"But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us"
About this Quote
Watts slips the knife in with a polite phrase: "we try to pretend". The line isn’t a calm metaphysical claim so much as a diagnosis of a cultural habit - a strained performance we keep up because it makes modern life feel manageable. By framing realism as pretense, he recasts "common sense" as an act of social theater: we agree to treat the world as a sealed-off object so we can measure it, own it, predict it, and talk about it without admitting how much our seeing shapes what’s seen.
The key pressure point is "altogether independently". Watts isn’t denying rocks exist when you look away; he’s puncturing the fantasy of total separation, the clean split between observer and observed that underwrites a lot of Western thinking: scientific objectivity as emotional posture, the self as a little CEO in the skull, nature as inventory. His Zen-tinged move is to shift attention from nouns to relationships: experience isn’t you plus world; it’s a single event with two names.
Context matters: Watts is speaking into mid-century Anglo-American confidence in technique - the era of systems analysis, behaviorism, space-race certainty that reality yields to the right instruments. He’s also translating Eastern philosophies for audiences trained to treat consciousness as a private room. The subtext is ethical as much as intellectual: when you insist the world is "out there" and you are "in here", it becomes easier to exploit, harder to empathize, and almost impossible to feel at home. Watts offers a quieter scandal: what if the boundary is useful, but not true?
The key pressure point is "altogether independently". Watts isn’t denying rocks exist when you look away; he’s puncturing the fantasy of total separation, the clean split between observer and observed that underwrites a lot of Western thinking: scientific objectivity as emotional posture, the self as a little CEO in the skull, nature as inventory. His Zen-tinged move is to shift attention from nouns to relationships: experience isn’t you plus world; it’s a single event with two names.
Context matters: Watts is speaking into mid-century Anglo-American confidence in technique - the era of systems analysis, behaviorism, space-race certainty that reality yields to the right instruments. He’s also translating Eastern philosophies for audiences trained to treat consciousness as a private room. The subtext is ethical as much as intellectual: when you insist the world is "out there" and you are "in here", it becomes easier to exploit, harder to empathize, and almost impossible to feel at home. Watts offers a quieter scandal: what if the boundary is useful, but not true?
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Alan
Add to List
