Dear Metaphysicians of Woo,
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a philosopher in possession of a great idea must be in want of an entirely new way of expressing it. But is that really necessary? I mean, of course the subject-predicate classification artificially bifurcates thought! But clause after clause of hyphenated noun phrases with no linking verb in sight won’t do much to explain the true nature of reality if no one wants to read you.
Me, personally? I think you’re really and actually deep. But I’ll be honest, I don’t want to read you either! I have to force myself to read you. It hurts to read you. I read War and Peace to escape you—it was a beach read by comparison. That was my gateway drug. After partaking in fiction it became harder to choke down your tangle of terminology. I mean, god forbid you should give a concrete example. I know you think your opponent will turn them against you, but don’t forget, you have no opponent. It’s crickets out there.
You’re gonna have to do better.
I hear what you’re saying:“But there’s simply no other way to circumvent the dualistic paradigm that is ordinary language!”
Really? It sounds like you just did it.
“But analytic philosophers are guilty too. They confuse their technical trappings for clarity.”
Yeah, but most of them have the sense to confine their word math to academic papers. And at least that math is shared by a specific group of people; not no one. On top of that they do much better than you in explaining ideas to a general audience. Just take a look around the internet if you don’t believe me. Of course they would know better. Once upon a time they tried to tame natural language—any proposition that wasn’t empirically verifiable was meaningless (…except…this…one). Yeah. Since then they’ve moved on. Why haven’t you? Seriously! If analytic philosophers couldn’t bring common speech to its knees, what makes you think you’ll do better? You can barely get through a paragraph without contradicting yourself!
You know what? I’m beginning to wonder whether you’re the reason we’re still talking about ‘qualia’ and characterizing experience as fundamentally ineffable and private.
“How is that my fault?” you might reply, “I never said those things.”
Before all those whining existentialists and postmodernists sucked all the oxygen out of the room, you had a real shot at placing what’s these days called ‘phenomenal experience’ on an objective foundation. A shared qualitative reality. But you blew it.
Imagine if I wrote this post in, say, Morse code and handed you a decoder to turn this post back into ordinary English? You’d say no way I’m doing that. Life is short. But that’s what your asking your reader to do…and without decoder. You made up words or gave common words new meanings without bothering to explain yourself.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m exaggerating? I’ll pick a random sentence from one of your books. Oo…here’s an eye-catching title: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book. I’m cracking it open, closing my eyes, and dropping a finger down on any ‘ol passage.:
From the standpoint of the phenomenological science which we propose to establish, that signifies <considering> in addition which sciences it might draw from without violating its pure sense, which <sciences> it might and might not use as given beforehand, which, hence, need “parenthesizing.” (Chapter Four: The Phenomenological Reductions, Edmund Husserl).
Who’d bother to decode that? I guess I would, given that I did (I think?) But time was on my side then.
Alfred North Whitehead, I used your famous quote for the title of my novel, A Footnote to Plato, and yes, I did that before reading you…shame, shame, shame on me. Jim over at Staggering Implications recommended your book, Science and the Modern World, and I’ve recently started reading it. I dig. Your criticisms of the primary and secondary qualities distinction make my recent post feel a bit like plagiarism.1 At the same time, I’m all too aware that this is considered your easy book. Process and Reality is the one your known for, and it’s a real kick in the pants from what I’ve heard. I asked my Plato-scholar husband if he’d read it and he admitted that he tried to read it once but stopped when he realized “he didn’t have to.” Let me repeat that. A Plato scholar decided you weren’t worth reading. What a waste! You two could’ve hit it off! You could’ve been Best Friends For Ever! That’s something to think about right there.
So. Here we are, the last day of the year, 2024. Since everyone breaks their New Year’s resolutions anyway, let’s just go ahead and shoot for the impossible. Go big or go home, right? I propose that you come back to life and rewrite all your works so they sound like something a normal human being would consider reading. I promise to absorb all your deep insights the way I absorb holiday calories. Whaddya say. Have we got a deal?
Hello?
What do YOU think?
Which books do you wish to have read?
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“Diogenes”, Subliminal Mind Pub, by Nick Herman. Check out his music, support indie artists!
Be sure to check out Nick’s Substack, Kaleidoscopic Mind.
“This division of territory between science and philosophy was not a simple business; and in fact it illustrated the weakness of the whole cut-and-dried presupposition upon which it rested. We are aware of nature as an interplay of bodies, colors, sounds, scents, tastes, touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed as in space, in patterns of mutual separation by intervening volumes, and of individual shape. Also the whole flux, changing with the lapse of time. The systematic totality is disclosed to us as one complex of things. But the seventeenth century dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colors, sounds, scents, tastes, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of the cogitations of the individual minds. Both worlds shared in the general flux; but time, as measured, is assigned by Descartes to the cogitations of the observer’s mind. There is obviously one fatal weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of mind exhibit themselves as holding up entities, such as colors for instance, before the mind as the termini of contemplation. But in this theory these colors are, after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly, the mind seems to be confined to its own private passions. This conclusion from the Cartesian data is the starting point from which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant developed their respective systems. And, antecedently to them, it was the point upon which Locke concentrated as being the vital question. Thus the question as to how knowledge is obtained of the truly objective world of science becomes a problem of the first magnitude.” —Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Chapter IX, Science and Philosophy.
I’m just gonna cut and paste from SEP because I’m sick of typing out quotes:
The primary qualities are the essential qualities of substances whose spatio-temporal relationships constitute nature. … The occurrences of nature are in some way apprehended by minds … But the mind in apprehending also experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. (1925 [1967: 54])
“The enormous success of the scientific abstractions”, Whitehead wrote, “has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact” and, he added: “Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme. (1925 [1967: 55])”
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