AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
His key move is the distinction between Reason (Vernunft) and Understanding (Verstand), borrowed and transformed from Kant. Understanding is the analytic, categorizing faculty that builds machines and runs markets. Reason is the higher synthesizing faculty that grasps living wholes, moral truths, and the divine. A society organized purely around Understanding — commercial, utilitarian, administratively rationalized — starves Reason and produces what Coleridge called "men of talent without wisdom."
His concept of the clerisy (in On the Constitution of the Church and State, 1829) is a direct response: a cultivated class — not just clergy, but educators and intellectuals — whose institutional role is to preserve and transmit the national culture against the atomizing forces of commerce. This is explicitly a corrective to clockwork society.
In Biographia Literaria (1817) he attacks associationist psychology (Hartley, Locke) as the mental correlate of mechanism — the idea that mind is just billiard-ball impressions combining by contiguity. Against this he posits the primary Imagination as a living, creative power that actively constitutes experience rather than passively receiving it.
His organic metaphor is doing real philosophical work: a clock is assembled from outside; a plant grows from internal principle. Society and mind are more like plants. Interfere mechanically and you get disruption without understanding why.
You're right that "panrealism" seems like it should be a term - it's a very logical construction! The closest established philosophical position would be ontological liberalism (also called ontological permissivism). This is the view that existence is "cheap" and that our ontology should be quite inclusive rather than restrictive.
Ontological liberals argue that we should generally accept that things exist rather than being skeptical about their existence. Philosopher Amie Thomasson has been a prominent defender of this kind of view. The basic idea is that if we have conceptual schemes that seem to refer to certain kinds of things (numbers, fictional characters, social institutions, etc.), we should generally accept that those things exist in the relevant sense rather than trying to eliminate them from our ontology.
Other somewhat related positions include:
Meinongianism - the view that there are objects that have "being" even if they don't "exist" (so in some sense, more things are real than we might think)
Ontological maximalism - though this term is less established in the literature
You're absolutely right that eliminativism represents the opposite impulse - trying to show that things we think exist (like beliefs, consciousness, moral facts, etc.) should be eliminated from our best theory of what's real.
It's interesting that "panrealism" hasn't caught on as a term, since it would be a neat way to capture the maximally inclusive ontological stance. The philosophical community can be somewhat conservative about terminology, but there's nothing stopping the term from gaining traction if it proves useful!
Note, doing it is distinct from writing about it, OTOH these days that distance is small since Claude will turn intentions into code, or practically anything else.
René Girard isn't typically classified as a "conflict theorist" in the conventional sociological sense—that label usually refers to the Marxist-Weberian tradition focused on class struggle and competing group interests (Dahrendorf, C. Wright Mills, etc.).
That said, conflict is absolutely central to Girard's thought, just theorized very differently. His mimetic theory makes rivalry and violence generative of culture itself:
Mimetic desire produces inevitable conflict as people converge on the same objects
The escalating "mimetic crisis" threatens to tear communities apart
The scapegoat mechanism resolves this through collective violence against a surrogate victim
Religion, prohibition, and ritual emerge to manage and contain this fundamental violence
So while Marx sees conflict arising from material conditions and structural contradictions, Girard locates it in the very structure of desire itself—it's anthropological and quasi-metaphysical rather than economic or political.
There's an interesting comparison to be made: both thinkers see conflict as foundational rather than aberrational, and both offer "hermeneutics of suspicion" that unmask hidden violence beneath social order. But Girard's resolution points toward religious revelation (specifically the Gospels exposing the scapegoat mechanism) rather than revolutionary praxis.
If anything, Girard might be called a violence theorist—someone for whom violence is the hidden engine of the sacred and social order, requiring exposure rather than dialectical resolution. His intellectual lineage runs more through Durkheim, Freud, and literary criticism than through Marx.
Kierkegaard's relationship to irony is dialectical — neither simply for nor against, but a sustained inquiry into its limits.
**The early view (The Concept of Irony, 1841):** He takes Socratic irony seriously as a world-historical turning point — the moment subjectivity first asserts itself against given ethical substance (à la Hegel). But he criticizes romantic irony (Schlegel especially) harshly: it becomes pure negativity, a stance of infinite hovering above all commitments, which is aesthetically seductive but existentially empty and irresponsible. The ironist who can never be pinned down, who treats everything as material for clever distance — this is a failure mode.
His own irony: Yet Kierkegaard is himself one of the great ironists in Western literature — pseudonyms, indirect communication, the whole apparatus of Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, etc. He practices irony as a controlled negativity, a pedagogical tool for unsettling complacency without leaving the reader stranded in mere cleverness.
The key distinction: Irony as a position (romantic irony, where one dwells) vs. irony as a moment one passes through on the way to deeper commitment. He wants irony to be a stage, not a home. The ironist who never makes the leap — who aestheticizes existence indefinitely — is exactly the "aesthetic stage" type he anatomizes in Either/Or.
The deeper point: He's suspicious of irony because it can be a sophisticated form of bad faith — protecting the self from the demand of genuine choice. His target is the cultivated Copenhagener who substitutes wit for inwardness.
So: for irony as method and moment, against irony as dwelling place and identity.
More Claude , with apologies, but it's my way of being Of My Time.
I can't verify the specific lecture, but the phrase fits coherently with his stated positions, and it's worth unpacking what it would have meant for him specifically.
The ZERO context
The postwar German artists who became ZERO were making a deliberate break — from Expressionism, from the trauma-saturated art that preceded them, but also from the idea that the artist's job is to transcend or critique their historical moment. Piene's move was almost the opposite: full acceptance of the technological present as the artist's actual material. Light, air, fire, industrial materials, the electromagnetic spectrum — these weren't metaphors, they were the stuff of now, and he wanted to work directly with them.
So "I am of my time" would carry a polemical edge against two targets: the romantic idea of the timeless artist-genius above history, and equally against artists who engage technology ironically or critically, keeping their hands clean. Piene was neither. He wanted genuine immersion.
How it showed in the work
This is what gives Sky Art its particular character. He wasn't using balloons and light to make nature-metaphors or anti-technology statements — he was treating the atmosphere, industrial fabrication, helium supply chains, and coordinated engineering as his medium without apology. The works are utopian rather than critical, which made them unfashionable as postmodern irony took hold in the art world through the 80s.
The tension
The interesting thing is that "being of one's time" in 1970 meant something different than it did by 1990. The technological optimism that animated ZERO and the early CAVS ethos started to look naive as the cultural mood shifted. Piene didn't really pivot — he held the position. That's either integrity or stubbornness depending on where you stand, but it does mean his work has a consistency that makes it readable as a coherent statement rather than a series of accommodations to fashion.