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Mystery. We May Sense That
Mystery. We May Sense That
Why should we think this view is correct? Here a bit of philosophical background is needed.
It might be supposed that to understand reality the thing to do would be to strip that
understanding of all that makes our perspective, and come to see things in a totally impartial,
disinterested way — a view from nowhere. This is what René Descartes had in mind as the
“absolute conception.” But it turns out there is a flaw in this plan — and we find a critique of
it in the works of Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Ludwig Wittgenstein — namely, that it gives no credit to the way in which any concepts
we might use to think about the world arise. That way is only through our active, interested
engagement in the world as reflects the contingently embodied partial creatures that we are. A
simple example: Things are out of reach to us in a quite different sense from that of a bird.
Take those kinds of considerations away and there would be no ways any world delineated in
concepts, any understanding, would arise at all, and so nothing would “ex-ist” in the literal
sense of “stand out” — at best, the world would be an undifferentiated homogeneity.