Public Scholarship
Leadership Consulting through Philosophy, Lectures
The Void: Fear, Anxiety and the Possibility Beyond
Listening to Nothing: The Quiet Force of the Possible
Essays
Excerpt from 'The Children, They Know', 2025:
The circumstances of childhood, particularly early childhood, seem to be the most philosophically provocative time in one’s existence. Being thrown into the world, children contend with philosophical quandaries from the get-go as they are becoming inducted into a kind of existence that others have either become accustomed to, have already negotiated amongst themselves or are trying to negotiate the terms of existence. Philosopher Gareth Matthews, who inaugurated the philosophy of childhood, explains that "in important part, philosophy is an adult attempt to deal with the genuinely baffling questions of childhood" (Matthews, 1994, 13). Young children’s questions emerge upon entering or as the existentialists prefer, being thrown into this world. Young children’s existence upon thrownness is not an event that is foreclosed. From the point of existence, children “are faced with rules and norms they have not internalised yet and want to understand the justification for them” (Goeing, 2008). This assumes that children are firstly, and innately attuned to the physical and philosophical perplexities of everyday living. Secondly, children are actively engaged with these perplexities without being tethered to any ‘norms’ of living. In putting those assumptions together, children’s engagement with the perplexity and absurdness of life and living is meaning-making and a search for new horizons. For children, being thrown into existence in this world is not a deterministic life sentence that needs new imagining for one’s salvation, but one that is indeterministic where every encounter with entities in this world presents an engagement of imaginative ethical deliberation for that time, for that time’s projection of the future. Others, particularly adult counterparts, see children as foreclosed upon their entrance into this world. They impress the foreclosure of structural defects of social, cultural and political systems onto that child, accepting that because children
are born into their unique set of subjectivity, their probable projection for life can be and has been calculated, therefore rendering a prognosis for their existence as being-toward-death which is dasein’s utmost possibility. Perhaps these individuals see their existence as one that is foreclosed by others in this world and hence they prognosticated the child’s utmost possibility even before the child works out his existence. Farthing this position, it is not only the child that they see as foreclosed, it is also the potential adult that is presented in this child as determined from birth. The person at any given point of existence then exists as an unfolding symmetry of the assemblage of both child and adult of the same person (Priya, 2023) against the horizon of time.
Excerpt from 'Possibility vs Probability', 2025:
Given this potential, are there possible futures that are not exhausted or defined by probable futures? How should deterministic futures hold tension with an indeterministic one? Possibility emphasises human agency to yield a different future-making, taking on the position that future-making is seen as one that is constructed by humans. This in itself is problematic as it assumes all humans are reconciled with the ability to aspire. The capacity to aspire is not evenly distributed. It is tightly wound within class lines, within the probable, assuming a known trajectory. The matter of non-matter of aspiration teases out a present inclination toward a core promise of the temporally and probably blurred possible. Possibility is the site of contention to secure which ‘real’ futures get made.
One cannot get caught up in anticipatory reactions to potential imaginaries, but respond with an exercise of possibility, of horizoning at the edge of knowledge. This takes a careful consideration of the position from which one develops utopian preparation. One’s subjectivity stemming from the probable or the possible would signify the precision of what can exist and not exist, and reshape early rejections, or the permissible ‘absurd’ possibilities in the already absurd world that one exists in. The orientation of the preparatory work and the work itself is not enough. In her analysis of the experimental egalitarian society in the French commune for a universal society, Kirstin Ross (2015) stated, “Actions produce dreams and ideas, “not the reverse”. One needs to act, to leap into the uncertainty, the fear, and the hope of utopias without any temporal visibility. One needs to leap into the nothing. As Silverstein’s poem, Diving Board ends, “you've been up there since half past five/ doin’ everything...but DIVE” (2020).
Excerpt from 'The Inquiry', 2025:
There is an emphasis on continuous searching for the utmost authentic possibility of an egalitarian mode of living for all persons in the nature of inquiry, one that assumes a horizontal engagement where there is no completion. If that is so, the act of horizoning can be seen as a certain universal hermeneutic experience like a story that never ends. Inquiry acts upon the continual edges of knowledge where it feels, asks questions, hypotheses, tests, imagines, and discovers (Lowery & Jenlink, 2019). Its search for openings of possibility embodies knowledge production as one that is active and living and not imprisoned in its spatial and temporal situations. Ideas are accidents of time that arise at the intersection of humans and technology in a dialectical relationship for a sense of preparedness that is no longer tethered to prevalent, fixed knowledge. These possibilities are found only after the act of leaping, as they are revealed in the instant of the jump as “actions produce dreams and ideas, not the reverse” (Ross, 2019). Though Ross does not express this explicitly, she seems to be elevating the status of inquiry to an existential status where the tenets of utopian experimentation are founded. Hence, the Praxis of the living imaginary is found in experiments of creating the infrastructures for the future we want together with the joys, disappointments, pain, fear and anguish of the process of living with the uncertain, the doubt and the unknown. The capacity to inquire in the face of these moods that might motivate one’s being to seek fugitively from the inquiry itself is to develop curiosity as the expectation of finding something new through inquiry (Caspary, 2019). Curiosity as inquiry’s partner might enable one to get through the incommensurability of the experience of imbalance.
Inquiry’s purpose overlaps with utopia’s purpose in the continuous search for the utmost authentic possibility of an egalitarian existence. The acquisition of the utmost possibility is to constantly and continuously be at home in the homelessness presented by being at the edge of knowledge. Being-towards-death is a human being’s utmost possibility. When human beings are taken as learning beings or meaning-making beings, it posits a perspective where the existential being’s search for meaning-making through inquiry can be taken as utopia itself: the process of existence is utopia.