Clerestory (Bryan Kam)

Neither/Nor podcast · recorded 22 June 2026Andrew Milward is an independent philosopher who, like me, came to philosophy through literature. For me it was a search for texts treating what matters in life and how to live it, which led me away from logic and towards Tolstoy at university. For Andrew it was Orwell’s 1984 in his early 20s: reading it as a critique of the Soviet Union led him to the Russian Revolution, then Marx, Hegel, and eventually Plato and the pre-Socratics. He too has followed his interests without the constraints, or the support, of any institution. We met on Mastodon, of all places; he’s now a regular in my London writing group, First Few Books. We spend the conversation on two of his works.The Absent World (2017)It starts from a question: how can we think and speak about things we can’t see? We talk about cities neither of us is standing in, essays neither of us is holding. Andrew names a gap between sense (everything belonging to language — speech, writing, thought) and referent (what language points at, whether that’s another piece of language, a physical thing, or a mix of the two). Language generalises: it leaves out whatever isn’t needed to communicate, and the gap widens the further the referent slips out of view.At one end of the spectrum there’s no gap at all — in logic and mathematics, sense is self-referential, pointing at its own necessity rather than any outside object. At the other end Andrew creates a concept he calls depth: sense at its greatest possible distance from a referent, one that takes in everything. The payoff isn’t only philosophical. Depth should stop us flattening a person or a group into a conceptual label.Wittgenstein and Deleuze (2025)Here he sets out the method behind the essays and describes a non-epistemic philosophy. We usually recognise only two kinds: the epistemic kind that builds knowledge, and the sceptical kind that tears it down. He wants a third, which does neither. From Wittgenstein he takes “Don’t think, but look!” (Philosophical Investigations §66) — turning vision on our own thinking, with no attempt to grasp a hidden reality. From Deleuze he takes concept creation. The combination is the point: Wittgenstein alone left his early attempts flat, and the Deleuzian side was needed to build concepts that change thought. Depth is one of them — a fabrication that lives in language and claims to discover nothing out there.Toward the end we find the overlap with Neither/Nor. My paper’s oscillation — loosen concepts through perception, then reform them into something usable — pairs with Andrew’s Wittgensteinian looking and Deleuzian creation. His sense/real duality maps onto my conceptual/experiential distinction: internal linguistic thought, external physical world. Both call for practices on each side — a life of thought and ideas, and a skilful embodied engagement with the physicality of living.Andrew closes with a case for abstraction. Our abstract concepts don’t belong to a Platonic heaven, but their universal form lets them move fluidly in thought, and follow the path belonging to the idea itself. Each reader still has to apply it to a reality of their own.Mentioned: Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men · Ellison, Invisible Man · Styron, Sophie’s Choice · Heller, Catch-22 · Orwell, 1984 · Marx · Hegel · the pre-Socratics · Plato, Republic · Nietzsche, The Gay Science · Kierkegaard · Frege · Lacan · Wittgenstein, Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations · Kripke, Naming and Necessity · Deleuze, Difference and Repetition and (with Guattari) What Is Philosophy? · Parmenides · Kant · Sextus Empiricus · Pyrrho · BadiouLinksAndrew’s essays and books: andrewmilward.netSupport the podcast: PatreonThe Neither/Nor paper (Kam & Granic, 2026): Nature / Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

My long-awaited full PDF paper is out. “Neither/Nor: a pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge,” co-authored with Isabela Granic, is available here. (PDF)Jonah Wilberg, who writes The Wider Angle here on Substack, interviewed me on the principles of the paper. We recorded in my living room.The core argument: rationality and perception are not two incompatible philosophical positions, but two trainable skills. Then the question shifts from Which is right? to Which one should I choose now?In the podcast, Jonah and I work through what we call “Neither/Nor”: an approach that treats conceptual, abstract reason and embodied, experiential perception not as competing metaphysical positions — neither "rationalism" nor "empiricism" — but as capacities you can deliberately develop and oscillate between.Western philosophy tends to privilege the conceptual. We call this "latent Platonism": the often-unconscious tendency to reify abstractions — to treat “capitalism” or “the self” as objects with real existence rather than as useful but provisional constructs. Other traditions, notably Buddhism, push in the opposite direction, treating direct experience as the more reliable guide and concepts as a distraction. Our argument is that neither is sufficient alone. What matters is the oscillation.Drawing on managing type 1 diabetes, meditation, cooking, sport, CBT versus psychoanalysis, and Kuhn's paradigm shifts applied to personal identity crises, I try to describe when it's most useful to construct a conceptually stable model — and when it's most useful to dissolve one in favour of direct experience or incoming evidence. Neither position is final. The paper also develops related principles around relations and processes over static objects (drawing on Whitehead, Bateson, and complexity science), trial-and-error learning, and what we call conditional historicism over linear causality.00:00 Why This Paper Matters02:25 Two Ways of Knowing05:36 Neither Nor Explained06:13 Diabetes and Attention07:43 Principle One Setup09:24 Latent Platonism Today15:39 Concepts as Skills21:18 Training Experience23:59 Why Not Both And26:24 Meditation and Perception32:14 Jhanas and Suffering34:30 Flourishing in Practice36:25 Everyday Neither Nor Tools37:59 Both And Training Analogy40:42 Oscillation Principle Explained42:22 Paradigm Shifts and Identity46:31 Therapy and Emotional Reconsolidation49:58 Metamodernism and Two Modes55:54 Process Thinking and Whitehead01:06:16 Trial Error and Historicism01:11:07 Order Chaos and Bureaucracy01:15:12 Wrap Up and Where to Find More

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how conceptual abstraction relates to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.I was thrilled recently to speak with a hero of mine, Brook Ziporyn, who is Mircea Eliade Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago.In this podcast we cover Ziporyn’s intellectual history, from his grandfather’s Spinozism to the ontological ambiguities of Tiantai Buddhism. We spoke about how values undermine themselves when made explicit, how grammar shapes metaphysics, and what happens when one follows anti-realism all the way through to its surprisingly positive consequences.Professor Ziporyn traced a philosophical thread that runs from the Daodejing’s second chapter—”when all in the world recognizes the good as good, there is the bad”—through Buddhist emptiness to Spinoza’s critique of teleology. This “value paradox” suggests that explicit embrace of values contains an immanent reversal, a self-undermining which challenges the Western philosophical tradition’s foundation in purpose, natural kinds, and the Good.We look at related insights across traditions, for example:Chinese Buddhism’s claim that samsara is nirvana,in Schopenhauer’s blind will that has no internal divisions nor any ultimate goal,in Nietzsche’s affirmation of life including its suffering,and in the Daoist sage who acts through wu-wei (spontaneous action or non-action) rather than purposeful striving.A central exploration concerns how language inclines thought, though it doesn’t limit it. Classical Chinese lacks tense, gender, singular/plural distinctions, definite articles, and even clear differentiation between parts of speech—the same word can be beauty, beautiful, or to beautify depending on context. This grammatical openness means that certain metaphysical questions of “Being” simply do not naturally arise. Other philosophical questions, whose appeal is difficult to render into English, do, of course, arise in Chinese — like the paradox “a white horse is not a horse”.By contrast, Indo-European languages with their subject-predicate structure seem to demand an agent behind every action (Nietzsche’s example: “it rains”—what is the “it” that does the raining?). The law of excluded middle, natural kinds, and teleological thinking may be, as Ziporyn puts it, “downhill” moves in Western languages—statistically more likely to develop because they’re grammatically easier to express. But they are “uphill” for Chinese, meaning that they can be expressed with difficulty. Likewise, Chinese insights into “non-purposive action” can be expressed easily in Classical Chinese, but only with difficulty in Western languages, like Spinoza’s Latin or Schopenhauer’s German.Ziporyn has written on “ontological ambiguity” in Tiantai Buddhism. Rather than ambiguity being merely epistemological (we don’t know what something is), Tiantai suggests ambiguity is inherent to existence and distinctions. To be determinate requires relations to what something is not—and those relations make any finite thing necessarily ambiguous, appearing differently in different contexts without changing.This leads to the Buddhist notion of the “emptiness of emptiness.” Rather than a straight line to pure experience beyond concepts, Chinese Buddhist readings suggest the negation of negation brings us back to provisional reality—but transformed. As Ziporyn notes, once you say everything including nirvana is an illusion, the contrast between illusion and reality disappears. “Illusion” no longer functions as a put-down but [...]Read more at https://www.bryankam.com/p/samsara-is-nirvana-with-brook-ziporyn

Mathematics as MethodA Conversation with Alexander V. GheorghiuBryan Kam in conversation with Alex, assistant professor and a New Frontiers Fellow in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.As you'll hear in this podcast, my meeting with Alex Gheorghiu was random and fortuitous. In this podcast we discuss whether and how mathematics and logic relate to reality, why Buddhist thought challenges Western categories, and what Gödel's incompleteness theorem might mean for how we understand the world.Alex traces his intellectual development from teenage mathematical realism—the belief that mathematics describes the fundamental structure of reality—to his current anti-realist position. Through studying algebra and analysis during his degree, he came to the view that these mathematical tools are cultural constructs rather than discoveries about an objective reality "A model is just a model in the way that a map is never the land itself."Alex is also a Zen practitioner. We explored the famous Zen koan of Master Joshu, to the question of whether a dog has Buddha-nature. He responds "mu"—which neither affirms it nor denies it, but rather rejects the question. This exemplifies a philosophical move that transcends binary thinking, similar to how the Daodejing presents the Dao as preceding both unity and duality. We discuss how Chinese philosophy, lacking the Indo-European grammatical structures that equate existence and predication, developed fundamentally different approaches to how categories work.Through Michael Dummett's anti-realist philosophy, we explore how meaning emerges from use rather than correspondence to reality. This challenges millennia of Western philosophical assumptions about categories and definitions.The ancient tension between Parmenides (static being) and Heraclitus (dynamic becoming, which I've written about here) continues to shape philosophy today. We examine how Plato attempted to reconcile these positions through his theory of forms, and why this synthesis may have taken Western philosophy down a particular path—one that privileges nouns over verbs, objects over processes, and abstract categories over lived experience.Eugene Wigner's famous question—why mathematics works so unusually well in describing nature—dissolves when viewed through an anti-realist lens. If mathematics is a human tool rather than a discovery of reality's structure, its effectiveness becomes less mysterious and more a reflection of how we've shaped our tools to solve our problems.Alex shares his vision for bringing Gödel's incompleteness theorem into public consciousness the way physics has done with black holes. Having just won the 2025 Graham Hoare Prize for his essay, he argues that this "small technical result" has profound implications for how we understand the limits of formal systems and human knowledge itself.Alex Gheorghiu is an assistant professor at the University of Southampton and honorary fellow at University College London, working in logic with interests spanning philosophy of mathematics, theories of language, and the relationships between reasoning and reality. He's currently developing a mathematical account of Dummett's philosophy and working to make logic and mathematics accessible to wider audiences.Bryan Kam hosts the Clerestory podcast and is writing Neither/Nor, exploring how conceptual and experiential ways of knowing can inform both individual flourishing and our approach to philosophical problems.Recorded at Drake & Morgan, London, where philosophical work happens with "consistently low" productivity but high engagement.

On Thursday 7th August, I walked around Bethnal Green with Christopher Daniel, who organises Long Now London.We walked through East London, discussing architecture, philosophy, and the importance of long-term thinking. We explored the evolution of our own projects, especially Long Now London and Bryan's discussion group Through a Glass Darkly. We delved into broader themes like societal change, the impact of technology, and embodied experience versus conceptual abstraction. We wandered the streets, thinking about history, our own personal stories, and how to create meaningful and sustainable communities.The Bertrand Russell quote I butchered:“Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”See some photos I took of East London over on SubstackMy piece on HeraclitusMy piece on Dependent ArisingJamie Stantonian on the Uffington White HorseAnab from Superflux whom Chris mentioned a few times.I wrongly called one of the Greek schools of medicine "Dogmatist" when I should have said "Rationalist"; Sextus opposes both dogmatism and rationalism. The three schools of medicine in 2nd century AD were "Empirical," "Rationalist," and "Methodist."