Let me explain.
Human beings have an amazing ability: to enter alternate realities.
When I read a book or watch a movie – Lord of the Rings, for example – in my mind I enter the world of the story. I feel sad when the hero is injured, and happy when he wins. I dislike the enemy, I am worried about dangers – as if I was inside the story. I smile in satisfaction or hold my breath in fear, as if this was happening to me and around me. Of course, I am not completely lost in that world – I don’t confuse the Hobbit on the screen with the person sitting next to me. But some part of me is inside another world.
Likewise in games: When I play chess, I enter the game as if it was reality. For the duration of the game, there is almost nothing outside the game. My heart and soul are in the battle, and the plastic pieces are me, my identity, my hopes. If I lose a piece, I feel pain as if it is part of me.
In short, we are very good at entering an alternate reality. We enter a social game and identify with its values, we enter a job and identify with its rules and goals, we enter the emotional world of a friend. Without this amazing capacity, we would have no literature, no cinema, no games, perhaps no society!
Something similar happens when I contemplate a philosophical text: I enter a philosophical world in my mind. I find myself inside the world of the ideas of Plato, or of Nietzsche, etc.
Yet, there is a big difference here. Entering a philosophical world is very different from entering a movie or a novel. Because the world of Lord of the Rings is still made of ordinary things: objects, people, events, just like ordinary reality. I can be with hobbits and magicians, just as I am with my friends at home. In contrast, a philosophical world is made of something very different – it is made of general ideas, it is made of meanings!
How can I be inside a world of philosophical meanings? Obviously, not as a human being with a physical body. Meaning is not something I can touch or see.
In fact, in the depth of philosophical contemplation I do not look AT the ideas in the text, I do not even think ABOUT them (as I do in a philosophy discussion at university). I don’t examine ideas from the outside, as if they were “things” in front of me. Rather, I am WITH these ideas. I let them fill me, I make them present inside me. And now, my thinking self disappears. I am no longer a thinker, no longer a self, or a subject. Now there is only a sea of meanings.
This is a huge inner change: In philosophical contemplation, the usual structure of subject-object disappears. There is no longer a subject versus object, a thinking self versus object of thought. I am no longer my ordinary psychological thinking self, but an open space of inner listening.
Thus, I find myself not just inside a new world, but in a new world-order! This is a world-order of fundamental meanings. Fundamental – because the text is philosophical, and philosophy is about fundamental reality. But I am not thinking ABOUT fundamental reality – I am with it, inside it, resonating with it. I am a wave in an ocean of philosophical meanings.