Clerestory (Bryan Kam)
Why Abstraction Causes Suffering: The Neither/Nor paper
Published: 28 May 2026 at 23:02 Europe/London
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Episode notes
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 Matters
02:25 Two Ways of Knowing
05:36 Neither Nor Explained
06:13 Diabetes and Attention
07:43 Principle One Setup
09:24 Latent Platonism Today
15:39 Concepts as Skills
21:18 Training Experience
23:59 Why Not Both And
26:24 Meditation and Perception
32:14 Jhanas and Suffering
34:30 Flourishing in Practice
36:25 Everyday Neither Nor Tools
37:59 Both And Training Analogy
40:42 Oscillation Principle Explained
42:22 Paradigm Shifts and Identity
46:31 Therapy and Emotional Reconsolidation
49:58 Metamodernism and Two Modes
55:54 Process Thinking and Whitehead
01:06:16 Trial Error and Historicism
01:11:07 Order Chaos and Bureaucracy
01:15:12 Wrap Up and Where to Find More
