Beginner’s mind

Whether the object of your quest is the source of inspiration, the origin of language, the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, the origin of wholehearted inquiry is here in the time you are now living.

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.

— Wittgenstein (1969, #471)

Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is. One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were “as easy as lying.” Another proposes that we should begin by observing “the first impressions of sense,” forgetting that our very percepts are the results of cognitive elaboration. But in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can “set out,” namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do “set out” — a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have made all knowledge impossible to yourself?

— Peirce (EP2:335-6, CP 5.416)

You can’t divest yourself of the immense mass of cognition (knowledge, beliefs, ….. ) implicit in your present state of mind. But from that mass you can try to extract, or rather abstract, the simplest and most elementary features that must be implicit in any possible state of mind or of cognition, regardless of any other features it may have. This effort is what Peirce calls phaneroscopy, because it necessarily involves observing the phaneron, ‘the total content of any one consciousness (for any one is substantially any other), the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value’ (EP2:362).