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In Uncategorized on 31 July 2008 with 16 comments

I posted a quote a few weeks ago about being preoccupied with thinking.

I thought this related to that passage very nicely.

Human beings have a tendency to ‘live in their heads’. This phrase covers several facts. First, men have a tendency to overtheorize. Some things are ruined by too much thinking on them, things which are essentially matters of experience. What is more, almost anything can be the source of immediate experience, and so almost anything is vulnerable to ruination by too much theorizing. The second fact is this, such theorizing usually presents itself phenomenologically as internal verbalization, and the internal verbalization often insinuates itself between ourselves and the thing experienced. This is how the thinking interrupts experience and how it leaves us with only our verbalizations. This leads to the third fact: when our theoretical internal verbalization is interposed between ourselves and external things, the object of our awareness becomes ourselves. It is we who are doing the theorizing, and to be aware of the theoretical verbalizing is to be aware of ourselves. This state of mind is undesirable, for it is a commonplace that our happiest moments come when we are not conscious of ourselves, and that most forms of consciousness of self are baneful. It is hard to say why this is so; perhaps the resources of a self are much more limited than the resources of the world, so only an object-directed consciousness can satisfy the human appetite for variety.

Michael E. Levin.

I find myself lost sometimes in my own thoughts that I forget what I’m experiencing. At times its necessary, I think, for survival. But at other times I feel as if I miss the important parts things, that I can be too caught up in my little internal dialogue.

This of course brings me back to theorizing about overly solipsistic ways of thinking, and whether or not people can ever really escape them.

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