GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

>> 
>> >> OK:
>> >> epistemological question - what is the world like?
>> >
>> > Look around as carefully as you know how, suspending judgement for
>> a
>> > while...
>> >
>> >> ontological question - which (and whose) world is this?
>> >
>> > Why *this* one, uh, ours.
>>
>> There's the jump into postmodernism. My world isn't yours, or perhaps
>> is,
>> but might not be.
>
> And *there* is the jump into metaphysics, which a week ago y'all were
> trying to transend...

Not at all. There is a jump into a realisation that that rational and
pragmatic world handed down to us by Plato and Science and the Enlightenment
is perhaps more of an abstraction or hoax, and a convenient and self-serving
one at that, than all of metaphysics and what-all crackpot theories put
together. Sure, it's a lump of luke-warm rock wobbling around a big hot
vaguely-spherical gas blob thingy, and there are lakes and birds and cars
and stuff on it, but it's not within the human ken (or barbie for that
matter) to comprehend and intuitively or intellectually synthesise the
universal totality of everything all at once. One can never be sure that one
is spot on, and there simply isn't any room for error when you start to
design rules and systems and syntaxes and load-bearing walls to account for
and regulate this totality. The best we can ever do is approximate (cf. pi).

There are still peoples for whom there is a Soul in ev'ry Stone, so to
speak, and in every creature and tree, for whom the heavens contain, well, a
Heaven or Heavens, and you, or I, or Venturi, cannot speak for them and
their relationship with this our world which is *their* world, too, and
*not* ours at the same time that it *is* ours in that pragmatic Realpolitik
sense of which you speak. In the best of all possible worlds there would be
all possible worlds ...

best


----------
>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Tue, Jul 4, 2000, 9:06 AM
>