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THE REALLY HARD PROBLEM Frederick Dolan |
Half a century after existentialism, there is today a renewed willingness to reflect on the phenomenon of the qualia of consciousness, the «hard problem», as David Chalmers calls it. The inquiry is now driven by the philosophy of mind and all sorts of cognitive-related sciences, all of them in search of an explanation of consciousness. However, what we need is not an explanation but an appreciation of the limits of any explanation and of the paradoxical character of consciousness, that is, not intelligibility but meaning. Such was also the quest of the Gnostics -- provided we avoid their strictly religious terminology --, something which can be achieved by freeing oneself from any explanatory framework, by being interested in all representations while privileging none. Our representations of the world are simultaneously revealing and concealing -- to explain being as a fact or as an event leads to conflicting descriptions of the same reality --; gnosis (and Heidegger’s philosophy was in a way a modern form of gnosis) may be what allows a closer approach to that interplay of intelligibility and significance. |
36 Rhetoric December 2005