I theorize that you’re experiencing at least two different common, related, yet almost opposed mental re-organizations.
One, which I approve of, accounts for many of the effects you describe under “Bemused exasperation here...”. It sounds similar to what I’ve gotten from writing fiction.
Writing fiction is, mostly, thinking, with focus, persistence, and patience, about other people, often looking into yourself to try to find some point of connection that will enable you to understand them. This isn’t quantifiable, at least not to me; but I would still call it analytic. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it, nor anything especially difficult other than (A) caring about other individuals—not other people, in the abstract, but about particular, non-abstract individuals—and (B) acquiring the motivation and energy to think long and hard about them. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t find it as mentally draining per minute as chess, though perhaps that’s because I’m not very interested in chess. But one does it for weeks on end, not just hours.
(What I’ve just described applies only to the naturalist school of fiction, which says that fiction studies about particular, realistic individuals in particular situations in order to query our own worldview. The opposed, idealistic school of fiction says that fiction presents archetypes as instructional examples in order to promulgate your own worldview.)
The other thing, your “flibble”, sounds to me like the common effect, seen in nearly all religions and philosophies, of a drastic simplification of epistemology, when one blinds oneself to certain kinds of thoughts and collapses one’s ontology into a simpler world model, in order to produce a closed, self-consistent, over-simplified view of the world. Platonists, Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, post-modernists, and SJWs each have a drastically-simplified view of what is in the world and how it operates, which always includes “facts” and techniques which discount all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the Buddhist / Hindu / Socratic / post-modernist technique of deconstruction relies on an over-simplified concept of what concepts and categories are—that they must have a clearly delineated boundary, or else must not exist at all. This goes along with an over-simplified logocentric conception of Truth, which claims that any claim stated in human language must be either True (necessarily, provably, 100% of the time) or False (necessarily, etc.), disregarding both context and the slipperiness of words. From there, they either choose dualism (this system really works and we must find out what is True: Plato, Christians, Hegel, Marx) or monism (our ontology is obviously broken and there is no true or false, no right or wrong, no you or me: Buddhism, Hinduism, Parmenides, Nazis, Foucault, Derrida, and other post-modernists). Nearly all of Western and Eastern philosophy is built on this misunderstanding of reality.
For another example, phenomenologists (including Heidegger), Nazis, and SJWs use the concept of “lived experience” to deny that quantified empirical observations have any epistemological value. This is how they undermine the authority of science, and elevate violence and censorship over reasoned debate as a way of resolving disagreements.
A third example is the claim, made by Parmenides, Plato, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and too many others to name, that the senses are misleading. This argument begins with the observation that every now and then, maybe one time in a million—say, when seeing a mirage in the desert, or a stick underwater (the most-frequent examples)--the senses mislead you. Then it concludes the senses are always wrong, and assumes that reason is always 100% reliable despite the obvious fact that no 2 philosophers have ever agreed with each other using abstract reason as a guide. It’s a monumentally stupid claim, but once one has accepted it, one can’t get rid of it, because all of the evidence that one should do so is now ruled out.
Derrida’s statement “there is no outside text” is another argument that observational evidence should be ignored, and that rather than objective quantified evidence, epistemology should be based on dialectic. In practice this means that a claim is considered proven once enough people talk about it. This is the epistemology of German idealism and post-modernism. This is why post-modernists continually talk about claims having been “proven” when a literature search can’t turn up a single argument supporting their claims; they are simply accepted as “the text” because they’ve been repeated enough. (Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the clearest example: its origin is universally acknowledged to be Barthes’ paper of that title; yet that paper makes no arguments in favor of its thesis, but rather asserts that everyone already knows it.) Needless to say, once someone has accepted this belief, their belief system is invulnerable to any good argument, which would necessarily involve facts and observations.
The “looking up” is usually a looking away from the world and ignoring those complicating factors which make simple solutions unworkable. Your “flibble” is probably not the addition of some new understanding, but the cutting away and denial of some of the complexities of life to create a self-consistent view of the world.
Genuine enlightenment, the kind provided by the Enlightenment, or by understanding calculus, or nominalism, isn’t non-understandable. It doesn’t require any sudden leap, because it can be explained piece by piece.
There are some insights which must be experienced, such as that of learning to whistle, or ride a bicycle, or feeling your voice resonate in your sinuses for the first time when trying to learn to sing. These are all slightly mysterious; even after learning, you can’t communicate them verbally. But none of them have the grand, sweeping scale of changes in epistemology, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about, and which, I think, must necessarily always be explainable, on the grounds that the epistemology we’ve already got isn’t completely useless.
Your perception of needing to make a quantum leap in epistemology sounds like Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, and is symptomatic not of a gain of knowledge, but a rejection of knowledge. This rejection seems like foolishness beforehand (because it is), but like wisdom after making it (because now everything “makes sense”).
Escaping from such a trap, after having fallen into it, is even harder than making the leap of faith that constructed the trap. I was raised in an evangelical family, who went to an evangelical church, had evangelical friends, read evangelical books, and went on evangelical vacations. I’ve known thousands of evangelicals throughout my life, and not one of them other than I rejected their faith.
Genuine enlightenment doesn’t feel like suddenly understanding everything. It feels like suddenly realizing how much you don’t understand.
I theorize that you’re experiencing at least two different common, related, yet almost opposed mental re-organizations.
One, which I approve of, accounts for many of the effects you describe under “Bemused exasperation here...”. It sounds similar to what I’ve gotten from writing fiction.
Writing fiction is, mostly, thinking, with focus, persistence, and patience, about other people, often looking into yourself to try to find some point of connection that will enable you to understand them. This isn’t quantifiable, at least not to me; but I would still call it analytic. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it, nor anything especially difficult other than (A) caring about other individuals—not other people, in the abstract, but about particular, non-abstract individuals—and (B) acquiring the motivation and energy to think long and hard about them. Writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t find it as mentally draining per minute as chess, though perhaps that’s because I’m not very interested in chess. But one does it for weeks on end, not just hours.
(What I’ve just described applies only to the naturalist school of fiction, which says that fiction studies about particular, realistic individuals in particular situations in order to query our own worldview. The opposed, idealistic school of fiction says that fiction presents archetypes as instructional examples in order to promulgate your own worldview.)
The other thing, your “flibble”, sounds to me like the common effect, seen in nearly all religions and philosophies, of a drastic simplification of epistemology, when one blinds oneself to certain kinds of thoughts and collapses one’s ontology into a simpler world model, in order to produce a closed, self-consistent, over-simplified view of the world. Platonists, Christians, Hegelians, Marxists, Nazis, post-modernists, and SJWs each have a drastically-simplified view of what is in the world and how it operates, which always includes “facts” and techniques which discount all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the Buddhist / Hindu / Socratic / post-modernist technique of deconstruction relies on an over-simplified concept of what concepts and categories are—that they must have a clearly delineated boundary, or else must not exist at all. This goes along with an over-simplified logocentric conception of Truth, which claims that any claim stated in human language must be either True (necessarily, provably, 100% of the time) or False (necessarily, etc.), disregarding both context and the slipperiness of words. From there, they either choose dualism (this system really works and we must find out what is True: Plato, Christians, Hegel, Marx) or monism (our ontology is obviously broken and there is no true or false, no right or wrong, no you or me: Buddhism, Hinduism, Parmenides, Nazis, Foucault, Derrida, and other post-modernists). Nearly all of Western and Eastern philosophy is built on this misunderstanding of reality.
For another example, phenomenologists (including Heidegger), Nazis, and SJWs use the concept of “lived experience” to deny that quantified empirical observations have any epistemological value. This is how they undermine the authority of science, and elevate violence and censorship over reasoned debate as a way of resolving disagreements.
A third example is the claim, made by Parmenides, Plato, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and too many others to name, that the senses are misleading. This argument begins with the observation that every now and then, maybe one time in a million—say, when seeing a mirage in the desert, or a stick underwater (the most-frequent examples)--the senses mislead you. Then it concludes the senses are always wrong, and assumes that reason is always 100% reliable despite the obvious fact that no 2 philosophers have ever agreed with each other using abstract reason as a guide. It’s a monumentally stupid claim, but once one has accepted it, one can’t get rid of it, because all of the evidence that one should do so is now ruled out.
Derrida’s statement “there is no outside text” is another argument that observational evidence should be ignored, and that rather than objective quantified evidence, epistemology should be based on dialectic. In practice this means that a claim is considered proven once enough people talk about it. This is the epistemology of German idealism and post-modernism. This is why post-modernists continually talk about claims having been “proven” when a literature search can’t turn up a single argument supporting their claims; they are simply accepted as “the text” because they’ve been repeated enough. (Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the clearest example: its origin is universally acknowledged to be Barthes’ paper of that title; yet that paper makes no arguments in favor of its thesis, but rather asserts that everyone already knows it.) Needless to say, once someone has accepted this belief, their belief system is invulnerable to any good argument, which would necessarily involve facts and observations.
The “looking up” is usually a looking away from the world and ignoring those complicating factors which make simple solutions unworkable. Your “flibble” is probably not the addition of some new understanding, but the cutting away and denial of some of the complexities of life to create a self-consistent view of the world.
Genuine enlightenment, the kind provided by the Enlightenment, or by understanding calculus, or nominalism, isn’t non-understandable. It doesn’t require any sudden leap, because it can be explained piece by piece.
There are some insights which must be experienced, such as that of learning to whistle, or ride a bicycle, or feeling your voice resonate in your sinuses for the first time when trying to learn to sing. These are all slightly mysterious; even after learning, you can’t communicate them verbally. But none of them have the grand, sweeping scale of changes in epistemology, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about, and which, I think, must necessarily always be explainable, on the grounds that the epistemology we’ve already got isn’t completely useless.
Your perception of needing to make a quantum leap in epistemology sounds like Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, and is symptomatic not of a gain of knowledge, but a rejection of knowledge. This rejection seems like foolishness beforehand (because it is), but like wisdom after making it (because now everything “makes sense”).
Escaping from such a trap, after having fallen into it, is even harder than making the leap of faith that constructed the trap. I was raised in an evangelical family, who went to an evangelical church, had evangelical friends, read evangelical books, and went on evangelical vacations. I’ve known thousands of evangelicals throughout my life, and not one of them other than I rejected their faith.
Genuine enlightenment doesn’t feel like suddenly understanding everything. It feels like suddenly realizing how much you don’t understand.