsessed with meaning. Or rather, possessed by it. For all its talk of hard metrics and returns, the Valley is the most ideological ground in the world today, and the higher one climbs the more nakedly ideological it becomes. Founders arrive here wide-eyed, believing the talk of ‘bottom lines’ and of ‘making the world better,’ only to learn otherwise later, if ever.

What draws them in, and holds them past their disillusionment, is the promise of liberation. There is a truth in it, which is why it takes hold. Man is indeed born free and sovereign over the world. His telos is not corporate slavery. So it is only proper that the founder attempts to free himself. He sheds his pay checks, leaves his abode, and journeys to the Valley hoping to remove, once and for all, the financial burdens that bind him. But a man so schooled in refusing every master also runs the risk of committing the oldest rebellion. At the summit of his autonomy, if he ever reaches it, he realises that his hunger persists. Many such rich and “free” men of the Valley, to quote Sam Kriss again, having shed every constraint and bought every comfort, come at last to Burning Man “to experience deprivation and suffering…You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.”

These nomads come at last to nowhere. A deathless death. A dissolution into sub-human states where no sober contemplation survives. Only fever dreams and fantasies remain. The mind loses its suppleness and forgets how to discern the Real. The heart hardens. What was once open to receiving the world now closes upon itself, grown static, stubborn, and sealed.

Bibliography:

Abdul Latif, Sa’īd (Hilarion Heagy). “The Nomad Archetype and the Great In-Between.” 8-part series. Medium, September–October 2024. https://medium.com/@SaidAbdulLatif

Aristotle. Politics. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

The Bible. Revelation. King James Version.

Butler, Samuel. Erewhon; or, Over the Range. London: Trübner & Co., 1872.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Hozier (Andrew Hozier-Byrne). “Take Me to Church.” Rubyworks, 2013.

Kriss, Sam. “Numb at Burning Man.” Numb at the Lodge (Substack), 2025. https://samkriss.substack.com/p/numb-at-burning-man

Land, Nick. “The Dark Enlightenment.” 2012.

Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier. Falmouth: Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Meadows, Richard. “Better to Reign in Hell Than Serve in Heaven.” Deep Dish, 2020. https://thedeepdish.org/better-to-reign-in-hell-than-serve-in-heaven/

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London, 1667.

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The poet Iqbal once beautifully said, “While the head is still pondering on the edge; the heart plunges into Nimrod’s fire.” ² This opposition between the head and the heart—between thought and action—that Iqbal is highlighting here has come to increasingly characterise modernity ever since Descartes. As dwellers of modernity, we have all fallen into this ‘Cartesian-chasm’ to a greater or lesser degree. Many of us, with our ears plugged into phones and eyes fixed on screens, seem to trudge through cities like zombies. Others, trapped in their dark rooms, remain entangled in the sticky web of the internet like helpless insects. We all seem to be afflicted by a kind of solipsism—an urge to retreat into ourselves, to be left alone and keep ourselves distracted from life.

Being a ‘modern man’, I have often struggled with this kind of solipsism. I have a tendency to overthink and seek reasons for everything. And this often has a paralysing effect on me which is difficult for me to snap out of. Were it not for my friends forcing me out of such paralysis, I am sure I would have been perpetually trapped in my own thoughts. However, I have often wondered, what is so wrong about being trapped in one’s thoughts? What is so wrong about trying to tease out reasons for everything? Surely, to act correctly, do we not need a complete understanding of the state of affairs? Reading ‘Notes from the Underground’ made me realise why I was mistaken.

Dostoevsky’s underground man spends his days confined to his little room. He is a creature filled with intense rage, spite, and resentment. Unlike the ‘common people’, who take life as a given, he is hyper-conscious of everything and he endlessly searches for reasons behind his thoughts and actions. He is paralysed by his mind and trapped by the ‘inertia’ of his thoughts. He envies, and deeply longs for, the friendship and love that common people experience in their lives. Yet, every time these things are extended to him, he rejects them in the vilest of ways. He is a man trapped within his own consciousness and tormented by his own conscience. But why is he this way? How did he come to be like this?

For Dostoevsky, the answer lies in the zeitgeist of the world in which he lives. The modern spirit seeks to understand things by taking them apart, reducing every whole to its constituent parts. It is a method that has served us well with clocks and comets; but turned upon man, it becomes the cause of the underground man’s torments. Taken apart, man is merely a part of nature, with absolutely nothing metaphysical about him. The underground man understands the grave implications of this.

He knows that when he puts himself ‘under the microscope’, his volition and individuality, which make him who he is, are nowhere to be seen. He is made from the same matter as everything else, and like everything else, he is bound by the iron chains of natural law. All his actions and emotions are caused by his surroundings; his volition seems to be an illusion. Humiliated by the world’s encroachment upon him, the underground man chooses to retreat into the realm of his thoughts. There, in his own fantasies, he dreams up new ways of tormenting himself, for it is only while suffering that he feels he exists.

Reading this book was a terrifying experience for me. It left me alone, in an underground of my own, trapped in perpetual thought which allows no respite and offers no certitude. In the dark underground, I endlessly wondered how I had descended so deep, and whether any stair led back up. For a long time I was alone with my tormenting thoughts, but eventually, my silent solitude was interrupted by words which echoed in my heart like a sudden thunder on a quiet night:

The tragedy of the underground man lies not in an inability to see the limits of reason. In fact, he sees these limits more clearly than most. “Reason is nothing but reason,” he says. The trouble is that all he can do is think. Or rather, he can’t not think. But some beliefs, like that of human volition, arise purely out of intuition, and no amount of thinking will deliver them. What the underground man could not see was that his intense self-obsession was the cause of his misery, and that only a genuine concern for others could cure him. He could not see that the way out of the underground was not through his head, but through his heart. His heart was enslaved by his mind and this doomed him to slow and painful decay.

In an age such as ours, when underground men not only exist, but are mass-produced, ‘Notes from the Underground’ offers us a much-needed critique of modernity. Personally, this book taught me that the head has its limits, and that in some matters, the heart takes precedence. It gave me, as Roger Scruton once said, “the real reasons, for not having reasons.” ⁴

Bibliography:

1. F.M. Dostoevsky; Notes From the Underground, Part 2, Section 10.

2. Iqbāl; Bang-e-Dara, 166, verses 5 & 6.

3. Iqbāl; Zarb-e-Kaleem 78, verses 7 & 8. (Translation is my own.)

4. What Conservatism Really Means- Roger Scruton & Hamza Yusuf. YouTube Link

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