Benjamin Cain
2 min readMay 6, 2022

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This is an intriguing and insightful mental map, as well as a heroic attempt to explain these various dimensions in terms of an underying unity.

I'd see the philosophy I'm working out in my writings as an attempt to bridge what you call the scientific and romantic worldviews.

Something about the "individualist" label seems off to me. I think the reference to capitalism is insightful, but I wonder whether that dimension of subjective meaninglessness wouldn't be better described as something like consumerism mimicing animalistic activity. Animals can form social bonds, but in a capitalist context we're driven not just towards egotism but towards mindless consumption.

Scientists focus on the objective business of explaining how nature works so that industrialists can use that knowledge in feats of technological progress. And on the subjective side, laypeople or ignoramuses immerse themselves in the fruit of that scientific labour because of the corporate promise that consuming resources makes us happy. That's largely a sales pitch to enrich the top capitalists, but it's also perhaps a noble lie or a necessary distraction to keep secular civilization afloat.

My question, then, is whether individualism is the driving force of that dimension, or whether degrees of individuality and social fragmentation are mainly effects of a relatively recent economic process.

One other possible underlying unity of at least the religious, individualist, and romantic worldviews is the childish experience out of which we might all grow to pursue these different paths. We can imagine the child's primordial experience of an enchanted, magical world in which the child is mainly consumed with processing its unprecedented mental states. The child also perceives those fresh experiences as being full of meaning. So we have a marrying of the religious, individualist/selfish, and romantic perspectives in each of our youths. We can hypothesize that we grow out of that unity as we socially specialize as adults.

Scientific objectivity would be an outlier, which is fitting because science depersonalizes/objectifies to enable the scientist to be on the same page as the natural facts, as it were, whereas children are preoccupied with playing and socializing. Science/objectivity is antithetical to a healthy childhood.

Mind you, children do have to learn the basics of how the world works, to avoid touching a hot stove, for example, in which case they posit causal relations and folk psychological relationships. So maybe the scientific worldview wouldn't be such an outlier, after all.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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