fusion of horizons

'The task of learning is to be at home in the distance within which we live.'

---Gadamer (more or less)

Excited by the prospect of the Pope's new encyclical on the role of ethics in thinking about the environment and climate change.

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There are some beautiful thoughts in Gadamer's Enigma. The simple words that come to an old man, perhaps, from a lifetime's distillation of sound thought-or maybe it is a sound living? Or is it the overlapping, the fusion between these two, one open to the other, the notion of balance, equilibrium, so central to religious thinking and a religious way of life? 

'One learns to keep house with the means, energy and time available.' The house is neither internal not external: the dihliz.

After a week you cease to live as a stranger in your own house. There is still space there on the landing steps, between the two levels, for you to read, listen to the cricket. 

To discover and preserve what is most appropriate for us, a sense of the right measure of things is not an 'external' measurement but an internal 'measuring up to' (metrion, not metron). 

What is the form of goodness? A face that is beautiful doesn't really change, or only changes slightly, and yet the eye doesn't tire of it.

The nihilism of the moderns: the self is everything; the world is nothing. This is, precisely, the meaning of 'worldliness'..the desert within expands (the Israelis would say: there were no people here, only a desert which we made bloom).

Hannah: we want to escape earth, gravity-not to find God, but to escape from ourselves. 

~

Anyone who has reflected on life is drawn to the conclusion not that life is absurd or meaningless, since that is preposterous...particular lives may be so, and any part of our own life may indeed fall under this dark spell at some point in time or the other, but life in general-unless one has given up hope or been driven to give up hope- cannot present itself on the whole as absurd for the simple reason that absurdity is one of many (and temporary) possibilities. To say that evil is a privation of the good is not to infer that all limitation is to be looked on in a similar fashion. 

Life and thought by their very nature are limited and finitude is, to paraphrase Jonas, both a curse and a blessing.

We look backwards and forward! We look to find faith under the left nipple, we look to find home here on earth knowing deep down that we are never fully alive to the moment, never able, finally, to quietly accept that this is the only existence or reality we can know or experience. I am never completely the space I occupy. 

There is a kind of arrogance in believing we can get on without mirrors (Simone's 'bridges'). And that belief sometimes manifests itself in a destructive tendency (mimicking the "frenzy" of God, Tawney would say). Point to note: the death of God did not lead to a displacement of our love towards the earth; quite the opposite in fact.