It is wonderful and more than a bit amazing to me that our farm is stocked and loaded with all the
construction materials we'll ever need to
create somethingn so beautiful that nobody can walk away, having
seen it, touched it, *without inspiration*. I
don't know why it is, but our eyes behold dreams and visions in our
heads, and then (if it is a GOOD dream, of course...), these riches are
locked away inside minds which don't have the appendages, hands and feet
that can collect the Matter, Arrange the Matter, Assemble the Matter,
into something so startlingly beautiful, that only criminal would
let if fall to ruin due to neglect.
Here we are again in the land of sustainability. We
are in very interesting philosophical territory too, and it is
instructive to parse our meaning here by laying bare the philosophical
choices we have in the world-views we so called Moderns adopt to order
our experience and to answer fundamental questions we have about what
life means, what OUR life means, how it is related to other lives and to
Life Himself.
Essentially, we have two philosophical
choices...we can either be Nominalists or Realists. What is the
difference and why does it matter?
A Nominalist believes, for example, that "Words are Arbitrary". The
language symbols human beings use to name
the fruit, Apple, could have just as easily been spelled out to form the
word, Toothbrush, and could have been used to 'name the fruit we've
begun to talk about, the 'Apple'.
A Realist, to the contrary, believes that the fruit
being named, when reduced to language symbols by which this real thing
is moved out of one human mind into another human mind, cannot signify
nor stand for anything "BUT" the object and fruit, the Apple. If
one speaks English, the fruit in question, when held aloft in an
horticulture class after a question is posed to students as to what it
is, the answer will be then and will always HAVE been and will always
BE, "Apple". The language symols used to then convey the name of
this object into other human minds so that the object becomes real and
can be seen in the mind are as much a part of 'Apple' as are the stems
which held the young fruit to the branches that had nourished the fruit.
