Philosophy as Autobiography

However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive to knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument…

In the philosopher there is nothing whatsoever that is impersonal….

“My judgment is my judgment”: no one else is easily entitled to it –that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say of himself.

Even apart from the value of such claims as “there is a categorical imperative in us,” one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it?

– Nietzsche

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Every model we make tells us how our mind works as much as it tells about the universe. These are just human symbolic games. The universe itself is bigger than any of our models.

According to Zen Buddhism, and most forms of Buddhism, and quantum mechanics, any description of the universe which leaves you out is inaccurate, because any description of the universe is a description of the instrument that you use to take your reading of the universe — if the only instrument you use is your own nervous system, you gotta include your own nervous system in your description of the universe.

So, ergo, any model we make does not describe the universe, it describes what our brains are capable of seeing at this time.

– Robert Anton Wilson