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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Tamper Tinker Tempt
Thoughts on familiarity and unfamiliarity: Christian metaphysics as "strange" and pagan antiquity as "home".
Thursday, 2004-09-16 | Classic Gin, Philosophy
| NU |
One of the things that's unique to the experience of travel is the profound feeling of identification with 'home' that travel inevitably inspires.
I mean this metaphorically and literally. The deeper I get into the muck of Christian metaphysics, the more pagan virtue seems to jive with my decidedly po-mo (i.e. radically antifoundational) sensibilities. Put another way, I live in a time and place where it makes the best sense for everyone to just agree to be selfish in the manner that's the least harmful to our fellows. The harboring and general maintenance of complicated substantive commitments in addition to the practiced aversion that America circa 20XX demands seems like a lot of extra work.
By the bye, I didn't mean for 'muck' to come off pejoratively back there, but honestly, how pure can a metaphysics that's like 2000 years old honestly be? Literally centuries of realignment in dogmatic texts as well as literary ones and dozens of two-for-one splits have turned what was once a few super-rational epistemological commitments into a phantasmagoric clockwork of subtly varying axiomatic taxonomies. 'Muck' might be a little less forceful than the situation seems to demand, now that I reflect on it.
On that note, here's a segue back to the literal implications of our original topic: one axiom that I can accept a priori and keep up with the maintenance of is the one about how absence makes the heart grow fonder. On vacation it seems so patently obvious that one is not where one belongs--this makes for some odd cognitive dissonance when one meets the natives or residents of the place he's vacationing. 'How can someone live here? I mean, it's a nice place to visit and all, but...'
The humidity in Connecticut is disgusting.
