This is a brief and fairly simplistic summary - according to my limited understanding - of two little known early 20th century Canadian philosophical theses, The Essentail Nature of Immediacy* https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/0148/10174 and The False Hope of Certainty* https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/xmlui/handle/0366/12964 (*translated from French).
The Essential Nature of Immediacy
The main argument in this work is that the cause of all the ills of the world, and the most fundamental weakness of human nature, is that we continually seek to distance ourselves from our immediate and direct experience of our existence and our life. This arises out of a deep and intractable fear that we experience very deeply from birth. To avoid addressing this existential dread of being alive in this world, we seek to place layer upon layer of distraction between ourselves and the world. The practice of philosophy is itself criticised for often being nothing more than an intellectual exercise in further distancing ourselves from the immediate experience of life. A warning is given that theories and explanations of life that do not give prominence to people’s phenomenological experiences are dangerously divorced from reality and prone to creating a negative impact on humanity.
The False Hope of Certainty
This thesis is a blistering attack on all forms of professed certainty: religious; philosophical; moral and political. But more than this, it actively encourages the individual to not seek a state of localised certainty and instead to practise living with and embracing the inevitable and inescapable uncertainties of their lives. We are called upon to dismiss the idea that we can make right or wrong decisions whilst still being encouraged to do our best to navigate through unsolvable conundrums. It is important to note that this is not an existentialist, nihilist or morally relativistic philosophy: it is made clear that there is no contradiction between the fact that we cannot know the answers to many questions we are faced with with any degree of certainty and the fact that there is still a general direction of righteousness or droiture that we should be aiming for.
These two philosophies provide an interesting framework wherein the practice of mindfulness can be placed.
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