Explanations

I’ve noticed in myself a compulsive need to explain everything. Before I take some action, I must know why. Even down to my body language, my mannerisms. If I can’t find a reason for why I should be myself, I must pretend to be someone else. When I look at something, if I can’t explain why it’s there, I don’t believe it exists. For example, I only started believing that dreams are real once I found an explanation for how dreams may be able to represent reality. I only started believing that there is such a thing as a type of object¹ once I learned about Platonist ideas. I wonder how much I’m missing out on just because I can’t find an explanation for it.

See also

• Don’t understand things
• Artificiality
• Hyperreflexivity

Lispector describes something like this in the beginning of The Passion According to G. H. Laing also discusses the phenomenon in The Divided Self, as does McWilliams in Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (under “schizoid personalities”).

1. For example, that two birds are really the same kind of thing in some objective sense, and not merely the result of categorization in the brain. (I think philosophers call the view that these things do not really exist “metaphysical nominalism”.) ↩