ABSTRACT
To confront and overcome the inadequacies of current interpretative schemes, including those promulgated by the sciences and other privileged discourses (including ideas parading as Marxist) and those embodied in practices, institutions, built environments and technology, dialectical thinking that gives a place to all components of speculative thinking: analysis, synopsis and synthesis, that can reconceive humanity and its place in nature, is required. The most important interpretative schemes that need to be identifi ed and confronted are those that are assumed by more consciously articulated interpretative schemes. It is these that are most diffi cult to question and replace because they are absorbed subconsciously in the process of being socialized into a culture and its practices. Embodied as habituses and accepted as doxa, it is extremely diffi cult for any individual to bring these assumptions to full consciousness. It is here that synopses that highlight the contradictions between diff erent domains of life, experience and thought, and assumptions held at diff erent times in history, are required. All forms of experience, whether the experience of the physical world, of being alive, aware or self-conscious, of being socially engaged or involved in empirical or theoretical research or artistic and religious contemplation, including the experiences of others and their utterances or writings, can be the basis for bringing into question and challenging prevailing interpretive schemes if they contradict experiences in any one of these. There are no absolute starting points or foundations for knowledge in this quest, either in reason or in experience, or in received claims to knowledge from the past (scientifi c or otherwise) and no conclusions that are beyond further questioning. Recognizing the role of speculation and synthetic thought while appreciating the unprethinkable Being that is always more than we can comprehend, exposes the fallibility of all claims to knowledge, whether comprehensive or narrowly focused, and the absurdity of foreclosing further questioning and speculation.
