• New2K2
    71
    I have been slowly reading Steppenwolf while listening to a podcast called Philosophize this and it has opened my eyes to what I believe to be philosophical undertones in the book. I know that a podcast does not give you all the info you need on any pilosophy so I'm not claiming full understanding, just ideas that reverberate, for example Cioran's idea of The knowledge of the possibility of Suicide being a too for motivation rather than suicide itself.

    Steppenwolf has a protagonist who believes he is torn in two; one part of him human the other a wolf on the steppes. Lost in a foreign habitat these two parts of his slf sneer and trip each other up making it impossible for him to integrate into society fully or to detatch from it completely. He receives a pamphlet that claims he is deceiving himself because he is not one or two but actually many. He is not two beings in a house but rather a village, some of the occupants hidden in darkness and only coming out seemingly at random.
    I can't remember what Philosophy this echoed but I think it's Nietsche on Being and Becoming; anyways to my thoughts.

    "Experiences create psyches (pseudoeople?) a human mind, these experiences could be a quote, an event, a realisation etc. simply something that changes your thought process and stays with you. The child raised by your parent for example is not dead, but your experiences growing up have also altered your perception of the world. Not all experiences become psyches, but these psyches anchor us to reality and create complexity, these anchors serve as parameters for understanding new experiences. Imagine the mind as a computer AI, a rational engine, fed the data that is experiences, when facing something unknown, the mind starts looking for similarities, using these anchors as a way to map out this new terrains.

    A yellow substance resonates with the anchor that recognises this colour and everything encountered that is yellow, it's liquid triggers anther anchor, Imagine a sort of vennn diagram maybe, what's yellow and liquid, with these two anchors triggered the mind has a landscpae where thsi substance potentially falls into. We map the world using similarities in these new experiences to create even more anchors in the mindscape. Now for the leap, what if we assume that the sole goal of a life is to pass along these anchors; there's a lot of talk about how good humans are at recognizing patterns, what if we assume that the goal of a life is to pass on these anchors/patterns so that the new mind/rational engine can better process the world outside, rather than relearning all from scratch."

    Thanks for coming to my TedTalk!
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