God, Cosmos, democracy, and hammers...
January 24th 2007 16:43
Hi all,
this last post about physics will prepare us to start talking about ethics. On it i'll complete the knowledge we need to be able to understand things in next posts...
This time i'll be talking about our definitions of world, of "real". More important, with them i'll show you who we used to put as "the center of the world", it means, what was the thing that we took as example to decide how to live.
I'll expose 4 ideas, 4 ways of defining the world. They are quite simple (maybe this post is the simplest of all) so you don't need any extra knowledge to understand it. They are:
- The stoiciens "cosmos"
- The christians "God"
- The humanists "ideals", created with our humans science
- Nietzsche's "real" and "life"
The first idea is the stoiciens (greeks). For them, the world (which meant sometimes more than just the "real") was a cosmos, a perfect entity that had it's place defined, where harmony was present. They thought this by looking to the sky and seeing the "perfect stars" over their heads, floating in "ether", while we were in a huge globe of cristal below.
We men were a part this harmonious world, and to be in harmony everything we needed to do was to find our right place on the "real", the place where we belonged. As part os this perfect cosmos, when we died, we continued to be a part of this cosmos, and thus death is not a problem, is just a change. It resembles a lot to all these budist style philosophies. And somtimes you hear some people say things like "In this world, we're nothing but stardust...."
Well, this idea of a perfect cosmos was changed by christians, because they found that men were all the same, and thus that the "right place" defined by greeks was an "aristocratic" way of explaining the world. Since there was a perfect place for each one, it explained why someone was part of the aristocracy, and others were slaves. The christian way of seeing the world "humanized" the idea of cosmos, saying that this perfect entity was "God". And since we were made similar to "God", we were all the same. This anti-aristocratic way of seeing the world stated that when we all die, we would all be the same to "God", which would leed us to a heaven..
The problem is that this anti-aristocratic thought created a spirit in men that became its ruin. "Why priests or kings are more than i am, if we're all the same to God?"
With the evolution of sciences, the men of the renaiscance let the idea o "God" fade, since our so pretty sciences could not prove him. We saw the world now as a caos of infinite forces that had nothing of "divine". So they've "divinized" humanity, and then the world became a "caos of forces" where only "humanity could control, with the power of sciences", and these sciences came up with a new center for our world. Our "divine" men created the things that took the place of "God", our ideals, like socialism, democracy, nationalism, etc. These "idols" (to use Nietzsche's definition) became the center of our world, guiding our actions.
To make an analogy with my mathematical ideas: human thought that the "real" was a base to which we could, using sciences, define completely. He didn't considered the fact that "real" was an "infinite dimensional Hilbert space" (a thing too deep for our minds to define completely). We thought that our "idols" would be able to explain the world, and thus to tell us how to behave.
But then came Nietzsche with his hammer to destroy all the things humanism created. All the "idols" defined by men were destroyed, since Nietzsche saw that no "idol" would avoid the fact that you are going to die, and that nothing of this would save you. The world is a "caos of forces" yes, but "humanity" and sciences are not to be putted at the center, nor our fragile "idols".
This "caos of forces" is exactly our infinite dimensional vetors projected in the base of "real", an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. I like to use this analogy because when you know the mathematical part, the philosophy behind becomes easy to understand. And with this analogy we can understand how people create models to our world, to be used in any context, from economy to meteorology.
One of the greatest contributions Nietzsche gave to philosophy was the capacity to deconstruct our inerent intention to look for values "over life". There is nothing over the "real", "life's" value cannot be measured.
And so it is, from "cosmos" to "God", from "God" to "human", from "human" to "real" (when i use the term "human" i mean our "human sciences", our "human idols") . This is the point where we are today. We live in an "caos of forces" where we have nothing to take as example, exept from "real".
So next post ill talk about how these ideas guide us to decide how to live our lives concerning the others...than i'll come back to this matter, to decide who is in the center of our world, a posteriori.
Cheers. Uula
this last post about physics will prepare us to start talking about ethics. On it i'll complete the knowledge we need to be able to understand things in next posts...
This time i'll be talking about our definitions of world, of "real". More important, with them i'll show you who we used to put as "the center of the world", it means, what was the thing that we took as example to decide how to live.
I'll expose 4 ideas, 4 ways of defining the world. They are quite simple (maybe this post is the simplest of all) so you don't need any extra knowledge to understand it. They are:
- The stoiciens "cosmos"
- The christians "God"
- The humanists "ideals", created with our humans science
- Nietzsche's "real" and "life"
The first idea is the stoiciens (greeks). For them, the world (which meant sometimes more than just the "real") was a cosmos, a perfect entity that had it's place defined, where harmony was present. They thought this by looking to the sky and seeing the "perfect stars" over their heads, floating in "ether", while we were in a huge globe of cristal below.
We men were a part this harmonious world, and to be in harmony everything we needed to do was to find our right place on the "real", the place where we belonged. As part os this perfect cosmos, when we died, we continued to be a part of this cosmos, and thus death is not a problem, is just a change. It resembles a lot to all these budist style philosophies. And somtimes you hear some people say things like "In this world, we're nothing but stardust...."
Well, this idea of a perfect cosmos was changed by christians, because they found that men were all the same, and thus that the "right place" defined by greeks was an "aristocratic" way of explaining the world. Since there was a perfect place for each one, it explained why someone was part of the aristocracy, and others were slaves. The christian way of seeing the world "humanized" the idea of cosmos, saying that this perfect entity was "God". And since we were made similar to "God", we were all the same. This anti-aristocratic way of seeing the world stated that when we all die, we would all be the same to "God", which would leed us to a heaven..
The problem is that this anti-aristocratic thought created a spirit in men that became its ruin. "Why priests or kings are more than i am, if we're all the same to God?"
With the evolution of sciences, the men of the renaiscance let the idea o "God" fade, since our so pretty sciences could not prove him. We saw the world now as a caos of infinite forces that had nothing of "divine". So they've "divinized" humanity, and then the world became a "caos of forces" where only "humanity could control, with the power of sciences", and these sciences came up with a new center for our world. Our "divine" men created the things that took the place of "God", our ideals, like socialism, democracy, nationalism, etc. These "idols" (to use Nietzsche's definition) became the center of our world, guiding our actions.
To make an analogy with my mathematical ideas: human thought that the "real" was a base to which we could, using sciences, define completely. He didn't considered the fact that "real" was an "infinite dimensional Hilbert space" (a thing too deep for our minds to define completely). We thought that our "idols" would be able to explain the world, and thus to tell us how to behave.
But then came Nietzsche with his hammer to destroy all the things humanism created. All the "idols" defined by men were destroyed, since Nietzsche saw that no "idol" would avoid the fact that you are going to die, and that nothing of this would save you. The world is a "caos of forces" yes, but "humanity" and sciences are not to be putted at the center, nor our fragile "idols".
This "caos of forces" is exactly our infinite dimensional vetors projected in the base of "real", an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. I like to use this analogy because when you know the mathematical part, the philosophy behind becomes easy to understand. And with this analogy we can understand how people create models to our world, to be used in any context, from economy to meteorology.
One of the greatest contributions Nietzsche gave to philosophy was the capacity to deconstruct our inerent intention to look for values "over life". There is nothing over the "real", "life's" value cannot be measured.
And so it is, from "cosmos" to "God", from "God" to "human", from "human" to "real" (when i use the term "human" i mean our "human sciences", our "human idols") . This is the point where we are today. We live in an "caos of forces" where we have nothing to take as example, exept from "real".
So next post ill talk about how these ideas guide us to decide how to live our lives concerning the others...than i'll come back to this matter, to decide who is in the center of our world, a posteriori.
Cheers. Uula
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Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
If you read something that you don't understand (and you wanna try to), use the comments to ask. It's me that will thank you, since i'm writing this to "experience" these ideas, and see if their too far away from people, or if they're able to understand something...
cheers. Uula