Robert Sharp's Blog
Posted by Robert Sharp
The Golden Mean has an intuitive simplicity to it. Moderation sounds like a great way to live life. Excess implies waste and danger. Moderation implies temperance and safety. But I am always left wondering which is better. Believe it or not, I have a Romantic streak...I don't mean romance/love. I mean the Romantics, the poets and philosophers who believed in passion over reason. At the same time, I have an analytic streak. I see myself largely as an analytic philosopher, but this creates the problem.
On the one hand, there are days when I think Romanticism, Existentialism, Post-Modernism and all similar movements are a bit flaky. They often contain too much passion and not enough evidence or argument. They are often obtuse, needlessly so. But on the other hand, part of (a very strong part) wants to follow them, to live a life of pure passion, to say "Screw the establishment! Screw discipline and tradition!"
This is not the rambling of youth, though I fear sometimes that as I get older this passionate part of me is fading. I think there will always remain a Romantic inside of me screaming that moderation is for fools who play it safe and never really live. To avoid confusion, that voice is not calling on me to get drunk and have orgies. Instead, it pushes me to be Ahab from Moby Dick, to feel the roar of a beautiful obsession, to drown in an attempt to fulfill a desire that literally consumes my life. Without that, I sometimes wonder what the point is supposed to be.
We can contribute to the path of mankind in various ways. We can be steady, dependable, even great in our ability to realize the ethical and pass it on to others. Or we can explode and leave a mark on history that may never be understood by anyone. I honestly don't know which path is better, and that's what bothers me.
Posted by Robert Sharp
Recently, I was teaching Plato's theory of the forms, and one of the central points of emphasis is the idea that the forms exist outside space and time (they are transcendent). Along with some other research I have been doing, this has me wondering about the connection between space and time. We often distinguish them, saying one can stay in the same space for a particular length of time (meaning space stays the same but time change). Movement, of course, requires both: a change in space and time. That's evident in the equation D=RT (Distance equals Rate of movement times Time). But is the connection a necessary one?
In Latin, the term 'ubi' means 'where,' as in where are we right now. But it also means 'when' as in when will we be there. Even in English, the term 'where' can refer to space or time, though we tend to use 'when' instead. Of course, the words are very similar. You can see their etymological connection. They come from the same root at some point. Where and when are not very different. Still, this is just how we use words. It doesn't yet answer my original question.
Could something exist outside of space but not outside of time? Or the reverse? Could we have something subject to time that isn't subject to space? I'm not sure what it would mean, honestly, but let's consider some possibilities. Light doesn't work, as it is subject to both. It doesn't have mass per se but it does have mass like qualities (including being affected by gravity, if we are to believe physicists). Still, it takes time for light to reach the Earth from the Sun because it must travel through space.
What about gravity itself? How quickly does gravity work as a force? Is it instant, or is it subject to the limit of the speed of light? What about thought? How quickly does thought happen? How quickly does it travel? I don't mean the signals in the brain, which are electrical discharges, though perhaps that is the limit of thought as well. We'd have to ask one of the suite writers who deals with ESP to help us understand theories that suggest that thought is not subject to space or time.
In the meantime, I find myself baffled. I'm having a difficult time thinking of something that exists in one of the two (space or time) without existing in the other. Any ideas?