Playing Dice To Rise Up
An hour plus was spent reading Nietzsche’s account – the pre-Socratic philosophers struggle, one after another to “explain”, to express to their own satisfaction, the nature of Being. Is Being singular and indivisible? If so does that mean that all that we experience, the multiplicity and the change in every direction is illusion and unreal? Further more is thought a mirror image of being, singular, and pure, immobile in pristine reliability, certainty? After all reasoning deductively 2+2 is always 4. No matter all manner of change, the variability of what surrounds, deductive reason is fixed, changeless. Is that what we mean by Being?
Philosophers who worked with this problem, or better said who were worked-over by this problem adapted terms and a flexibility of thought as a consequence of this concern. This development of language and thought appears to be the payoff accrued, which we now inherit. Shall we not with our inheritance in hand move on? Let’s rise out of our ditch, with renewed vigor, with refreshed passion to take care of one another, and to take care of the earth!
I recognize that some of us would like to crank into reverse the clock, a return to an imagined simpler time. Even without evidence there must have been a time when men were men, and women followed orders, and ethnic (non-white) individuals were invisible, and those lived from the crumbs falling from the big table… Be done with this eruption of desperation, this abyss of loneliness! We are not alone. It is natural, congenial that we care for one another and for all species of living and non-living things.
Reading of this sort is heavy lifting, not particularly entertaining. I continue with perseverance toward the end of the text. I began reading about Thales. I have journeyed as far as Anaxagorus. He advanced the theory that movement was the result of mind, and that mind and matter were both in the origin of things. The origin by the way was a chaotic mixture. Mind plays dice with matter, moving this way and that, finding ever new combinations.
I am reminded of the first phrase of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word. In late antiquity that was a phrase pointing to mind.
I’ll read on.
