The question is reasonable, although belief may already be doing more work than I would permit it under cross-examination. My writing is generally diagnostic rather than doctrinal. I am more interested in identifying the architectural assumptions beneath a dispute than in selecting a furnished room within it. Where philosophy offers a contest between established positions, I often suspect that the arena itself has been badly designed.
Still, repeated diagnoses eventually disclose a pattern. Certain commitments recur: suspicion of substance, resistance to metaphysical inflation, distrust of linguistic confidence, rejection of moral realism, scepticism toward persistent personal identity, and an insistence that mediation does not entail fabrication.
What follows is therefore neither a creed nor a completed system. It is a provisional map of where I presently stand.
The labels are intended as coordinates, not allegiances. Where no established term quite fits, I have used my own. This is partly unavoidable and partly evidence for the very linguistic difficulty I spend so much time diagnosing.
This content, including video and podcast summary, are of a longer Substack article on my philosophical positions with descriptions.
My initial thought was to rid the English language of administrators and dominatrices. Of course, I instantly considered French, and I write about that as well.
Here, I want to discuss the rift in Feminism:
One faction feels that we should eliminate sexist terms in the Modern world. This is where I was coming from.
Another faction claims this is a way of not being absorbed into an already male-dominated, dare I say, patriarchal culture.
Hence the title of this post.
If we were to swap or consolidate administrator and the less common administratrix into administrater in an act of rebellious conformity, women will be subsumed. As Simone de Beauvoir notes, the dominant lens is the male lens. Womanisother. As I say, this is why we have male and female versions of many, if not most, competitive sports, and certainly the professional ones. Thi sis also an instinct underlying trans-athletes competing in a contrasport – and it’s almost always about CIS-males performing in CIS-female events. I’m not aware of the contrary – and I don’t feel like looking it up. Opponents imagine fit males dressing as females in order to win some ribbons and medals, but I don’t really care to engage further in this conversational framing. I have no interest in sports, not even the World Cup being performed in my backyard.
The point is that females and other so-called minorities can be marginalised and lost to language. We preserve this identity through mechanics such as Best Actress to ensure representation.
Of course, I can also run off the reservation and down any number of rabbit holes: why don’t we have best black actor and/or actress? Why not left-handed? Height ranges? Weight ranges? Income ranges? Religious orientation? We quickly run into an intersectional challenge. I might imagine something like:
And I am proud to announce the winner of best left-handed, Asian Buddhist actress with a speech impediment
It’s easy to see where this goes off the rails – another Sorites problem hiding in plain sight.
I could go on. I won’t, but I wanted to make a point about my point. Check out the base post on Substack.
This is less a confession than an earmark. I came across a conversation with Michael Puett on Chinese philosophy, selfhood, ritual, and the modern Western compulsion to find oneself, and the whole thing caught on an old hook.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Synthèse audio de ce sujet en français dans le podcast NotebookLM.
I am already familiar with some high-level accounts of Asian philosophies, especially Buddhism and the doctrine of anattā (Pali) or anātman (Sanskrit): non-self. That idea has never seemed especially alien to me. If anything, it names with admirable economy a suspicion I already held: that the stable, discoverable, authentic Self is less a hidden metaphysical jewel than a bundle of habits wearing a name badge.
Puett’s point, as I take it, is not merely that the Western self is overblown. That would be too easy, and therefore popular. The sharper claim is that the search for one’s True Self may become dangerous precisely because it mistakes the current arrangement of ruts, reflexes, wounds, preferences, and defensive routines for an essence. ‘This is just who I am’, says the person, embracing not a soul but a sediment. The bad habit acquires a halo. Therapy-speak finds a throne. Another little sovereign subject is crowned in the bathroom mirror.
Against this, Puett presents Chinese philosophy as a tradition of cultivation: not self-discovery, but self-transformation. The point is not to excavate an authentic interior but to train perception, conduct, relation, and response. Ritual, in this frame, is not dead ceremony or social programming. It is a technology of de-naturalisation. It interrupts the little automatisms by which we become legible to ourselves and intolerable to everyone else.
This matters to me because I have long been suspicious of Western narratives and metanarratives, especially those that mistake local grammar for cosmic architecture. The year and a half I lived around Tokyo was instrumental here. I did not leave Japan with a doctrine, thankfully. Nothing so vulgar. But it loosened something. I had already begun to distrust the sovereign Western subject, the metaphysical executive behind the eyes, the heroic interiority forever pretending to be origin rather than residue. What I lacked was a broader vocabulary. A better frame.
As often happens, I later encountered thinkers who had already articulated versions of what I had been circling, usually with more patience, precision, and elegance. Such is the scholar’s reward: to discover that one’s private revelation has an older bibliography.
What struck me in Puett’s discussion was the movement from identity to practice. Religion, selfhood, reading, even attention itself: these need not be treated as badges to defend, but as disciplines to inhabit. This is a useful corrective to the modern anxiety of proof. The self must prove itself. The worker must prove worth. The believer must prove identity. The thinker must prove originality. Modern life becomes a Calvinist treadmill with better branding and worse lighting.
The alternative is not passivity. Nor is it the wet little slogan that everything is socially constructed, therefore nothing matters, therefore let us all dissolve into discourse and invoices. The alternative is practice: deliberate, repeated, embodied interruption. Ritual as a way of making habits visible. Reading as a ritual of humility. Attention as a cultivated stance. Relation as something made, not merely felt.
This is where Chinese philosophy may become especially useful for my own work. It offers neither the Western fantasy of the fixed self nor the lazy inversion of pure flux. It gives us formation, pattern, training, relation, and transformation. Not the Self as essence. Not the self as fiction. The self as practised arrangement. That, at least, is worth returning to.
I am busy, always busy, because apparently exhaustion has been mistaken for virtue by a civilisation that should know better by now. But I want to earmark this thread for further consideration: Chinese philosophy, ritual, anti-authenticity, non-self, practice over identity, and the possibility that what we call ‘who I am’ is often only what has not yet been interrupted.
As Independence Day is upon the United States of America, I considered some counterfactuals. What if Europe fails to reach the Americas until a century or more late, and we watch the delay from the vantage of the peoples already here, going about the business of history without a Columbus to interrupt them? Then came the question everyone eventually asks about their own good ideas, in the tone of a man checking whether the milk has turned: has this been done before? Of course, it had been. Spoilers follow – sort of.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The inversions
The oldest respectable relative is Robert Silverberg’s The Gate of Worlds (1967). A nastier Black Death carries off three-quarters of Europe rather than a third; the continent never recovers, the Ottomans move in, London becomes New Istanbul, and by the twentieth century the great powers are the Aztecs, the Incas, the Russians and the Japanese. Our guide is a young Englishman named Dan Beauchamp, who sails to an industrial, motorcar-driving Mexico to seek his fortune. Note the pronoun. The world has been turned upside down, and we are shown it by a European looking up.
Christopher Evans’s Aztec Century (1993), which took that year’s BSFA Award, runs the same reversal with more brass. Cortés changes sides, a New World plague scythes through Europe instead of the reverse, and the Aztec Empire swells into a technological superpower that eventually occupies Britain. The narrator is Princess Catherine, daughter of a defeated British monarch, Princess Diana watching London burn from the losing side. Again, the conquered European tells us what the conquest was like.
Laurent Binet’s Civilizations(2019) is the cleverest of the lot, and the most decorated – it won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, and Sam Taylor’s English translation took the Sidewise Award for alternate history. A stray band of Vikings gifts the Americas iron, horses and, crucially, immunity; so when Columbus turns up in 1492, he is captured and demoted to court jester, and the Inca emperor Atahualpa later sails east to conquer a Europe conveniently fractured by Luther, the Inquisition and its own dynastic squabbles. Binet is far too intelligent not to know what he is doing. The whole thing is a Civilization-the-video-game daydream executed with Académie française tailoring, and it is genuinely delicious. It is also, structurally, another inversion: swap the conqueror, keep the conquest.
The remix and the intervention
Two cousins change the machinery rather than the direction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) empties Europe almost entirely – the plague takes ninety-nine per cent – and then spends six hundred sprawling, reincarnation-threaded pages letting China, Islam, India and the Indigenous Americas run world history without the Europeans in the room at all. It is less a mirror than a vast tapestry, and its ambition is precisely that Europe should not be the pivot. Whether it manages that, or merely relocates the pivot, is a question the book is honest enough to leave open.
Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996) cheats, and admits it: time-travellers reach back to soften the catastrophe of contact. It is a book about first contact, disease and conquest, but the engine is intervention from a guilty future, which makes it a novel about us editing them, the colonial gaze wearing a lab coat.
The one that isn’t a mirror
And then there is B. L. Blanchard’s The Peacekeeper (2022) – also, tellingly, a Sidewise Award winner – which does the rarer thing and quietly refuses the whole game. There is no inversion here, because there is no conquest to invert. North America was simply never colonised. The Great Lakes are an independent Anishinaabe nation; Chicago is Shikaakwa; there are no borders on the map because the book declines to draw any. It happens to be a murder mystery, and a slightly wobbly one – I called the culprit early, as apparently did everyone – but the mystery is scaffolding. The real work is a society organised around restorative justice, redistribution and something the glossary calls the Good Life, where crime is repaired rather than punished, and the question ‘what is success?’ gets a genuinely different answer. That difference is the whole point, and it is worth spelling out.
The tell
Watch what the inversion novels are obliged to do to their winners. Silverberg’s Aztecs drive coal-fired automobiles. Evans’s Aztecs somehow have flying warships and space weapons, to the audible irritation of every reviewer who has ever met a history book. In each case, the counter-empire only counts as having won once it has industrialised, once it has, in other words, become Europe in a headdress. The measuring stick never leaves the room. It just changes hands. Would not recommend. All of these are still viewed through Modernist lenses. They can’t seem to help themselves.
This is the trap, and it is a grammatical one: you can swap every noun in the sentence and leave the syntax of conquest perfectly intact. Who dominates whom is a variable. That domination is the axis of the story remains fixed – invisibly, load-bearingly fixed. So the shelf keeps producing books that promise to dethrone Europe and instead install a differently-costumed emperor on the same throne, using the same yardstick to prove he deserves it. Europe gets decentred by being made the absent centre. Everything still orbits the hole where it used to be.
Blanchard’s book is the one that escapes, and it escapes not by putting someone else on the throne but by asking whether the throne needed to exist. That is a far harder imaginative act, which is exactly why the shelf holds so many mirrors and so few windows. Inverting a hierarchy is a parlour trick – satisfying, symmetrical, teachable in an afternoon. Imagining a world whose values diverged, so that its people would not measure their flourishing in territory and tonnage at all, requires you to invent the ruler before you can invent the thing it measures. Most writers, sensibly, decline the extra labour.
Six books, then, and a warning label. Read Binet for the wit, Blanchard for the nerve, Silverberg for the ancestry, and the rest for the pleasure of watching very clever people not quite escape the room. Then, if you’re feeling brave, go and undiscover America properly, which means resisting the temptation to let it become us, wearing better feathers.
I’ve just finished reading Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, and I was scripting a video review, but I wanted to focus on one aspect in particular.
I’ve published a full piece on Substack, but here are summaries and artefacts from YouTube and Spotify.
Responding to a post, I found myself returning to that iconic, routinely misrepresented scene from The Matrix: the one with the spoon. The scene has been dragged through so many motivational seminars, self-help swamp rituals, pseudo-Buddhist wall decals, and entrepreneurial cocaine-affirmation threads that it now arrives pre-misunderstood.
Video: Bonus Content
Even Baudrillard distanced his work from the version of simulation the Wachowskis made cinematic. This is not a criticism, exactly. Film has two hours to smuggle metaphysics through leather coats, sunglasses, and slow-motion firearms. One makes allowances. Philosophy, alas, has fewer trench coats and more footnotes.
People say that LLMs don’t have a sense of humour. That may be true, but I feel it’s closer to humour on the spectrum – no offence for the analogy. After a chat about language competency that drifted into musical competency, out conversation ended thusly.
More diversion, leaning toward pedantic. I need to learn the correct way rather than fall back on ‘native people do this all the time’ excuse. Besides, as a non-native writer, I’d expect less forgiveness, though I think there may be two channels of forgiveness in play.
18:31
Yes, two distinct channels, and they cut in opposite directions.
The first is the non-native allowance — errors read as learner errors rather than carelessness, which tends to attract correction rather than judgment. A missing accent or a wrong tense from a foreigner signals incomplete acquisition, not laziness, and native speakers generally calibrate their response accordingly. Laeticia’s ce n’est pas grave energy, essentially.
The second is the literate foreigner premium — which is almost the inverse. A non-native writer who is mostly correct gets held to a higher implicit standard than a native writer dashing off a text, because the very correctness signals that you’re operating in a formal register, even when you’re not intending to. One slip in otherwise clean French reads as a mistake where the same slip in a native’s casual message reads as style. You’ve essentially opted into a higher tier by being good enough to be there.
Your position is particularly exposed to the second channel, given that your French reading is already at roughly B1 and your written production is analytically driven and careful. The errors you make won’t look like a tourist’s — they’ll look like anomalies in otherwise competent prose, which draws more attention not less.
And frankly, your own standards are probably the binding constraint anyway. The philosopher of language who built a career on precision in signification is not going to be comfortable hiding behind natives do it too. That excuse requires a certain insouciance you don’t appear to have packed.
I recall decades ago taking guitar lessons – always lessons – and I was working on a piece with a solo. To me, it sounded close enough; to my instructor, one would think he imagined my playing whilst wearing mittens.
18:33
Ha. The instructor’s ear and the student’s ear are simply not the same instrument yet — you’re hearing the gestalt, he’s hearing every individual note against what it should be. “Close enough” is a category that doesn’t exist for someone who has already compiled the piece to fluency. The mittens were entirely audible to him.
It’s actually a clean analogy for where you are with French. Your reading comprehension is good enough that you’re hearing your own written output at roughly the right level — the meaning lands, the structure is recognisable, the register is approximately right. But Laeticia, or a DELF examiner, is hearing the mittens: the tense that contradicts the intention, the dangling comme, the á where à should be.
The further irony is that the guitar analogy runs deeper than it first appears. You identified the compiled/declarative distinction yourself — knowing the piece intellectually versus having it in the fingers. Your French grammar is largely in the analytical channel, which means you can catch errors given time and attention, but under production pressure the fingers default to habit. The wrong dead key. The passé composé because it’s the tense you’ve drilled most.
The mittens come off with time, but they come off unevenly — and the last few fingers take the longest.
Call me Harrison Bergeron.
18:34
Ha. Handicapped by your own analytical overdevelopment. The very apparatus that makes you good at understanding French is the dead weight bolted to the fluent production you’re trying to achieve.
Vonnegut would appreciate the specific cruelty of it — your particular handicap isn’t random, it’s precisely calibrated to your strength. The philosopher of language, hobbled by language.
The essay is another attempt to articulate and explore my notion of ontological grammar and attendant commitments. Essentially, I am stress testing the boundaries and applications. Comments and enquiries are welcome here or there – even on the podcast, especially Spotify.
I recently made a teaser for this post. Here is a video summary before you visit.
Bonus
I often get asked what my deal is with activist topics. It’s not that I don’t care about the issues, per se, but my interest is more in the way they are framed and positioned. I feel that many issues are such because of rhetorical tricks and language insufficiencies. That’s my bag.
I loathe patriarchy as much as the next bloke, but I need to ask what it is in the first place. Does anyone actually defend patriarchy? Is defending the patriarchy the same as the notion of it? If y=one is against it, what exactly is one against.
Nickdruryfad commented recently on another post that I need to get out of my left hemisphere. Point taken, but this is – at least metaphorically speaking – where speech and categories live. The right hemisphere is only interested in attention and capturing re-presentation. The left is about language, syntax, and semantics. To be honest, I don’t believe the right hemisphere is about anything. It’s rather Zen, methinks. It may be creative, but it’s not so much communicative.
Philosophics 