This book projects a philosophy that life and reality are at bottom amorphous, disordered, contradictory, inconsistent, non-rational, and non-objective. Science and much of western philosophy have in the past presented us with the illusion that things are otherwise. Rational views of the universe are idealized models which only approximate reality. The approximations are useful. The models are successful often enough in predicting the behavior of things that they provide a useful foundation for science and technology. But they are ultimately only approximations of reality, and non-unique at that.

This bothers many of us. We don't want to confront the unreality of reality. It frightens, like the shifting ground in an earthquake. We are abruptly left without reference points, without foundations, with nothing to stand on but our imaginations, our ethereal self-awareness.