Random morning message
There’s a nice French expression to designate a sudden urge: une envie de pisser [wish to pee]. That’s what happened to me a moment ago, leading up to the present message. It’s a philosophical viewpoint that has been pursuing me ceaselessly for a long time. So, here it is.
Our outlook on existence is totally biased by the particular dimensions of our observations, which define a mere window. We remain incapable of adopting windows that might be more macroscopic or microscopic.
• The first weakness means that, in spite of our gigantic windows out into space-time, we remain like ants who imagine their anthill as the entire universe.
• The second weakness means that, in spite of our fondness for elementary particles and string theory, we humans are not very good at dealing with things that are far smaller than what we see through our eye-glasses.
Besides, it’s funny that we introduce a direction into these two scale differences. What right do we have to say that, in the macroscopic case, existence appears to get bigger and bigger, whereas it’s smaller and smaller in the microscopic case? Maybe we should simply say that the differences are no more than changes in our two kinds of viewpoints, without claiming that one change is “bigger” and the other “smaller”.
For the moment, it’s primarily the second weakness that has inspired my matinal philosophy message… but nothing really changes when we move to the first weakness. All our human conclusions about what is good or bad, and what is right or wrong, have been concocted from within our familiar everyday window, at the level of human organs and our devices such as eye-glasses. For example, people use their normal viewpoint to encounter all kinds of happenings, from peace and love up to war and terror. This suggests that our above-mentioned human conclusions would no longer have the same sense if we were to modify our viewpoint, by moving in an up/down direction. In other words, morality is not a universal phenomenon. It’s rather a purely relative viewpoint-based affair.
Personally, I am both awed and frightened by this conclusion. For the moment, therefore, I avoid the temptation of accepting it completely.
Ah, if only our existence were to be nothing more than watching a rugby match! Sadly, at no instant in my existence has my life ever moved an instant into such a nirvana. That has always been my major problem...
Our outlook on existence is totally biased by the particular dimensions of our observations, which define a mere window. We remain incapable of adopting windows that might be more macroscopic or microscopic.
• The first weakness means that, in spite of our gigantic windows out into space-time, we remain like ants who imagine their anthill as the entire universe.
• The second weakness means that, in spite of our fondness for elementary particles and string theory, we humans are not very good at dealing with things that are far smaller than what we see through our eye-glasses.
Besides, it’s funny that we introduce a direction into these two scale differences. What right do we have to say that, in the macroscopic case, existence appears to get bigger and bigger, whereas it’s smaller and smaller in the microscopic case? Maybe we should simply say that the differences are no more than changes in our two kinds of viewpoints, without claiming that one change is “bigger” and the other “smaller”.
For the moment, it’s primarily the second weakness that has inspired my matinal philosophy message… but nothing really changes when we move to the first weakness. All our human conclusions about what is good or bad, and what is right or wrong, have been concocted from within our familiar everyday window, at the level of human organs and our devices such as eye-glasses. For example, people use their normal viewpoint to encounter all kinds of happenings, from peace and love up to war and terror. This suggests that our above-mentioned human conclusions would no longer have the same sense if we were to modify our viewpoint, by moving in an up/down direction. In other words, morality is not a universal phenomenon. It’s rather a purely relative viewpoint-based affair.
Personally, I am both awed and frightened by this conclusion. For the moment, therefore, I avoid the temptation of accepting it completely.
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