jeudi 5 novembre 2009

Arne Naess = Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Belloc said what needed to be said about deep ecology when improving a stanza of Coleridge's Lay of the Ancient Mariner:

He loveth best who loveth most
  all creatures, great and small.
The streptococcus is the test:
  I love him least of all.


From some essay collection of Belloc's works.

3 commentaires:

Hans-Georg a dit…

While we are at Belloc, James Kalb has just read Characters of the Reformation by that author.

HGL (composes music too) a dit…

And while at false philosophies, on of my facebook friends wrote this:

Time and space are mere conveniences our minds invented to keep everything from happening all at once in the same place.

I think not

In other words, I think Kant was wrong.

He gave the likeness "if you carried blue spectacles, you would see everything as blue, since you carry time-and-space-spectacles u see things as happening in time and space."

He forgot that blue is not a category like time, space or colour, but a setting like yesterday, on earth and red.

Hans Georg Lundahl a dit…

Clarifications brought about by correspondence with author of statement:

If we wear blue spectacles, we see everything as blue. That is not seeing everything as in different colours, it is the reverse. Wearing blue spectacles is reducing the colour parametre to the setting of strictly dark or light blue. It does not create a new parametre, it is only hiding one that is already there.

Time and space are parametres in their own right, and not just settings to one parametre other than themselves.

"what I think Kant was getting at was the difference between our intuitive understanding of the universe that arises from the tools we are born with and a more synthetic understanding that grows from experience."

Problem again: he denied the validity of experience as such, since any prolonged series of experiences is based on immediate (and therefore intuitive) experience.

"I don't think he was equating an electromagnetic frequency with the entirity of the space/time continuum."

He made a very wry and awkward equation, not between space continuum, time continuum and electromagnetic continuum, but between space continuum and one (extreme) setting of the electromagnetic continuum, between time continuum and one (extreme) setting of the electromagnetic continuum, AS FAR AS DISTORTION OF EXPERIENCE IS CONCERNED.

That is: he denied that our experiencing time and space and causation is any more proof that these parametres exist than the blue-spectacled man's perception is proof that the parametre of colour goes in only blue.