How accurate are the means of our understandings. The second question is: what do you mean by means? I'll tell ya! "An action or system by which a result is brought about, a method."
You got math, physics, biology it's a long list that includes Accounting and Creative Accounting. Some way off is the question: has physics cheated us? Max Planck in his 1944 speech in Florence Italy suggested that maybe it had. And why? Because by means of physics the finalizing metaphysical equation hadn't been determined, a conclusion hadn't been reached, something as yet unidentified, was missing. In short the Physics journey was unfinished, the means had a long way to go.
When Planck offered his thoughts on the gaps in physics, many a hard-nosed adult went spiritual and in the meanwhile far away in the bombed out ruins of Frankfurt am Main, Arthur Schopenhauer, a bad tempered Metaphysical Materialist well known for throwing a seamstress down stairs, grunted in his grave. He'd never been big on linear thinking, the compulsion to require an ending was not strong in Arthur. Nor was it a quarrel between circles and straight lines for him, it was closer to what John Walking Stewart called Moral Motion.
And what on this good earth did your hero mean by Moral Motion?
First of all, with a name that includes "John" and "Stewart" there is no way he can be my hero, if there was a "Chad'' in there I'd spurn him completely. Second of all: Moral Motion is Stewart's name for the idea that the universe is not made of "objects," but of sentient matter in a constant state of transition. And this is were the argument that Thomas de Quincy attempted to develop over how and where Stewart got his ideas, twinkles anew in our warm, festive hearts as we sup on Kentucky's own Ginger Ale and wish it was Bourbon.
For his part, Walking Stewart claimed that all his ideas had come to him through the physical act of crossing continents on foot. De Quincy knew for sure that Walking Stewart was an "untutored," ill-stabled genius who'd done a bit of walking, and might have stumbled upon and talked to Buddhists and European Materialist as well as a mix of atomist and animist thinkers, and he'd got got himself so muddled up he couldn't order his thinking into a well trained bundle. And it's true Thomas De Quincey's own contribution to the written world was spectacular, all that and he'd discovered a novel way to monetize addiction, he'd invented the genre of Addiction Literature.
The Romantic critique of the Industrial World had dreams of changing it all for the better. A holism that completed the whole man, didn't leave parts of him lost and panting. And your'e right, percentage-wise not many people heard of Schlegel's Lucinde or Hoffmann's Nutcracker, until Dumas and Tchaikovsky did stuff to the Nutcracker and Emmanuelle Arsan did stuff to Lucinde, and Lo as the line was straightened the genre of Romantic literature, and chorus line theater turned sticky from industrial portrayals of lingerie.
As a result, in the search for a happy ever after, never was Schlegel's contribution to the meanings in Irony mentioned. Schlegel supposed that the role of irony in art was to demonstrate there was no such thing as an ending. Try putting a slightly retarded Bastian on the back of a fluffy dog and flinging him around in a dark void called "The Nothing" and not mention Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer Heidegger or Sartre.
No wonder David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at his girlfriend, he couldn't get his mind around the possibility that if it ended happily or with hope, it was suspect. And yes as Baxter likes to point out, throwing coffee tables at anyone or anything is a first world problem.
For de Quincey's interest, as he wonders where Ann went, the thousands of generations of Aboriginal People of Western Australia were well tutored in their understandings of their world. It was place where the land carried the dreaming, were custodians of the verse walked the tracks of songlines, followed the lore, and maintained a frequency.
Of the two, de Quincey and Stewart. Stewart was closer to understanding a world without the written word. That world would have been a non-linear world. In that non-linear world where, as a transient collection of atoms I am nothing without everything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment