August 22, 2025

The Weight of Meaning: Horizons, Thresholds and The Unfinished - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

27 minutes

The Weight of Meaning: Horizons, Thresholds and The Unfinished.

The Deeper Thinking Podcast is digitally narrated.

For those drawn to liminality, ethical responsiveness, and the quiet power of the pause.

#Liminality #Suspension #Bridges #EthicalResponsiveness #PoliticalPhilosophy #HannahArendt #JudithButler #GiorgioAgamben #PhilosophyOfCare

What if the most revealing moments were the ones in which nothing seemed to move? This episode dwells within suspension, the felt space between action and arrival. Drawing on the imagery of bridges, thresholds, and interrupted rhythm, we explore how the in-between becomes not an absence of meaning, but its deepened expression. Between past and future, memory and becoming, the pause speaks. And within that pause, ethics takes form.

Rather than seek immediate resolution, this episode traces a politics of responsiveness, one that takes seriously the role of orientation, relationality, and moral attention. Through conversation with the works of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Giorgio Agamben, we consider how suspension can be a space of agency, not through action alone, but through the cultivation of ethical listening and shared becoming.

What emerges is not a theory of delay, but an invitation to inhabit the world more slowly, more attentively, more alive to what lingers between the visible contours of change. Ethics, here, is not commandment. It is choreography. Not doctrine, but posture. Not speed, but rhythm.

Reflections

This episode reflects on how the in-between becomes a ground for ethical life. It is a meditation on how form does not restrict, but enables, and how uncertainty, held carefully, might become a resource rather than a threat.

Here are some reflections surfaced along the way:

Suspension is not absence, it is tension, becoming, and charge.

Ethics without attentiveness is performance; ethics within suspension is response.

To cross a threshold is to be changed, even by the pause before the step.

Slowness can be fidelity, not hesitation.

The bridge is never just structure, it is a way of being between.

Responsiveness is not agreement , it is willingness to be affected.

Ethical action requires not speed, but rhythm attuned to others.

Even endings carry resonance; closure is never total.

The space between can become the site of ethical imagination.

Why Listen?

Explore how liminality shapes moral experience

Engage with Arendt on beginnings, Butler on precarity, and Agamben on potentiality

Rethink action as something shaped by pauses, not just movements

Hear how ethics, suspension, and shared thresholds can reorient political and personal life

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Bibliography

Suspension, Judgment & Time

Friedman, J. (n.d.). Suspended Judgment. PhilPapers. Retrieved from https://philpapers.org/rec/FRISJ

Guilielmo, B. (2024). Suspended Judgement Rebooted. Logos and Episteme, 4, 445–462. https://philarchive.org/rec/GUISJR

Mudry, L. (2025). The Ethics of Suspension of Judgement (Doctoral dissertation, University of Zurich). https://www.zora.uzh.ch/267511

Vazquez, D. (2024). Suspension of Belief. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/suspension-of-belief/4B1196BB5D91587247517DF7B04C8229

Ethics, Thresholds & Liminality

Michael Szewka. (2025, February 4). On the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical. PNW History & Philosophy. https://pnwhistoryphilosophy.wordpress.com/2025/02/04/on-the-matter-of-the-teleological-suspension-of-the-ethical-michael-szewka

Waldron, J. (2010). Threshold Deontology and Its Critique. In Law, Economics, and Morality. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/10763/chapter/158863037

Primary Texts by Hannah Arendt

Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future. Viking Press.

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.

Arendt, H. (1976). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace. (Original work published 1951)

Arendt, H. (2003). Responsibility and Judgment (J. Kohn, Ed.). Schocken Books.

Yeatman, A. (Ed.). (2011). Action and Appearance: Ethics and the Politics of Writing in Hannah Arendt. Continuum.

Arendtian Secondary Literature

Mahony, D. L. (2018). Hannah Arendt’s Ethics. Bloomsbury Academic.

Macready, J. D. (n.d.). A Bibliography of Literature on Hannah Arendt since 1975. https://johndouglasmacready.com/a-bibliography-of-literature-on-hannah-arendt-since-1975/

Goethe-Institut Canada. (n.d.). Hannah Arendt Bibliography. https://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/en/kul/ges/tid/har.html

Berkowitz, R. (2009). Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics. Fordham University Press.

Hannah Arendt: Her account of natality, beginnings, and political appearance underpins the essay’s engagement with emergence.

Judith Butler: Central for understanding precarity, relationality, and the ethics of responsiveness within social frames.

Giorgio Agamben: Provides a conceptual foundation for suspension, potentiality, and the politics of the threshold.

The pause is not what interrupts meaning. It is what gives it space to speak.

#Suspension #EthicalResponsiveness #PoliticalPhilosophy #BridgesAndThresholds #Liminality #JudithButler #HannahArendt #GiorgioAgamben #CareEthics #DeeperThinking #DigitalPhilosophy #CivicEthics #RhythmOfEthics #InhabitingThePause #DeeperThinkingPodcast #RelationalPolitics #AttentionAsEthics

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