after some thought, I am going to place this here for reasons I
hope will become clear…
I spent the afternoon watching the fire that virtually destroyed
the Notre Dame Cathedral… and I must admit I was emotionally
affected by the fire… but Kropotkin, you aren’t a religious person,
in fact, you are an atheist… Why should the destruction of a church,
a catholic one at that, affect you? Because what we saw was not the
destruction of just a church, but we saw the destruction of history…
we saw over 800 years of history burn down… and after spending the
afternoon being emotional, I now stand at the point where I need to
address this in some philosophical manner…….why, why do that Kropotkin?
what value do we gain by approaching this philosophically?
One of my points, although I rarely ever point this out, is that
philosophy is something more then a game we play when
it is convenient… philosophy must extend to our life, all of our life…
philosophy is not just a academic issue, but an issue that we live,
philosophy should be a way of life, not something we study to
learn about Nietzsche idea of the Ubermensch for example…
philosophy to be philosophy must be lived, not just to be studied…
so, how do I understand this event of the Notre Dame fire philosophical?
that people, objects, buildings, even stars are transitory.
that they don’t exists for long… and they must be appreciated as
they are because even something that seems as permanent as the earth,
still exists within history, was created and at some point will be destroyed.
We must understand that we aren’t at the apex of history, but we
are simply at another part of the road of history… and the road goes
on long after we are gone…to think of existence as a point in history
is the proper place to think of history… a history which began long before us
and will end long after us.
think of ourselves as being in the midst of a long river and we are simply
droplets of water within that river… the droplets come and go, but
the river goes on until it doesn’t… history is full of rivers that for whatever
reason, no longer flowed…but there are other rivers… time continues
on, with or without us.
the Notre Dame fire is simply another event in the history of human beings,
another event in the history of buildings, another event in the history of
religion… and you can think of Notre Dame in any one of these fashions or
created a new understanding of Notre Dame… How we view such things falls
entirely within our viewpoint of the world, entirely within how we view the world…
I see buildings like the Notre Dame cathedral in a historical context and
you can see it in a religious context and we will both be right……
and we both can be sad over the loss of a important, histoical building
like the Notre Dame Cathedral…
Kropotkin