"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is." - Deep Thought on the answer to the ultimate question...
Thinkings today, but I am trying to avoid doing philosophy. So instead I will ramble on a blog. Which is the same but somehow even more pretentious.
The world is conditioned by our understanding, and our understanding by our experience of the world. As the ways in which we, across space and time, have understood the world have and do differ, it stands to reason that the worlds have differed too. The concepts by which we understand the world are not, ultimately, separable from our experiences; they draw from and feed in to one another. There is no way we can step out of the stream of experience to get a "God's eye view" of things.
But we want to say that, at the same time, it has been the same world understood by different people across time. How then, do we unify the plurality? How do we find identity among difference?
It seems, at first necessary to posit some world independent of the languages and methods we use to describe and understand it.
But this could be missing the point. The world isn't represented to us via experience, it is
present. There is not necessarily a gap to be bridged.
The reason we might think there is could be because, although we cannot step outside of experience to get a "God's eye view", we can step back enough to ask a question
as if from that point of view.
We are, for better or worse, self-conscious. We are aware of ourselves
as ourselves. We are also aware of the world
as the world. This seems something fairly uniquely human. It's not clear cut. Animals are conscious. A dog is aware of the world. It's consciousness is directed towards the world; the dog chases the cat. But it is only in language that this relationship becomes transitive; the dog does not, as far as we know, think of the cat as the object of his consciousness, and he the subject. He just gets on with chasing the cat.
Many animals, it should be said, do occasionally display behaviour more sophisticated than "chasing", which may complicate matters a little. I'm not going to claim to be an authority on animal consciousness, I only want to make the point is that there is something fairly unusual about humans, as far as animal life on this planet goes.
Things like language, and anything by which we "describe" or manipulate the world in some way or another, mediate between us and the world, allowing us to bring our own experience of the world to consciousness. It is because of this mediation, however, that we become alienated from our immediate
belonging to the world. We experience the world both prereflectively as
part of the world and reflectively, aware of ourselves as conscious
within the world. We fall from grace, and become aware of ourselves as naked in the Garden of Eden.
I'm getting too close to philosophising for comfort, so I'll leave a lot unsaid. It probably comes down to some sort of sense of resolution, in terms of both the will and an end point. But perhaps what unites the plurality of worlds is that they are all attempts to answer a question that no one quite understands. Coming to terms with ourselves as of part of the world even through our alienation from the world. Ways of
Being-in-the-World.
Which I suppose makes Eve the first philosopher. Good on her.
"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." - Genesis 3:6-7
