An Essay Featured In The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose

Prisms and Prisons of Thought

Humans have an impulse to create metaphor as humans have an impulse to create meaning and/or explanation. We want to see the tree as “a tall man” in the same way we want to see the tree as “Mom’s favorite” or “a creation of God’s,” for such “ways of seeing” can add to the world and to life a more beautiful, good, and meaningful feeling. This impulse is naturally in us, but that doesn’t mean the tree isn’t “Mom’s favorite” or that the world isn’t “a creation of God’s.” It means only that humans have…

A NONFICTION BOOK BY O.G. ROSE

Does Tolerance or Humility Better Favor Mechanisms of Knowledge Acquisition?

In regard to modernity, Conyers wrote that ‘[t]he question [now is] how [do] we achieve authentic toleration without merely shifting to another political perspective from which a new kind of intolerance becomes acceptable.’¹ If one didn’t know better, one would be forgiven to think this sentence comes out of Rauch’s book. ‘A very dangerous principle is now being established as a social right,’ Rauch warns, ‘Thou shalt not hurt others with words.’² In the early nineties, long before The Atlantic began publishing articles about the loss of free speech on…

A Short Story from Under the Wing by O.G. Rose

Cogito ergo sum ovium

For a complete audio reading, click here.

My name is Ludwig, Mr. Ludwig, not that you actually know that or if the words I use mean what you think they mean, because all the dictionaries and everyone who has ever used those words, including me, could be mistaken. Forgive me, I’m terrible at introductions, or so you’ve been led to believe. Perhaps intentionally? Perhaps not. Perhaps. Always perhaps. Life you know: always a perhaps. Today, I’m speaking in a mirror — given of course that this is, in fact, a mirror and not better called the…

A Short Piece Inspired by “On Critical Thinking” by O.G. Rose

Just because we’re critical of something doesn’t mean we’re critically thinking about it.

It’s unfortunate we decided to run with the phrase “critical thinking”: we would have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and confusion had we stuck with “deep thinking” or “dynamic thinking.” Instead, we strapped ourselves to a language that suggests we’re profound and insightful if we’re insulting; as a result, someone who criticizes something seems to be someone “who knows what they’re talking about.” This puts a lot of social capital in the hands of people who are hard to please, and I think Charlie Munger is…

From “Absolute Knowing,” Combined with “Emphasis,” Both by O.G. Rose

Because we can’t talk about everything at the same time, we can’t avoid sounding like we think hierarchically.

Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot is pretty confusing; take this section:

To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Water does not pour out of rays of sun, and a dry pool cannot cause a lotus to float and rise. Is Eliot drunk…

FEATURED IN (RE)CONSTRUCTING “A IS A” BY O.G. ROSE

Considering together “Lacks Are Not Nothing” with“(W)hole Hope,” and the Temptation of Ambiguities We Singularize

To look ahead (as will be elaborated on), our ontology is one of “ ‘A/(A-isn’t-A)’ is ‘A/(A-isn’t-A)’ (without B)” (or A/B for short) versus “A is A” (or A/A). A/B entails an orientation that never achieves full completion, and, if genuine, doesn’t attempt like A/A to achieve completion through self-deception or (false) “holes.” “Lacks” and “holes” are very similar, and both create “ambiguities,” for they exist between “the present” and “the absent” (like Schrödinger’s Cat). Because we are A/B, we must face ambiguities and decide…

A Discussion Between Dr. Cadell Last and O.G. Rose

“A Theory of Everything” Which Addresses You

To borrow Cadell’s eloquent description of the talk and topic: Absolute Knowledge is a notoriously difficult and confusing concept in Hegel’s philosophy (and yet represents the name of the last chapter of his masterwork Phenomenology of Spirit). Here Cadell attempts to frame the discourse by discussing the experiences Cadell has had in his maturation as an intellect in relation to evolutionary and religious philosophies about “absolute knowing”. Evolutionary thinkers tend to view absolute knowing as an anachronistic and unnecessary concept, a relic of pre-modern thinking before the emergence of the Darwinian universe, where…

Published at West Trade Review

A Poem by O.G. Rose

We are honored to have our poem, “(when all memory is a memory), ” published at West Side Review. WSR is a wonderful publication, and we are in their debt.

The piece can be found here.

This is the only day you wake up.
Your long gold hair spreads across the white pillow,
and your Daddy sleeps downstairs in his wheelchair,
but you do not remember being too tired of farm routines
to bathe him…

For more, please visit O.G. Rose.com. …