'True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew...'

We witness, at each moment, the marvel that is the connection of experiences, and no one know how it is accomplished better than we do, since we are this very knot of relations. The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions. True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history...

Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945

In Angel's Care, Paul Klee, 1931

'Existentially primary'

Neurological and informatic models of subjectivity will no doubt have their uses and values, as did mechanistic models of the world before them. Yet, like their mechanistic forebears, these theories are grounded in an insistence that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon whose explanation resides in something prior. Chalmers wants to insist, along with Descartes and Locke before him, on the primacy of subjective experience or, as the philosopher Bitbol puts it, ‘that consciousness is existentially primary’. Rather than being something that can be ‘described by us in the third person as if we were separated from it’, Bitbol argues that consciousness ‘is what we dwell in and what we live through in the first person’. This feels reminiscent of what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in 1936 called the ‘life-world’ of conscious experience, and I suspect that it is where we must look to locate the source of our selves. But I also expect that philosophers and scientists will be arguing the point for centuries to come.

I feel therefore I am Margaret Wertheim

See also Is quantum physics behind your brain’s ability to think?

Photo: Europa and Jupiter's Great Spot, Voyager 1, March 3, 1979. NASA

'Multifarious descriptions of many things'

We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew. 

There is no theory of everything Simon Critchley

Image: Seascape study with raincloud by John Constable

A philosophy of pure ressentiment

Cioran accepts his aggressive-depressive disposition as the atmospheric fact of his existence. He accepts that he is fated to experience the world primarily in dystonic timbres; weariness, boredom, meaninglessness, tastelessness, and rebellious anger towards everything that is the case. He frankly affirms Nietzsche’s diagnosis that the ideals of metaphysics should be viewed as the intellectual products of physical and psychosocial illness…Thinking does not mean thanking, as Heidegger suggests; it means taking revenge.

You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk (2012)

Image via TuttoCioran

As personal as death, as unfathomable as the world

The sublime is that which, by calling to mind the overwhelming, shows the observer the possibility of their engulfment by the oversized — which, however, is suspended until further notice. The sublime whose tip points to me is as personal as death and as unfathomable as the world.

You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk (2009)

From what causes do I derive my existence?

Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, invironed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty. 

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

from A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume (1738)

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. 

from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (1942)


Image: William Allen et al

The Very Large Mistake

The Very Large Mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of reality to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical.

— Galen Strawson


Image: nautical chart of Semisopochnoi (Wikimedia)

"We are all alike in our infinite ignorance"

There is nothing infallible about “direct experience”...Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations.

from Why it's good to be wrong David Deutsch.

See also Deutsch on Why wondering is vital.


Image: detail of Monkey orchid by David Evans

Not nature itself

Contemporary thought is endangered by the picture of nature drawn by physics. This danger lies in the fact that the picture is now regarded as an exhaustive account of nature itself, so that science forgets that in its study of nature it is merely studying its own picture.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

— Werner Heisenberg.

The first observation is quoted by Michael Benson in Cosmigraphics (2014) via a citation in Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation by Dalibor Vesely (2004). Apparently, it comes from The Idea of Nature in Contemporary Physics (1954). The second is from Physics and Philosophy (1958).  In the latter, Heisenberg writes:

Existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

In Time Reborn (2013), Lee Smolin writes:

Quantum mechanics, too, is likely an approximation to a more fundamental theory. One sign of this is the fact that its equations are linear — meaning that they effects are always directly proportional to their causes. In every other example in which a linear equation is used in physics, the theory is known to arise as an approximation to a more fundamental (but still effective) theory that is non-linear (in the sense that the effects may be proportional to a higher power of the cause), and the best bet is that this will turn out to be true of quantum mechanics as well.

Image: Russell Savory via Guardian

Wonder, astonishment

“Wonder,” Descartes wrote, “is a sudden surprise of the soul,” reserved for what is rare and extraordinary. In his classification, it is the first of the passions, the only one unaccompanied by fluttering pulse or pounding heart. Disinterested but not indifferent, wonder is a cool passion that fixes on objects for what they are, instead of what they are for us. The wonder of wonder consists in the paradox of a cognitive passion: it has all the force of other passions like love or hate, but it helps rather than hinders reason. It is the passion aroused by anomalies, and the anomaly among the passions. [1]

Descartes [struck a balance] between just enough wonder and too much wonder. He recognized the utility of wonder “in making us learn and hold in memory things we have previously been ignorant of.” But this serviceable ‘wonder’ (admiration) was to be distinguished from stupefying ‘astonishment’ (estonnement), which makes the whole body remain immobile like a statue, such that one cannot perceive any more of the object beyond the first face presented and therefore cannot acquire any more particular knowledge. Astonishment differed only in degree from wonder - “astonishment is an excess of wonder” - but their cognitive effects were diametrically opposed...Wonder stimulated attentive inquiry, astonishment inhibited it. [2]

Note: [1] is from a review of Lorraine Daston of Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences by Philip Fisher (1999).  [2] is from Wonder and the Orders of Nature by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (1998). The quotations from Descartes are from Les Passions de l'âme (1649)

Image: Star trails over Indonesia by HuChieh via APOD