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The Human Condition, continued
Jan. 15th, 2007 12:05 pmI'm on page 28 out of 52. That's not bad, right? I think I'm so slow because I pause every so often to scribble something down on it.
Anyway, here're my current notes:
Immortality =/= eternity.
Immortality is deathlessness, endurance through time.
Eternity is transcendence beyond life and death, beyond time.
Beacuse everything in the Green world, both nature and divinities, were immortal but generally share the same nature/characteristics as humanity (consider that the Gods are like exaggerated forms of Man), mortality was the defining characteristic of mankind.
Immortality is when the individual life doesn't die.
Individual life rises out of biological life.
But biological life is circular, ever moving, in the large scale of things. Even as things die, other things are being born, and on and on and on and on.
Individual life, however, the life of a man is linear, it begins at some point and ends at another point. The mortal is immortal through the lasting things he produces that outlives his biological, mortal life. Thus, the mortal man who strives to be the best, giving up mortal things for immortal fame are the true humans, while those who content themselves with mortality and never strive beyond that are little more than animals. I obviously have a problem with the last bit, but then, we've moved beyond that sort of thinking. For most part.
Interestingly, it's not possible to contemplate eternityn (lead the life of pure contemplation) if one is concerned with leaving some trace of thought. The eternal is thus only experienced beyond the realm of men, as a single man's experience, and it's a kind of death in itself.
Therefore, the vita activa, which seeks to establish a kind of immortality, ruins any experience of eternity, since the eternal needs absolute quiet that the quest of immortality ruins with its busywork.
So: human inventions. Now, a lot of scientific inventions that we take for granted today weren't exactly created for any particularly practical reason in mind, and most inventions are created because, well, as humans, we like trivia. We like knowledge. Even if it serves us no particularly practical purpose, it's just fun to know things like how pink and blue mixed together creates purple. Science ties into philosophy, philo sophia, the love of wisdom, where we like to think things out and see what happens.
The point where science breaks off from philosophy, though, is where science concerns itself with doing, action, in order to make sure of the truth of their theory. Philosophic concerns are mostly observations and contemplation. Science is application through action. But you can't really be sure with philosophy.
Science isn't permanent in its theories either, though, and doesn't have to make sense to Mister Regular John Doe. Do you understand physics? I don't. But physics is a complicated, important science. Sciences, in general, create implications on religions which can be very offensive, because the regular stuff that doesn't make sense, that the religious right like to say doesn't have to make sense because God created it and we shouldn't question what God made, that regular stuff, the nonsensical, becomes a truth in the applications of science.
A world that is the product of a divine, ineffable god can't be understood by man, or men can't understand what he didn't make, so he can't understand nature. But science does try to understand things, and succeeds, and apparently that's fucked.
Because of the reversals in theories that happen all the time in science or philosophy, the poor fuckers in philosophy become jaded and this has a consequence in modern philosophy, in which we think our inner senses make us know what reality is really like, and that consequence is that philosophers turn away from the world, the people they share it with, and the truth that comes alongside living in the world and become misanthropic motherfuckers.
It's worse because in this innner world he doesn't even find a permanent eternal truth either, poor sod, because all he ends up with are the cnostant shiftings of sensual and mental perceptions.
Because science doesn't need philosophy anymore, philosophers either became epistomologists or mouthpieces of their times, expressing the problems faced by their times clearly.
Anyway, here're my current notes:
Immortality =/= eternity.
Immortality is deathlessness, endurance through time.
Eternity is transcendence beyond life and death, beyond time.
Beacuse everything in the Green world, both nature and divinities, were immortal but generally share the same nature/characteristics as humanity (consider that the Gods are like exaggerated forms of Man), mortality was the defining characteristic of mankind.
Immortality is when the individual life doesn't die.
Individual life rises out of biological life.
But biological life is circular, ever moving, in the large scale of things. Even as things die, other things are being born, and on and on and on and on.
Individual life, however, the life of a man is linear, it begins at some point and ends at another point. The mortal is immortal through the lasting things he produces that outlives his biological, mortal life. Thus, the mortal man who strives to be the best, giving up mortal things for immortal fame are the true humans, while those who content themselves with mortality and never strive beyond that are little more than animals. I obviously have a problem with the last bit, but then, we've moved beyond that sort of thinking. For most part.
Interestingly, it's not possible to contemplate eternityn (lead the life of pure contemplation) if one is concerned with leaving some trace of thought. The eternal is thus only experienced beyond the realm of men, as a single man's experience, and it's a kind of death in itself.
Therefore, the vita activa, which seeks to establish a kind of immortality, ruins any experience of eternity, since the eternal needs absolute quiet that the quest of immortality ruins with its busywork.
So: human inventions. Now, a lot of scientific inventions that we take for granted today weren't exactly created for any particularly practical reason in mind, and most inventions are created because, well, as humans, we like trivia. We like knowledge. Even if it serves us no particularly practical purpose, it's just fun to know things like how pink and blue mixed together creates purple. Science ties into philosophy, philo sophia, the love of wisdom, where we like to think things out and see what happens.
The point where science breaks off from philosophy, though, is where science concerns itself with doing, action, in order to make sure of the truth of their theory. Philosophic concerns are mostly observations and contemplation. Science is application through action. But you can't really be sure with philosophy.
Science isn't permanent in its theories either, though, and doesn't have to make sense to Mister Regular John Doe. Do you understand physics? I don't. But physics is a complicated, important science. Sciences, in general, create implications on religions which can be very offensive, because the regular stuff that doesn't make sense, that the religious right like to say doesn't have to make sense because God created it and we shouldn't question what God made, that regular stuff, the nonsensical, becomes a truth in the applications of science.
A world that is the product of a divine, ineffable god can't be understood by man, or men can't understand what he didn't make, so he can't understand nature. But science does try to understand things, and succeeds, and apparently that's fucked.
Because of the reversals in theories that happen all the time in science or philosophy, the poor fuckers in philosophy become jaded and this has a consequence in modern philosophy, in which we think our inner senses make us know what reality is really like, and that consequence is that philosophers turn away from the world, the people they share it with, and the truth that comes alongside living in the world and become misanthropic motherfuckers.
It's worse because in this innner world he doesn't even find a permanent eternal truth either, poor sod, because all he ends up with are the cnostant shiftings of sensual and mental perceptions.
Because science doesn't need philosophy anymore, philosophers either became epistomologists or mouthpieces of their times, expressing the problems faced by their times clearly.