
Originally Posted by
clark
How can one write from a platform other than one's own experience. Perhaps there is some confusion about "experience":
(today I walked two miles of city streets in my bare feet. When I got where I was going, my feet were cut, bruised, filthy, and aching terribly)
OR
(today I spoke with a man who walked two miles of city streets in his bare feet. He ended up suffering a lot of damage and pain, and he spoke with me in great detail about how deeply he was affected by this experience.)
That conversation is as much a part of my experience as is my own walk.
Heisenberg (1924) came up with his simple Uncertainty Principle', which distills down to: in any observation, experiment, quantitative analysis, or description we cannot enumerate the 'component' elements as though they occupied a reality 'out there', objectively separate from us, which we will now 'look at'. No, H contended, the scientist must add as an actual component in the data . . . themselves. Without getting into an arcane discussion about vestigial empiricism in the early 20th C, what H brought home to me is that there is no Objective Reality. Thinkers weld language units to phenomena or puzzles that they want to know about, just so that conversation is possible. Good . . .evil; hot . . . cold; simple . . . complex; reality . . .illusion. None of these great dichotomies exists in a plane free of the human minds that explore them. And a tree that falls in the forest 100 miles from a human ear does NOT make a noise. Faith is the only platform from which one could assert it does.
The imagination that brings forth the experience of love to a person who has never loved is that person's experience of love. And however addle-headed and just plain stupid WE may find their experience of love, they have every right to put it out there . To use it in their creative work.
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