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.
