Emmanuel Kant claimed the world we experience is chaotic and we become thinking organisms at the moment we attempt to make sense of it. What does he mean by chaos? The world is a complicated place. Our loves, our work, nature, and our social network to name a few form the problematic landscape in which we live. The moment we decide to make sense of this unsettled world entering through our senses we begin a voyage of reason, the highest endeavor for Kant. Reason seeks to organize the chaos Although It is quite satisfying to scrutinize and search for answers, the act of reasoning cannot always claim success. We may more often than not be left incomplete even as we are creating a path through the vast jungle. However there are those that employ reason yet have learned they cannot process everything into well groomed interpretations, so they choose to live as partners in orbit with chaos. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a good example of this. Sisyphus creates his own cosmos out of eternal drudgery.
How may we travel through this world? Perhaps like those so fettered by materialism they can't help but see the world as an unconcious heap or we can go forth with less ambition and more flexibility, annointing the world with other values. We may choose to clear a rifle barrel straight swath, or pursue a less invasive convoluted route. Either manner of travel presents us with choices but choices can be converted into whims and those inclinations may eliminate mountains. The consciously chosen discursive route will uncover nuances that an already attentive state of mind is poised to scrutinize. Our conclusions may not coincide with the world view, in fact we may see the truth indirectly, from the corner of our eye without fully understanding it yet instinctively know it makes sense. However there may be no place in the world for a dreamer. To be able to take one's time is a golden state of being. The straight line path will arrive on time. After all time is money. Perhaps, as Ennio Flaiano said, "The shortest distance between two points is an arabesque", poking fun at the straight liners at the same time eulogizing the delicacy of twirling tendrils.
The meandering path has a better chance to teach us why consideration is so important. We are prevented from seeing all that is ahead by a sinuous road. A human baby's growth is painfully slow compared to other species, rich in natural curiosity and heavy on observation liberated from time, a little like the game of baseball. That extended childhood, if one has been lucky enough to have had a childhood in this epoch of uniformity sold as diversity, one should have enhanced the mind's eye. Let's say you are in a valley and focus on a large, tree up there on the high ridge as your goal and, if you have the time to pass, you may assume an erratic path, from time to time consciously checking the location of your tree, yet frequently pausing to explore deadfalls which become godheads, a shaft of golden sun, or the call of an an unseen bird that gives depth to the woods. You will eventually arrive at your tree,, meanwhile having lost yourself in wanderous wonder you may arrive with a bonus bag full of wild mushrooms. Humans, not fettered with time constraints, have a better opportunity to explore experience because they are able to caress it. I know I may seem to be making a case against bulldozers and canalization. A world full of only wonderers and the vast cereal aisle in in the supermarket will disappear.
Monday to Friday. A period of time. The refrigerator, a cubic space with accumulated things in it. What to do? It's time to make refrigerator soup! That's it. At the end of the week open the fridge and examine the contents. Place it all before you then use your intuition to combine what is at your disposal? Cull what doesn't serve. Perhaps use the rejected items for a side dish or dessert but you have at your disposal a generous basket of ingredients in disarray. You stop to consider the culinary combinations and cooking sequences. Garlic and ice cream don't mix well. What does? Figure it out. Finally chef out an ecclectic soup. We might create a delicious meal out of what just before existed in space and time as future compost, accumulated during a week's time, a chaotic mix of things at rest, in a cold box made of sheet metal already innoculated with bacteria that cried out organization, and deserved consideration. Before and after, now and then, are all individual moments that we have separated by our intuition yet we go a step further and create a stability from the clutter. We have learned to separate space and time experience by organizing it. The space, if you will, is the ecclectic mix of things in the refrigerator and the time is what it takes to cobble a passable meal. That is a true philosophers stone.
The world of the senses is our swimming hole. We may dive into the cold clear watery silence scanning the bottom for signs of life similar to yet unlike us. We may roll over directing our gaze upward piercing the surface of the pool to see a rippled distorted sky. We emerge, and sit on a billion year old stone that has seen it all but seems mute. Water droplets are suspended on our skin like blisters. A garter snake slithers into the burr reeds. We wonder how it propels itself. Orioles lite on a scruffy patch of alders appearing and disappearing within its confines. The sound of the wind whispers through the pines like gossip. A dragonfly hovers on patrol seeing a world we cannot. Life embraces us as we begin to ponder and parse its mysteries.
This is the world of the senses, the world of experience. Mathematics however is an example of something not derived from experience according to many philosophers. It exists apart from the world of rivers, and trees, and hummingbirds. Math proves there is a world of concepts that survive in a non-material environment, like invisible fruit. As a philosopher once said, "God is a mathematician", the ephemeral well from which we draw water, to feed our thirst for explanations. Pythagorus said God is a geometer not an algebraist. He felt the magic coincidences angles and shapes pointed to God. Numbers seem to breathe the same air as spirit. Within the world of the senses we see a hummingbird and form a concept that is portable within us, but I bet Z=Z(2)+C could explain its wing rotation. Math is the numerical expression of the vast universe with all its mysteries. What we don't yet know, and may never know, exists within an organization of numerical phrasing that is the world of experience. The universe provokes a mathematician, and he gazes into his numerical microscope to see. Numbers have a unique capacity to explain intricacies of the universe. The poet on the other hand has an indirect way of seeing:
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -
With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -
A concept is how we align the endless parade of experience, how we separate the sense from the internal shimmering thought about it. If we go a step further we can make it myth.
One leaf is for fame,And one leaf is for wealth,
And one is for a faithful lover,
And one to bring you glorious health,
Are all in the four-leaved clover.
Hummingbirds are a symbol of good luck. Without this desire to fiddle with the world of sense the journey remains inanimate, dull, like the sound of an aluminum coin on a table. Does that mean we are each our own God? I think so as long as it doesn't go to our heads.
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