Our Tendencies Towards Excess

(A note on Many Worlds: A Simplification is available here)

Ross Douthat, speaking on a New York Times podcast, said recently, "There is, I think, a way in which a male braggadocio, this performative masculine rebellion against liberal politesse shows up again and again, from Silvio Berlusconi, to Trump. Even Boris Johnson had some of this. I don’t think it’s a coincidence ... "

What Douthat is referring to is arguably the question of the hour. It drives politics in every jurisdiction, including Sri Lanka.

David Hume proposed that the ‘easy’ philosophy generally wins over the ‘abstruse.’ Also observed by William of Ockham, called Ockham’s Razor, Hume was convinced he was elaborating a universal principle. But was he? Polling numbers do not support this conclusion. 

At what point do positive human qualities become excessive?

Nietzsche, Foucault, Butler and Cavarero make related arguments, in my opinion, and advocate for nominality and performativity. It's not the philosophy then that's the problem, it's the execution. It seems, every ontology, our nature of being / view of reality, is prone to obsession, error, and excess.

I discuss this in my book ‘Your Truths Matter: Expanding Perspectivism to Tackle Modern Problems.’

For a limited time, I am making it available as a free download here. 

We must become better at recognizing excess in all its forms, on the left as well as the right. Positive qualities of being organized can contort into bureaucracy. Emotional intelligence may, at times, exclude other intelligences. Excessive scientism, similarly, must be questioned. If we listen to the rhetoric, we may be highlighting excess, in one form or another.

My argument on ontology, which appears to depart from Heidegger, Deleuze and many others, hinges on what can be called epistemological equivalence. It can be shown that the many forms of truth — fixed, contextual, nominal, structural and pragmatic — are equivalent. But this is best discussed in a classroom.

Ontological perspectivism is increasingly on the radar of academics, as more and more papers are being written on the subject. It contains within the important questions we will face in coming decades.

For instance, perspectivism suggests that our reaction to an event is just as important as the event.

I am working on a less academic follow-up to my book. Give me a couple of years. There’s more than one way to peel an orange! That would be the gist of it.