Gaia's Teat (2023) Dessin par Edwin Loftus

In the world today, beyond wars and economies, trade and exchange rates, socialism and free-markets, democracy and dictatorship, nationalism and globalism, dreams and frustrations, lies a conflict over which the entire world, knowingly or not, is debating.
Immanuel Kant outlined the parameters of this debate over 200 years ago, defining the sides, as "noumena" and "phenomena". Whether you realize it or not, your life and the world around you is being torn in two over this question - Should the greater part of our interest and concern be involved with phenomena or noumena? With perceived reality, or with a never knowable reality at the foundation of those perceptions? Is reality what we perceive it to be or what we perceive that to imply?
Kant argued with great precision, in his 'Prolegomena to All Future Knowledge,' that all we "know" of experience is what our thoughts tell us. If there is "Reality" independent of those thoughts, it is a wholly theoretical one, about which we do not and cannot obtain direct information. The essence of this observation is "The Limitation of Self Awareness", a difficult, apriorism to grasp since it is paradoxically, apriori, self-refuting.
What we imagine that we can imagine about this apparent inability to know anything is that the ancients, if they existed, were aware of this dilemma as well as illustrated in tales like, "Echo and Narcissus."
The Gaia concept enters into this as well, (Earth as a composite living entity), in much the same way as Hobb's comments on value of universality or the movement in art called "Minimalism." This assemblage of marks on a surface is a phenomenon that may or may not exist independently of its perception, a form of galomophrian minimalism, a reduction to its essence resulting in chaos.
If you followed that, good for you. if not, don't be disappointed or suspicious that I've lost my ability to think systematically ... unless you prefer that.
There is a reducto ad absurdum in all things and all thoughts about all things the paradox of existence and this is art that addresses that. It is not for everyone, and yet it is of concern to everyone.
I was not being rhetorical in saying that the entire world IS debating this issue. You are doing this most of the time, (if such concepts have meaning). It is being done to you and with no regard to you because the main preoccupation of your every conscious moment is none other than responding to whether something seems real or not, significant or not, etcetera.
Ignore this if you wish. But it is on such issues that YOU are making decisions that will affect the life and death of other human beings, and yourself.
There is or may be, some degree to which it is important for you to figure this stuff out for yourself, as though everything depends on it, or not, as the case may be.
In short, are we not Gaia's teat?

Thèmes connexes

RealityMeaningTruthParadoxKant