Foreword
One of the joys, and paradoxes, of being a hairstylist is discovering how deeply people’s choices are woven with meaning. Hair may seem a superficial vessel for such reflection, yet it’s precisely in the everyday gestures; the cut, the colour, the mirror glance, that the search for significance quietly unfolds. My salon chair has become a front-row seat to the theatre of human becoming.
I think often of my mother, who refused to cut her hair short because she believed her neck was “too long.” Was it? Not at all. It was a graceful, ordinary neck, slender, dignified, and wholly unremarkable. But her judgment, like mine, was never about the neck itself. It was about meaning, a belief she had inherited about what necks should or shouldn’t be. Both our descriptions were interpretations, not realities; stories attached to skin.
As a hairstylist, I watch countless people trying to anchor identity in image, to construct coherence from reflection. It saddens me, because image itself is a construct ; a symbol requiring interpretation. These interpretive mechanisms of meaning-making, often unexamined, shape not just how we see ourselves, but who we become.
This essay is a small attempt to explore those mechanisms, to provoke curiosity about the meanings we inherit, to ask whether the truths we live by are truly true, and to remind us that even our mirrors are philosophical instruments.
Philosophy, at its lived encounter through choices, decides whether we are motivated by good or evil.
After all, every choice we make is an act of practicing philosophy, whether we know it or not.
Prologue: The Tyranny of the Certain
Before furthering my studies , I had never heard the word ontology. It means the study of being, the “what” and “why” of existence itself. You would think that being alive, knowing how we define ourselves would come naturally. Yet, most of us live ontologically without realising it. We are before we ever understand how we are. It’s like refusing to taste a food you’ve never tried; we form judgments long before comprehension ever arrives.
That’s the quiet danger of human knowing.
We live and act inside invisible systems of thought, absorbing “truths” that shape our being long before we question them. Social contagion, that subtle mimicry of the mind, moulds our beingness when we are unaware of how we know.
Hans-Georg Gadamer called this prejudice, not in the moral sense, but in the epistemic one:
“Prejudice does not necessarily mean a false judgment… it can have either a positive or a negative.” (Truth and Method, p. 273)
All understanding begins with pre-understanding. The question is not whether we are biased, but whether our biases are open to transformation. When we do not interrogate our prejudgments, they begin to think for us. And as history shows, from Social Darwinism to racial hierarchies, warped knowing produces deformed beingness.
Epistemology and ontology are intertwined. How we know determines who we become. And when our knowing is corrupted, our being follows suit.
The Birth of the Closed Mind: Rationalism and the Myth of Detachment
We’ve all heard it: “Ignorance is bliss.” But is it?
Ignorance may comfort, but it also cages. To remain uninformed is to surrender the capacity to discern truth from fiction. And every authoritarian system knows this; the easiest way to control people is to shrink their imagination.
Modern rationalism promised liberation through reason but delivered exile from mystery. The Enlightenment made detachment the highest virtue; to know was to stand apart.
Linda Martín Alcoff exposes this illusion of neutrality:
“A person who cannot gain critical distance from their cultural traditions cannot rationally assess them and thus cannot attain autonomy.” (Visible Identities, p. 22)
Modernity called this maturity. But in reality, it was the construction of a self so detached it lost its capacity for wonder, belonging, and transcendence.
Charles Taylor calls this enclosure the immanent frame:
“A social space where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular.” (A Secular Age, p. 542)
In this secular enclosure, the world became flat, a stage for performance, not encounter. The transcendent was not disproved, merely ignored. We traded holiness for efficiency; mystery for metrics. And in doing so, we built a world too small for the soul.
When Meaning Became Mechanical: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Metaphor
Scroll through your feed: headlines, byte-sized outrage, viral moralism. Society has mastered the art of being loud without listening.
Literalism, whether religious or secular, is the ideology of the afraid. It seeks comfort in clarity, safety in certainty, and control in uniformity. It refuses the tension that makes truth alive.
Paul Ricoeur reminds us that language itself thrives on this tension:
“A metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through interpretation… the literal interpretation self-destructs in a significant contradiction.” (Interpretation Theory, p. 50)
Meaning is not mechanical. It is relational ; discovered through the dance between word and world, speaker and listener, God and creation.
Gadamer calls this the “fusion of horizons,” a meeting, not a conquest. To refuse interpretation is to refuse relationship.
But we have built an age of slogans and algorithms where nuance is mistrusted and conversation is war. We mistake opinion for conviction, information for wisdom, and performance for truth. We have forgotten that the Word became flesh, not formula.
Tradition, Virtue, and Rational Coherence
When we remove honour from knowing, we hollow out what it means to be human. We create a society of narcissistic expertise, smart enough to dominate, foolish enough to destroy.
Alasdair MacIntyre foresaw this collapse:
“One cannot be practically rational without being virtuous, any more than one can be virtuous without being practically rational.” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 128)
Reason divorced from virtue breeds manipulation.
Morality reduced to self-interest breeds tyranny.
It is irrational to believe that “I” am more important than “we.” Morality is not an individual right but a shared obligation, a covenant that keeps the world habitable.
Rationality without justice becomes technocracy.
Faith without virtue becomes idolatry.
Both are forms of collective insanity masquerading as progress.
When the Paradigm Breaks: Faith Beyond the Systems
Every closed system eventually fractures, whether scientific, political, or religious.
Thomas Kuhn described these moments as paradigm shifts:
“Philosophical analysis weakens the grip of a tradition upon the mind and suggests the basis for a new one.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 88)
When our paradigms can no longer hold reality, crisis arrives not as punishment but as invitation. That’s where Cornel West steps in, not as philosopher alone, but as a prophet of renewal.
West’s prophetic pragmatism refuses despair. He writes:
“Prophetic pragmatism is a political form of cultural criticism… locating politics in the everyday experiences of ordinary people.” (The Cornel West Reader, p. 151)
Where modern reason detached, West reconnects. He brings truth down to the dust of the ordinary, insisting that the search for knowledge is inseparable from the struggle for justice.
Epistemology becomes ethical when knowing is an act of love or domination.
And faith becomes political when it forgets that belief is tested not by its words but by its works.
As West warns when reason loses compassion, it becomes ideology; when faith loses hope, it becomes fundamentalism.
Prophetic pragmatism insists on the messy middle; the place where truth must do something, or it is not truth at all.
The Colonised Mind and the Prophetic Imagination
But even prophetic reason can be co-opted if it forgets history. Willie James Jennings reminds us that Western theology itself once confused domination with divine order:
“European Christians saw themselves as agents of divine change… performing a deeply theological act that mirrored the identity of God in creating.” (The Christian Imagination, p. 60)
They forgot that only God can be unconditioned. The rest of us must learn to listen.
James Cone therefore declared:
“There can be no Christian theology which is not identified unreservedly with those who are humiliated and abused.” (A Black Theology of Liberation, p. 17)
Truth that does not liberate is not truth at all. And theology that does not confront oppression is merely pious philosophy; elegant but empty.
Cornel West’s voice harmonises here again with prophetic hope rising through despair:
“Emancipatory social experimentalism sits at the centre of prophetic pragmatism.” (The Cornel West Reader, p. 151)
Truth, then, must walk where pain lives.
Knowing must become solidarity.
Epistemology must become love made public.
Toward Coherent Truth: Revelation as Reorientation
If rationalism trapped us in the mind and fundamentalism trapped us in fear, revelation invites us back into relationship.
Karl Barth once said that God is the One revealed in His act. Thus, revelation is not information it is encounter. In revelation, knowing is no longer about control but participation. We do not master truth; we are mastered by love. Theology, then, is not speculation about God but communion with God. And coherent truth, that long-lost harmony between reason, faith, and justice, is found not in systems, but in the living Word who still speaks.
Epilogue: When Truth Breathes Again
Across centuries, humanity has mistaken knowledge for wisdom, and intellect for light. Rationalism built the cage. Fundamentalism locked the door. Pragmatism taught us to decorate the bars.
But prophetic knowing, humble, relational, participatory, breaks them all.
Gadamer taught us that understanding begins in conversation.
Ricoeur showed us that meaning lives in interpretation.
MacIntyre reminded us that reason demands virtue.
Taylor unveiled our immanent prisons.
Jennings and Cone showed that theology must liberate.
And West, fiery, relentless, compassionate, taught us that hope is the only epistemology the devil cannot counterfeit.
When we finally stop performing certainty and start practising love, interpretation ceases to be war, and becomes worship.
For truth is not what we hold in the mind, but Who holds us in being.
Prayer
Father God,
Forgive us for trying to be without knowing how You created beingness for us to learn to know. Help us to seek the adventure of knowing through Your holy way, as Your way is higher than ours.
Guide us, teach, mould us, and be our strength as we walk out of perceived certainty and into the mystery of the unknown.
Thank You Lord Jesus for being the way, the truth, and the life,
Amen
TRACK TO ENJOY:
Bibliography
Alcoff, Linda Martín. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics, Volume II/1: The Doctrine of God. Edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957.
Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970.
Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
West, Cornel. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
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