Slaughterhouse–5 and my big–word positions – epistemological and ontological musings

I would like to turn the attention towards two books that I have read. Not necessarily because these books caused changes in my life, but because they might be suited to explain to others the otherwise convoluted workings of my brain. The first one will be in this post, the second book in a seperate post.

Kurt Vonnegut´s book ”Slaughterhouse 5,” describes the authors attempt to write something sensible about the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Essentially, it shows that the world is bigger and more complex than human brains can do justice to. It shows that whatever worldview an individual chooses, that worldview is that small brains attempt at grasping the world. The world is bigger than our brains.

I read this when I had just moved to an international sixth form college from insular Norway. Sharing kitchens with refugees from Bosnia and Rwanda in the mid-nineties reinforced my sense that world is a disorderly place, and that my attempt to make sense of it was a modest one. In fact, the world we experience is infinite.

Not in the way that there are an infinite amount of numbers, but more comparable to the fact that pi is infinite: 3.14 is quite a small number, but it still goes on in infinitly greater complexity. I could spend a whole life studying a piece of grass, and not grasp the complexity of it. I could spend my whole life styding the hydrogen atom and not grasp the complexity of it. I could spend my whole life studying subatomic particles, and certainly not understand those.

Today, I carry with me these experiences. Ontologically, I assume that there is a real world out there, which is so complex and weird that to live and work, humans have to make simplifications, maps and shortcuts when describing the world. Epistemologically, I notice how people at all times (history of religions gives a background for this) have carved out meaningfull social worlds from the raw material of their experience of the world. That these life-worlds are socially constructed seems self-evident to me.

Lars Eriksen : 15 Oct 2006 20:01 |  Tags: Biography |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem