Whispers From Another World
I’m reading Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell. Russell eventually came to the United States and complained about the American spirit:
Americans in general he found too conservative and too bland (commenting to Ottoline on “the American tendency to slow platitude”), and American society alarmed him by being too mechanical, too preoccupied with the material and the mundane aspects of life. “Nobody here broods or is absent-minded, or has time to hear whispers from another world,”” he complained. Monk (1996) (347)
I love this phrase: nobody has time to hear whispers from another world. Metaphysicians listen for these whispers. Philosophers, more generally, listen for the whispers.
The whispers, here, are the way that reality unveils itself to us if we just pay attention. There’s a certain kind of epistemological picture — a Kantian one — in which we struggle to grasp reality because it doesn’t come in the right shape for our minds.
There’s another kind of picture in which we struggle to grasp reality because we don’t have time to grasp it properly. Too many things to do. Too much money to make. Too much power to acquire.
The American mind indeed.