2 Comments

Didn’t know about Schilling, but I’m not aware of anyone who has better expressed this “paradox of human subjectivity” than Polanyi in some of his fundamental last writings (Personal Knowledge, I believe). He rescued the Primroses, for they were lost, and brought back their fragrance with the seminal idea of triadic integration. Not surprisingly Whitehead, always lacking a better word for everything and still managing to say everything right, called it “sympathy”. By the way, he dispatched with sensationalism and Aristotelian subjectivism (universal/qualia) in a few uncharacteristically clear paragraphs of Process and Reality.

Regarding “Representations”, historic time “is” an absolute representation in the present, as Nishida might have put it when he describes its unfolding from the made to the making. “Ogni attimo risulta alora eterno, perché in esso si condensa tutto il passato e tutto l’avenire”.

Expand full comment
author
Jan 9, 2022·edited Jan 10, 2022Author

A shout of thanks to the Information Philosopher [https://www.informationphilosopher.com/about/] Bob Doyle for drawing my attention to a significant difference between the original German version of Einstein’s quote about the comprehensibility of the world and its English translation, which I quoted. In the English translation we read:

> One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

In the original German Einstein writes:

> Man kann sagen: Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit.

More literally translated:

> One may say: the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.

The rhetorically strong juxtaposition of “Das Unbegreifliche an” (the incomprehensible thing about) and “ihre Begreiflichkeit” (its comprehensibility) has sadly been lost in translation. The popular internet version “The most incomprehensible thing about the world/universe is that it is comprehensible” (with nearly 33,000 hits) thus is more faithful to the original than the “official” translation by Jean Piccard in “Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein” (Crown Publishers, 1954, p. 292).

Expand full comment