for the love of the world

Even though I know your inward secret, nevertheless declare it now in thine outward act.
---Rumi.

Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, animal consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder.
---D.H. Lawrence

Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
-----Hannah Arendt

There is a love of the world that is cheap and second-rate; this is really very little else other than the love of oneself-if such a thing be possible. But the world and all that is in it is then reduced to a soulless abstraction. Everything is just a projection of the all-consuming self and the world becomes as fleeting as our desires.

In previous times we have thought of the world in relation to a perspective that encompassed 'heaven and earth', the metaphysical and the physical. But the materialistic monism that is a by-product of science , and that was initiated further back by Descartes, has only space for a dead world and mechanism. Only the human mind (not person-mind, body and soul) existed like a spark in the void. All this comes about, it must be recalled, alongside a profound scepticism toward the commonsensical view of things as well as the idea that anything is merely 'given'. If we can never be absolutely sure that we can know the world as it is -our very reason has become suspect- then we can at least know it as we make it. In this second-turning inward the world has become a truly strange and fantastical place.

Of course, we could never maintain such a tension. As Nietzsche remarked: abolishing the Real world behind the Apparent one meant that the latter disappeared as well! With the advent of Darwinism mind- and thought itself- became organically linked with the world and its hidden forces, processes. Once again we have come to share a nature with Life, but this time it is only one of blind mechanism and contingency. How often one hears the childish exclamation:we share _ % of DNA with a monkey/lizard/pig. And atoms with a stone too, no doubt! A substitution of material continuity for an ontological one.

Is it , then, the case that a devaluing of the metaphysical necessarily entails a diminished understanding and appreciation of the world? Is 'the Fall' always not the discovery of the world but the discovery of our isolation from it? From then onwards the world becomes a "problem", something that has to be subject to "analysis" as it becomes an "object" of thought, and we a "subject". Nature now becomes a confronting 'other' when, it might be said, true understanding comes from knowing and acting with the world: Mitwissenschaft. Thinking is not independent of, free of, the world. To think is already to be in the world. Is there a thinking self before the world, prior to language? (Wittgenstein).

But let us not be hasty here. Edward Said: time into space: "[With]the opening up of chronological sequence into landscape the better we are able to see, experience, grasp, and work with time." It is often said that 'the Fall' marks the precise point at which Time comes into existence; might it not be that it is also the growth of our consciousness of space? The world now takes up the space between us and God (and Time is the Space between me and You). And the world taking up this intervening space , this in-between-ness is a blessing. Without it we would be burnt by the dazzling presence of God. And the world itself also introduces us to plurality and multiplicity. 'I' would not be 'I' unless I could relate to you through a common world.

So, let us not look with too harsh a gaze on this ability of ours to think of the world as separate from ourselves. Mind exalts the permanent and ignores the transitory, ...mind can achieve her object by picking out one particular quality as the permanent substance of the perceptual world , partitioning a perceptual time and space for it to be permanent in. (Eddington).

The danger is, therefore, of seeing the world only from the perspective of discontinuity. To do so, ultimately leads to a perverted love of the world.

There's a sort of betrayal involved in talking about someone or something that one deeply loves. It is as if in naming that something or someone one is taking away something essential. But it is not really so; without our opinions the world would stop turning.

If there's one piece of writing by Hannah that I had to name, that means the world to me, it would be her short essay on Lessing. It goes like this:

There's a lack of commitment to the world and its affairs, its politics and 'current events' , that derives from an otherworldly shunning of the material and physical; there is also a passive indifference to the world one that finds its satisfaction in the private world of pleasure (in this regard asceticism and hedonism are not too dissimilar).

But then there is a vigilant, active, and wholly mindful, attentive aversion to any orthodoxy in such matters. In such cases it isn't the world that is left behind; no, instead there is the constant re-orienting of one's views towards the world and other people. Nothing is final, everything can be revalued, revised. It is, in short, to be the contrarian par excellence, to be wary of being 'conformed to the world' and ideological snares. Like a flaneur, one chooses carefully which elements of an ideology one likes. Carefully, but lightly. Today one is a conservative when yesterday one was the soundest of liberals. A shifting constellation of allegiances that confounds bourgeois sensibilities: consistency is a virtue of small minds.

It is, therefore, not a lack of commitment to the world per se, but only to it to the extent that it is the world. Everything depends on recognizing there are different levels and types of pleasure; that there is a right way of seeing, that a person's style is not incidental to 'form', that judgement is not just subjective taste, and that there is- though it is not always adequate or proportionate to the object of its desire- something called 'proper love'.