Rediscovering the World

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...it could well be that ancient wisdom-- whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic or Epicurean-- was intimately linked with a relationship to the world; but isn't the ancient vision of the world out of date? The quantitative universe of modern science is totally unrepresentable, and within it the individual feels isolated and lost. Today, nature is nothing more for us than man's "environment"; she has become a purely human problem, a problem of industrial hygiene. The idea of universal reason no longer makes much sense.

All this is quite true. But can the experience of modern man be reduced to the purely techno-scientific? Does not modern man, too, have his own experience of the world qua world? Finally, might not this experience be able to open up for him a path toward wisdom?

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The utilitarian perception we have of the world, in everyday life, in fact hides from us the world qua world. Aesthetic and philosophical perceptions of the world are only possible by means of a complete transformation of our relationship to the world: we have to perceive it for itself and no longer for ourselves.

--Pierre Hadot from Philosophy as a Way of Life