Philosophy's Trippiest Idea

Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Large Enclosure Near Dresden” 1832

Philosophy is practical. It’s important. It’s not just “hey, what’s the nature of fundamental reality? How do I know other minds exist? What if my purple is your yellow?”. Of course philosophy is more than those kinds of questions… buuuut it’s not less than those kinds of speculative questions either. Those trippy, stoner-bro sounding questions are actually important and play a vital role in philosophizing. In seeking to answer them, we can actually learn a lot about reality, the limitations of our knowledge, and how we should live in this weird reality we find ourselves in.

So don’t cut philosophy from your university curricula!

I have to say that because I love the armchair, abstruse metaphysical stuff and there are some philosophers out there in the academy frantically trying to show how practical philosophy is so they don’t lose their jobs. I get it. I'm with you. We need more philosophy, not less. I’ll let you folks inspire with practicality and I’ll do my part to lure in the abstract thinkers who like the more speculative stuff.

So what’s the trippiest idea in all of philosophy? That’s both tough and not tough to answer. My gut response is the idea that

< reality is more than just objective reality >

Why is that so trippy? Well, it’s really weird if you stop to think about it. There’s a distinction between subjective reality and objective reality such that ‘reality’ simpliciter includes both. So, if we had all of the objective facts of the world, we’d be missing a ton of facts—subjective facts. If you could take thee objective point of view—whatever that may be and if that’s even a coherent idea—then you’d still be missing at least billions of other points of view, subjective perspectives. That’s weird!

Is that really the trippiest though? Well, I don’t have a list of necessary and sufficient conditions to prove it—and I don’t want to try and come up with an ad hoc set either. Maybe I’ll just punt to particularism. I don’t need a method to determine the trippiest idea, I just know it when I see and and I saw it in Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere and in C.S. Lewis’s essay “Mediation in a Tool Shed”.

Maybe that’s too big a cop out, though. I prefer particularism over methodism but I do have an inner methodist in my mind that thinks particularism is too slick. Maybe I’ll just say that I think this is the trippiest idea because it’s the idea that continually gives me pause and really freaks me out.

The idea hit me hardest while reading Nagel and C.S. Lewis but you can find it all throughout philosophy in different forms, throughout different thought experiments, and emphasized to various degrees. The British Idealists emphasized the difference between appearance and reality. Frank Jackson emphasized the distinction between physical facts and phenomenal facts in his famous Mary’s Room thought experiment. Wilfrid Sellars gave us the scientific image vs. the manifest image. Husserl gave us the Lebenswelt or ‘life-world’ or world of life, which is the pre-reflexive world of our experience prior to any philosophical or scientific interpretation. This disctinction is at the heart of global skeptica threats, solipsism, the problem of other minds, and more. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave drew on a related distinction between the most real world of the forms and the shadowy world of our experience—It’s all over the place, don’t make me try and give a full catalog.

The idea of a distinction between the objective and subjective world is ubiquitous, it’s weighty, and it’s trippy—perhaps the trippiest.

Check out my latest ParkNotes video for more on Thomas Nagel’s take on the distinction, as well as C.S. Lewis’s. I also briefly cover inverted qualia and how it can be used as an arg. against reductive theories of mind and I touch on Linda Zagzebski’s theory of omnisubjectivity as a divine attribute. So lot’s of trippy stuff.

Please do actually click on the video below and watch at least a couple minutes of it. Stupid YouTube is not feeding it out and it’s getting completely buried. Someday I’d love for my audience here on Substack to be big enough that I could just post a video here and direct enough of you to it that I wouldn’t have to worry about clickable thumbnails and titles and trying to satisfy YouTube’s insanely fickle and inscrutable algorithm.

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