"The Emotion of Ontologic Wonder"

Elliot -

It sounds like you had quite the amazing trip. I think train riding - like bicycle riding and unlike car riding - is conducive to these kinds of experiences. When your not stuck in a nausea inducing aluminum box eating fast food, life can really catch you by surprise. It must have been pretty amazing to ride through the rockies. I'll put taking a train ride across the country on my list of things to do right after bicycling across the country.

"The Emotion of Ontologic Wonder" is a phrase that comes from William James, the father of the Pragmatist school of philosophy. I could try to give you a quick summary of Pragmatism but I'm only on page 18 of his book. The first chapter is on the Sentiment of Rationality, which means the absence of irrationality or that pleasant feeling we get when we convince ourselves that we actually know something. The question then is how do we get to that sentiment of rationality.

In order to pass the rationality test, he argues, we need two requirements: theoretical and practical. The theoretical being the ability to place order to things (think empiricism), and the practical being the ability to know the looseness and disorder of things (think fallibility). His rationality test may seem contradictory, but that is his point. From what I gather, James is making a rational argument against rationality. Call it irony or call it chutzpah, they both should work. To him any workable philosophy must appeal as a compromise of both the theoretic and practical requirements - it must allow for scientific reason combined with an understanding of the severe limits of knowing.

Cutting to the chase....

James thinks that any argument that ends in absolute certainty will soon reach for a metaphysical truth. No law of gravity can explain why there is gravity, after all. The question of "Why?" will always follow a scientific conclusion. According to James, science brings us to this point of order only for us to then reach for a metaphysical non-entity to try and explain the unknowable phenomenon. This is where "The emotion of ontologic wonder" comes into play - this is that feeling we get when we are unsatisfied by empiricism and find either comfort or fear in the disorder and chaos.

Okay, I'll stop here. I'm finding this to be a very interesting read and one that may relate to your train riding experience. When you finally got to the point where you had nothing else left to write, and when you stopped and talked to the amish men, and when you took in the landscape of the rockies, my guess is that you probably had little interest in empiricism and logic. But I bet you had a serious sense of ontologic wonder.

I'll keep you updated as I continue reading. The next chapter is about pragmatism in decision making and I'm pretty psyched.

Zach