I remarked to my friend the other day that travel no longer fascinates me. At the same time, in deference to her insightful observation about my psychology that I might be using my reason as a defense mechanism, I told the friend that “Yes, I do admit that in this way of looking at traveling, I might be trying to assuage my dismomfiture of some sort with traveling, sour grapes kind of thing, though my angst with traveling is hardly there at all these days but one which was pronounced till late into my adult life.”
But come to think of it, when you travel, what do you encounter on your travels?
A seeming variety. One could say, “Look, this is a Gulmohar tree and it is not present in our home town.” But, the variety is NOT exhausted there. In fact, every leaf on that Gulmohar tree is different from the one next to it…and once you start digging into one leaf on that tree, and keep digging, where do you end up? In nothingness, shunyata, emptiness (which Advaita calls Consciousness, the nameless and formless), so matter disappears and one realizes its illusory nature (a fact that the “Hard Problem of Matter” [search that phrase on this blog] tries to grapple with).
Also look up my poem “The Travelling Bug I Have Not” on this blog, a poem that I wrote a few years back.
The “Blooming, Buzzing Confusion” (from Google AI)
The phrase “blooming, buzzing confusion” is famously coined by psychologist William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the initial, undifferentiated sensory experience of an infant. However, in philosophy and the history of animal cognition, the concept is frequently mapped onto Immanuel Kant’s theories regarding how the human mind synthesizes experience versus how non-human animals or non-discursive beings process the world.
Kant, Synthesis, and the “Manifold”
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that raw sensory inputs (the “manifold of intuition”) are chaotic and fragmented on their own.
* Human Cognition: For humans, the mind applies a synthesis—organizing, connecting, and structuring these representations through categories and concepts of the understanding. Without this active conceptual framework, human experience would dissolve into a disorganized, chaotic blur—akin to a “blooming, buzzing confusion”.
* Non-Human Animals: Scholars like Hein van den Berg and others have analyzed how Kant and his 18th-century contemporaries (such as Hermann Samuel Reimarus and Buffon) viewed animal minds. Because Kant denied that non-human animals possess conceptual thought or the ability to consciously synthesize the manifold into objective, rule-governed judgments, some interpretations argue that animal mental life lacks this unifying structure—leaving them in a state analogous to a confused, undifferentiated stream of sensations.
Key Distinctions
* William James’s Original Meaning: Applied to human infants, suggesting all sensations fuse together until the growing mind learns to isolate and discriminate between them.
* The Kantian Application: Applied to the necessity of the understanding and conceptualization; for Kant, true objective awareness requires unifying the sensory manifold, preventing experience from collapsing into mere confused or obscure representations.
