understand this; I am not attempting to “understand”
anything or explain anything, I am just describing…….
I exist: How or why I exist, is, for now, unimportant.
I exist within the “world” what the world is, is unimportant, for now.
I exist as a biological entity: I am living.
This living means that I must, must follow certain rules or laws
of life. Just as natural systems have rules or laws, the laws of motion
or the theory of gravity, I must “obey” certain biological rules/laws.
My rules/laws can be called necessities. I must eat to survive.
I must breath, I must drink water, my body to survive, must obey biological
necessities. I must remove bodily waste. I have no choice.
To mentally/emotional survive, I must have love, security, freedom………
I must have contact with my fellow humans, not as a physical need, but
as a psychological need, a mental and emotional need. We are social creatures,
we must have social contact to survive…(which is why the worse form
of punishment is solitary confinement) For some the scars of loneliness can
never be healed.
We have, for lack of a better word, a “world”. Now what exactly is this
“world”? The “world” is our interactions with anything outside of us.
For example, I have the day off. I can do many things on my day off.
I can read or watch movies or jack off or pet the cat or stand in front
of the window and watch the “outside world”. However, I must, must follow
my biological necessities, I must eat, I must breath air, I must drink water,
but because I am only alone for a few hours, I can survive without any
physical contact with other human beings. So we have two type of actions,
one is biological necessity and one is based purely on choice.
Now at this moment, I am doing laundry… I kinda like clean clothes,
and my wife has told me to do the dishes. These are mixed type of
things, I don’t necessarily have to do them, but someone does.
As my back is really bothering me this morning, I probably won’t
do the dishes as that means I have to bend over and that hurts too much.
And my wife understands (or so I hope) and so she will do the dishes later.
I can also walk around my condo, just walk. Now at what point of this day
of being inside my condo, will it mean, am I, “IN THE WORLD”? We often
talk about “the world is a cruel and harsh place” and yet, in my condo,
am I “in” the world? The “world” seems to be something outside of me
and my condo. As I exist, right now, in this moment, am I “in” the world?
I am not in contact with the “world”, I am not on the phone, I am not
watching TV, I am not looking outside, am I “in” the world? I am on
the computer writing this, but until I press send, it simply sits on
my computer, waiting. How can I use the sentence, “the world is
a harsh and cruel place” just sitting here, quiet and peacefully listening
to music and writing this. The sentence “the world is a harsh and cruel place”
has no meaning in this moment, in this place. It is outside of me and
outside of my condo. Now if someone were to suddenly break in,
a home invasion of sorts, then suddenly, “the world is a harsh and cruel place”
seems to fit. But that requires someone to interact with me. I haven’t left,
they entered. If I were to shower and changed into something other then
the sweats I am wearing, and I were to enter the “world” then, as I am now
“in” the world, the statement that the world is a “harsh and cruel place”
might be accurate. The act of engagement or entering the world,
that becomes the answer to the question of, what is the world?
Something outside of me. If I leave my condo and walk down the main
street of my little town, then I have entered the “world”…….
As I walk down the street, I can engage with or participate in with
other lives, other beings, animal and human. In my little town,
everybody walks their dog down the main street, so I see all kinds
of dogs as I walk, and I either engage with or ignore them and they
might do the same. At this point, there is no biological “necessity”
driving me. I don’t have to engage with or be part of any person’s
activity. My physical needs, my necessities, have been met and so
I don’t need to “obey” anything right now. I walk because I want to
and my interactions with other people can be random because I cannot
know or anticipate who else is walking down main street. I might know them,
I might not. So another factor of “this world” is its randomness, chaos as it were,
anything might happen as I walk down main street. I cannot know.
Is the world “a harsh and cruel place”? I cannot know until I interact with “the world”
and something happens. Now if a car being driven down the street suddenly loses
its brakes and hits me as I am walking across the street, that can be considered
to prove the point that the world is “a harsh and cruel place” but it can also
be considered to just be a random occurrence. The world is a random, chaotic
place, one can never know what will happen or why.
It is this interaction with things, people, places that constitute
“the world”. I do not have control over these interactions, they
are random. It is this “other”, the interactions outside of me,
that is the “world”. The cat has been bother me all morning,
hanging around and walking all over the computer
and clinging to me. I finally feed the cat and the cat is no
longer bothering me. It is that interaction that is the “world”.
So interactions are the “world”, but how am I suppose to
understand those interactions? If they are as I have suggested,
random interactions, then what “sense” of them, can I make?
I can suppose that those interactions are the work of “god” but
there is no evidence of that. Because if the interactions are
random as I have suggested and caused by god, then god
is random, chaotic. Now some might suggest that those interactions
were not random, but those interactions were created by and
part of god’s plan for me and the “world”. But still I cannot react to
that because if those plans are “inscrutable” as suggested, I cannot in
any way, shape or form, understand them, I cannot react to them.
I have no means or way to react to “inscrutable” plans……
I am, by definition, unable to understand them, and thus I have
no way to react to them…………they lie outside of me.
I can suppose the interactions of me and other people, places, events
are part of some “scientific” explanation for the “world”. But as we know,
science as shown us the “world” is random, chaotic, just as we have discovered
walking down main street. But that still doesn’t help us understand anything.
Things happen when we interact with the “world”.
How are we to explain those “things”?
Kropotkin