I finally got around to reading this after the comment you left on my post The Human Animal, and I'm so glad I did. This was fantastic, and it absolutely feels akin to what I was attempting to explore in my own essay (which, as you make clear here, is all that really can be explored - the game of language, the flux of experience as elucidated by the limited lantern of perception etc.)
I'm very much looking forward to delving deeper into your thinking on this Substack.
I’m very pleased that you liked it. The two essays directly following this one are more or less direct continuations, while my project at large is outlined in the «Introduction» post, with links to all essays so far. Happy reading, and I welcome any and all feedback
Thank you, there is so much here - the beginning about experience brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s distinction between erlebnis and erfahrung…not sure how relevant it is here, just working on memory from reading him some 20 years ago, but wanted to bring that up also to point to the language-specific complexities regarding these elusive phenomena.
I know you mention Advaita Vedanta in passing towards the end but I kept thinking about the term ’awareness’ that vedantic contemporary English-speaking thinkers such as Rupert Spira employ… I think the notion of awareness, in the sense it can be felt eg via meditation practice, as ’not the experience of absence but as the absence of experience’ (I think I got it right) would be relevant here. I hope you find these points constructive!
I finally got around to reading this after the comment you left on my post The Human Animal, and I'm so glad I did. This was fantastic, and it absolutely feels akin to what I was attempting to explore in my own essay (which, as you make clear here, is all that really can be explored - the game of language, the flux of experience as elucidated by the limited lantern of perception etc.)
I'm very much looking forward to delving deeper into your thinking on this Substack.
I’m very pleased that you liked it. The two essays directly following this one are more or less direct continuations, while my project at large is outlined in the «Introduction» post, with links to all essays so far. Happy reading, and I welcome any and all feedback
Thank you, there is so much here - the beginning about experience brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s distinction between erlebnis and erfahrung…not sure how relevant it is here, just working on memory from reading him some 20 years ago, but wanted to bring that up also to point to the language-specific complexities regarding these elusive phenomena.
I know you mention Advaita Vedanta in passing towards the end but I kept thinking about the term ’awareness’ that vedantic contemporary English-speaking thinkers such as Rupert Spira employ… I think the notion of awareness, in the sense it can be felt eg via meditation practice, as ’not the experience of absence but as the absence of experience’ (I think I got it right) would be relevant here. I hope you find these points constructive!
Thanks for the suggestions! I’ve merely seen their names, but I will check out both Benjamin and Spira