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An unprovable hypothesis: the pre-modern past was more emotional; a person of the middle ages felt a wider, deeper, far wider range of emotions than someone alive today, scrolling down through Instagram.
An inescapably romantic hypothesis: but one still worth reckoning with. It is hard to read literature at least, or go to a museum, or listen to pre-modern music, and not feel that something has leaked out of the purview of consciousness; of being.
Philosophy isn’t really — its core activity at least — isn’t the production of analytic truths, philosophy should generate concepts, tools, tropes, that cleanse the doors of perception.
I’m not even sure why I thought of the deprivation tank: why that trope proposed itself to me — but that’s what our phones, our vehicles, our laptops, our TVs, seem to me to be: tanks where the brain dunks itself, puts out the fires of its humanity; becomes strictly computational and calculating.
And deprivation tanks, as I understand their purpose, are meant to be therapeutic, meditative, and I’m sure real deprivation tanks really are — but the human soul, realistically, is meant to extend out into the world; our senses, evolutionarily speaking, need to be awake for us to survive. If you can’t feel hot or cold, can’t feel pain, can’t smell a bad odor, can’t see or hear — well, of course you, the organism, are less likely to survive.
In the relatively safe, certainly tame modern world, the world of the city I live in, however, you don’t really…
