84
We don’t feel such tension when stopping to consider whether we can go from
one room to another in our home, point A to point B, as in the case of the most
famous of Zeno’s nine paradoxes. That’s because it would require an extremely
compulsive, neurotic individual to engage in what has become known as proof by
contradiction, reductio ad absurdum, an absolute refutation of philosophical
amnesty in the interests of moving a few feet left or right. This spatial and emotional
entrapment, a philosophical obsessive-compulsive disorder, one at first assumes, but
one that also saves trillions of individual lives every day with distinct apprehensions, suspicion, doubt, superstition, fuzzy logic, and a continuum of hindsights,
and harkens to that moment of supreme nausea tested by Jean-Paul Sartre in his first
major fiction, La Nausée, when his character of Roquentin encounters a chestnut
tree’s bark, only to be plunged into a psychomotor abyss.
41
A first, and disastrous,
encounter with the natural world. Or, as E. M. Cioran has written, in speaking of the
relativity of utopia and apocalypse, giving us the former, a confession of clichés
which are “closer to our deepest instincts”; and noting that “Not everyone can
reckon with a cosmic catastrophe…“.
42
Cutting aphorisms, decisive plots in a cemetery—these are our certainties (Fig. 8.5).
Scholarship Online: February 2010, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199268900.001.0001/acprof-9780199268900-chapter-2, Accessed January 23, 2019. See
also, “How we know biodiversity: institutions and knowledge-policy relationships,” by Rajeswari
S. Raina and Debanjana Dey, Sustainability Science, Sustain Sci 15, 975–984 (2020). https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11625-019-00774-w, January 2, 2020, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/
s11625-019-00774-w?sap-outbound-id=5476E303368693D1AE8022A18261041F4DA33070&
u t m _ s o u r c e = h y b r i s - c a m p a i g n & u t m _ m e d i u m = e m a i l & u t m _ c a m p a i g n = 0 0 0 _
N I S H 0 1 _ 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 9 _ S P S N _ AWA _ K N 0 1 _ G L _ W E D 2 0 2 0 & u t m _ c o n t e n t = E N _
internal_7025_20200606&mkt-key=42010A0557EB1EDA9BA8DCC3BF5B4FBD
41 Gallimard Publishers, Paris, 1938; for quotation, see “The Chestnut Tree: The Experience of
Contingency,” http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm.
42 Émile Cioran, History And Utopia, Translated from the French by Richard Howard, Seaver
Books, New York, 1960, p. 83.
8 Paradoxical Frontiers
We don’t feel such tension when stopping to consider whether we can go from
one room to another in our home, point A to point B, as in the case of the most
famous of Zeno’s nine paradoxes. That’s because it would require an extremely
compulsive, neurotic individual to engage in what has become known as proof by
contradiction, reductio ad absurdum, an absolute refutation of philosophical
amnesty in the interests of moving a few feet left or right. This spatial and emotional
entrapment, a philosophical obsessive-compulsive disorder, one at first assumes, but
one that also saves trillions of individual lives every day with distinct apprehensions, suspicion, doubt, superstition, fuzzy logic, and a continuum of hindsights,
and harkens to that moment of supreme nausea tested by Jean-Paul Sartre in his first
major fiction, La Nausée, when his character of Roquentin encounters a chestnut
tree’s bark, only to be plunged into a psychomotor abyss.
41
A first, and disastrous,
encounter with the natural world. Or, as E. M. Cioran has written, in speaking of the
relativity of utopia and apocalypse, giving us the former, a confession of clichés
which are “closer to our deepest instincts”; and noting that “Not everyone can
reckon with a cosmic catastrophe…“.
42
Cutting aphorisms, decisive plots in a cemetery—these are our certainties (Fig. 8.5).
Scholarship Online: February 2010, http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:
oso/9780199268900.001.0001/acprof-9780199268900-chapter-2, Accessed January 23, 2019. See
also, “How we know biodiversity: institutions and knowledge-policy relationships,” by Rajeswari
S. Raina and Debanjana Dey, Sustainability Science, Sustain Sci 15, 975–984 (2020). https://doi.
org/10.1007/s11625-019-00774-w, January 2, 2020, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/
s11625-019-00774-w?sap-outbound-id=5476E303368693D1AE8022A18261041F4DA33070&
u t m _ s o u r c e = h y b r i s - c a m p a i g n & u t m _ m e d i u m = e m a i l & u t m _ c a m p a i g n = 0 0 0 _
N I S H 0 1 _ 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 9 _ S P S N _ AWA _ K N 0 1 _ G L _ W E D 2 0 2 0 & u t m _ c o n t e n t = E N _
internal_7025_20200606&mkt-key=42010A0557EB1EDA9BA8DCC3BF5B4FBD
41 Gallimard Publishers, Paris, 1938; for quotation, see “The Chestnut Tree: The Experience of
Contingency,” http://twren.sites.luc.edu/phil120/ch10/nausea.htm.
42 Émile Cioran, History And Utopia, Translated from the French by Richard Howard, Seaver
Books, New York, 1960, p. 83.
8 Paradoxical Frontiers