"When we come to images or memories or thoughts, speculation, while always closely related to practice, is more explicit, and it is in fact not immediately obvious that such processes can be described in any sense as practical"
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Alexander is trying to rescue the mind from being treated as just another kind of tool. When our attention shifts from overt doing to images, memories, and thoughts, he argues, we enter a domain where the link to action is still there but no longer wears its work boots. Speculation, in his framing, is practice’s close relative that suddenly speaks in full sentences. It makes its assumptions visible, which is exactly why it feels less “practical” to anyone committed to a blunt, results-first model of human activity.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the era’s growing impatience with interior life. Early 20th-century philosophy was increasingly pressured by psychology and by a cultural appetite for utility: measure it, apply it, ship it. Alexander, a metaphysician who insists that mind is part of nature’s continuum, won’t let thought be dismissed as airy self-indulgence. He concedes the family resemblance between thinking and doing, but he refuses the easy reduction: not everything valuable about cognition announces itself as a means to an immediate end.
The line works because it stages a tension rather than solving it. “Not immediately obvious” is doing heavy lifting: it grants the skeptic’s point while also hinting that the obvious can be the enemy of the true. Alexander is inviting a more patient account of “practice,” one that can include the slow, non-instrumental labor of remembering and imagining - activities that don’t look like action until you notice how thoroughly they script what action becomes.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the era’s growing impatience with interior life. Early 20th-century philosophy was increasingly pressured by psychology and by a cultural appetite for utility: measure it, apply it, ship it. Alexander, a metaphysician who insists that mind is part of nature’s continuum, won’t let thought be dismissed as airy self-indulgence. He concedes the family resemblance between thinking and doing, but he refuses the easy reduction: not everything valuable about cognition announces itself as a means to an immediate end.
The line works because it stages a tension rather than solving it. “Not immediately obvious” is doing heavy lifting: it grants the skeptic’s point while also hinting that the obvious can be the enemy of the true. Alexander is inviting a more patient account of “practice,” one that can include the slow, non-instrumental labor of remembering and imagining - activities that don’t look like action until you notice how thoroughly they script what action becomes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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