About Me

Ryhan Higgins Orshalev

I started this blog because I love philosophy and I also hate philosophy.  It's one of those strange relationships.  What I love about philosophy is that it has the power to transform and reveal myself and allows me to explore untold possibilities.  Nothing intrigues me more than encountering new and compelling ways to look at myself and the world and more interestingly, the challenge of reconciling what seems to be incompatible view points.  That is my current goal right now as I am enthralled by existentialism, yet I see much proverbial fruit waiting to be harvested by finding a way to approach metaphysics without the trappings that it is currently associated with.  

So who am I?  I guess I cannot truly say so in words, but I can give the customary and superficial presentation by telling about my background.  I did my MA in the History and Philosophy of Religion in order to have access to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.  I decided not to do a Phd since I felt that politics has been playing too strong a role in what people can and cannot write about.  So I felt the best way to do philosophy authentically was to do it not as paid staff, but as a writer and this blog is giving me a creative space to test out certain ideas while polishing my book: The Metaphysics of Pure Will.

The name De-Liberation, sums up my own perception of philosophy and the goal of this blog.  The name is really a play on words denoting both freedom as the French 'liberation'... which is also fitting historically, yet, for myself it indicates the idea of achieving freedom though 'deliberation' the act of deliberating.  Further, we have the connotation of 'deliberate' the idea being to live and act deliberately, so there is a hint at the direction of my teleological reasoning here and what I understand true freedom to be: liberty through both deliberation and deliberate actions in the world.