Two memories of philosophical thoughts in childhood occurred to me today.
The first was an occasion when I was coming back from the zoo on a bus. I was tired of being on the bus and I wanted to be at home. But it suddenly occurred to me that I never would be at home and I never would be off the bus. I had a strong impression that every point on the graph of life is an independent existence, so the little Maolsheachlann that was on the bus would be a different person to the little Maolsheachlann that was at home. I couldn't have articulated this, but I thought it very clearly in a wordless way.
On another occasion, I was walking home from school and trying to decide whether to get a chocolate bar (specifically, a Fry's Chocolate Cream) in the shop I would pass on the way. I realized that one of two things would happen; I would get the chocolate bar, or I wouldn't get the chocolate bar. But I didn't know which it was going to be! Where exactly would the decision be made? It seemed like something outside of me, somehow.
Maybe that's not philosophy. But it's something close to it, I think.
That's very interesting. What age, approx?
ReplyDeleteI used to notice this kind of thing from my kids, but seem to have forgotten the specifics.
At first I just used to have ideas of how things were, how they worked - than later I tried to work things out. I have a picture of trying to decide whether there was a finite or infinite universe - and at first thinking I would could to an edge, like the inside of a sphere...
Then that I could push and tear through this edge and get onto the other side; and so had the idea that maybe the edge of the universe was like *cardboard*!
A shame that so few people continue to puzzle over such things as they get older - it would do us good.
Bruce
"A shame that so few people continue to puzzle over such things as they get older - it would do us good." Indeed!
DeleteI think I was about ten or eleven in the first instance, and about fourteen in the second.
I think I've heard cosmologists tout the "sphere" theory of the universe so you were obviously science-minded from the beginning!
I also used to drive myself crazy trying to imagine a completely new colour. Later I found Flann O'Brien had written about this in the Third Policeman.
Interesting post.
ReplyDeleteThat is probably where a lot of philosophy begins: just wondering about things.
I had some instances of that as well.
When I was in elementary school, I had the thought that I could not be sure that the world and everyone I knew was not an illusion. I forget when exactly I learned this was called solipsism. But it was a fairly disturbing idea, that I might be floating in a void somewhere, imagining everything. What bothered me was that even though there were plenty of reasons against it, such as that I could learn things that I did not already knew, I could not definitively disprove it.
The thought recurred a few times, usually after a period of years. The worry about solipsism was kind of like a superstitious doubt, where you don't really believe it, but you can't get rid of it. For finally getting rid of it, I have to thank Bertrand Russell. In his book The problems of philosophy, which is mostly about his approach to philosophy, he mentions that it is not possible to definitively disprove solipsism because the idea is internally consistent: it does not contradict itself. So realizing that and that you can still reject it even without definitive disproof helped me to lay it to rest.
Another one was that around 8 or so I had wondered why we can imagine things that are not real. I did not go that far with the idea, but it is something I have thought about more recently and I think it is worth wondering about. It is true that some things are combinations of things that exist, such as some of the beasts from Greek mythology like chimeras or sphinxes. Or sometimes people can delude themselves, for instance, they may describe political utopias, but it is only a vague idea, they have not got down to the details of how the utopias would work.
But it is still surprising how powerful our ability to envision and conceive of different possibilities really is, much more powerful than it would seem like it needs to be. I don't have a good answer for why that is.
Fascinating! I'm intrigued to hear from someone who actually suffered from solipsism (so to speak). Chesterton describes something similar in his autobiography.
DeleteAnd I've very often wondered the same thing as you about imagination. I've even wondered if dreams are responsible for this, although perhaps that is circular reasoning. I find it interesting that the novel took so long to involve; the early "novels" all involve some transparent (or not so transparent) pretext, such as Robinson Crusoe being a supposedly true story. And then, when the fantasy genre emerged, it took a long time for fully-formed fantasy worlds without any reference to our own world to be "permissible".
Thank you for reminding me that this type of phenomenon did occur, and indeed was normal in childhood.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! Bryan Magee mentions several of his own examples in the book "Confessions of a Philosopher".
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