METAPHYSICS

About the site

Curriculum vitae

The Book

Books archive

First Drafts

Lola's diary

Free-writing

Links

contact Jeremy
contact Ellen

The understanding I seek

Here is what I hope someday to achieve: I would like to understand the world in a way that allows me to get outside my head -- consciously restraining myself here from using quotation marks -- and know that I am a part of a broader reality than myself. I do not really understand mysticism, so I use the term advisedly, but it seems to me that what I am looking for is a mystical awareness.

A barrier that I have to overcome to achieve this type of thinking is the siren song of solipsism, the metaphysical idea that the outside world is less real than my internal reality. I find that much (not all) of the western philosophy which I have been exposed to promotes solipsistic thinking. In the coming months and years I will be reading more western philosophy that I think can contribute to denying solipsism; for instance, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Blumenberg. (Just got in the mail Blumenberg's Höhlenausgänge from German Amazon, I'm excited to read it.) I think a necessary goal of any Philosophy that I could appreciate must be the wholesale rejection of such thinking.

That is going to be my main course of attempting to mature intellectually in the near future; also my friend Jim gave me some books on Eastern types of mysticism for my birthday; so I will be taking a look at those as well, hoping to broaden the net.