metonymy4u

It seems to me that many intellectual errors can be corrected by understanding the difference between rule governing and rule describing. Do we assume that a phenomenon is rule governed simply because it is (as far as we know) adequately rule described? This was a question that took center stage for 19th century Europe. They noticed several things. The first was the degree to which human history could be rule described. The second was the degree to which our thoughts, feelings and experiences were to large extent (and this contradicted the wisdom of the ancients) involuntary. The entire surprising thing was that volition, and hence meaning, could vanish in an instant. How could this be? How shocking to wake up one morning and discover that the meaning of the world was suddenly gone. Nihilism’s plenitude is now fairly routine, but how devastating was it to those who first discovered it and wondered to themselves, “how did we get here?” Letting the days go by sometimes without even a word or a pause I wonder do we advance more by the chance of law, or taint of freedom, in every event?