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There is a natural, inbuilt, spontaneous knowledge of the nature of the world: that the world consists of Life and Reality.
Life is this world: the world of change, of growth and decay and transformation.
Reality is another and less obvious world: eternal and unchanging and the source of knowledge.
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From this metaphysic of Life and Reality; arise all questions, all philosophy and all religions.
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Questions such as the relation between Life and Reality: why are things set-up this way?
What things are eternal and changeless, what are ephemeral?
Why don't Life and Reality coincide? Or, if they do, why is this not obvious - why is the relationship not spontaneously felt?
What can Life know of Reality, and how?
What is Life for?
And so on.
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It is the denial of this knowledge of Life and Reality - denial of the basis of all human thought - that has un-moored modernity and led to endemic insanity.
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For modern man, there is only Life and no Reality. Only change and no eternity. Reality is an illusion, there is no source of knowledge, there is no knowledge - there is only growth, decay and transformation.
To believe this is insane, because it makes no sense - worse, it violates sense.
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Denying the basis of all philosophy and religion, modern man is unable to reason.
(This applies especially to the most educated intellectuals).
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7 comments:
Well this sure beats talking about the weather.
Reality is what interests a crow the most.
That is what crows are for.
Messengers from the one realm, to the other.
There is a lot of one-way traffic, lately.
And the recipients are rarely home.
'From this metaphysic of Life and Reality; arise all questions, all philosophy and all religions.'
Sounds like Spengler's cosmic symbolism of Space and Time:
Space: woman, plant, formal theology, philosophy, science; priest, scholar, theorist, cathedral,
styles of art, music, architecture, cosmic destinity, truth
Time: man, animal, techniques, crafts, skills, noble, entrepreneur, gambler, castle or peasant home,
lived history, fact
Spengler unlike most systematic writers preferred Time to Space; Life to Reality.
'in history a shrewd blow means more than a shrewd conclusion',
'an ethical philosopher of the stripe of Kant is never a"judge of men"'
'And so the drama of a high Culture that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow. The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.'
curiously enough our post modern intellectual class may be obsessed with Life and disdain Reality
but they are determind to force Life into the mold of a rigorous intellectual system.
BTW FINISHED THOUGHT PRISON; MASTERFUL.
@joetexx - thanks for the comment and compliment - 'masterful' is the kind of adjective that could go to a man's head...
Don't worry, Bruce: 'masterful', as you observe, is only an adjective.
It is achieved without effort, and so is transparent to the master.
Mastery, probably, is all in the eye of the beholder.
I have recently been adopted by a rabbit, who strolled in from the woods and set up a sort of benign dictatorship.
Three cats and a score of raccoons all flee at his approach.
It is a rather small rabbit, and I am unable to detect any manifestation of threat, power, or control.
That's mastery :)
@Crow - being an avid reader of Watership Down, I feel I can guess the kind of rabbit who now rules you.
Bunny Power has been a given since Bugs, Peter, and the Easter Dude formed the First Triumverate.
Life, Reality. Then where is God? Is God a kind of life that creates reality? Well, obviously this cannot be answered rationally..
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