I'm surprised no one aimed directly at the spider to pressure splat him. Or that the cleaning chemicals didn't take him out. Seems like he would have been in pretty bad shape by Nagel's intervention.
Lovely. When I lived in Taiwan, a subtropical country, I found all manner of creatures in and around the often-exposed indoor-outdoor places where I lived. One time there was a huge spider on my bathroom wall that suddenly appeared. It was enormous and basically was built like one of the face huggers from Alien. I started to get something to contemplate squishing it...and then I literally saw it leap from one wall to another. I closed the door and left the room.
My favorite Wittgenstein quote is: "“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
Which also reminds me of the penultimate lines of the Diamond Sutra:
"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space, an illusion,
a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this"
Thanks for following me on Youtube! Not that I have much to post there usually. Since you're a fellow flamenco-ista, maybe you'll appreciate this little guitar recording I did the other day, testing out a new microphone: https://soundcloud.com/chao3nick/guitar-pretend-tape-hi-fi-vibe
What an interesting short story! Though I can't help but wonder if it's apocryphal. Hard to believe the spider could survive for the months Nagel describes. Or that no one would have dealt with it in all that time. But it's interesting to ponder its meaning, especially from the spider's point of view. Was it happy in its perilous environment? Did it even, in some fashion, thrive? Only to quickly die in a "safer" one? It took the proffered rescue, but was it so exhausted by then that surrendered what life it had left? The story raises so many questions!
FWIW, I have Nagels /Mind and Cosmos/ on hold at the library. Should become available in two weeks or so. It was the only book of his they had (in ebook format). I'm looking forward to it. (I think I mentioned I'm reading John Searle's /Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World/. Still enjoying it but not finding his chapter on society as compelling as what he says about mind and language.)
In preparing my next blog post I've had occasion to think about Nagel's anecdote.
I would have done much the same, only I would have carried the spider, nestled gently in the wadded tissue, somewhere more accommodating to life -- probably outside the building, near the soil, by a crevice or a rock. At least from there it might have had some real opportunities. Perhaps by leaving it on the desert of the washroom tile, surrounded by giant shoes, Nagel crushed its hope that there might be somewhere significantly better in this cruel world than the drain.
The story is meant to persuade us of the hazard of thinking we can understand a spider -- but perhaps Nagel could have understood the spider more fully.
I'm surprised no one aimed directly at the spider to pressure splat him. Or that the cleaning chemicals didn't take him out. Seems like he would have been in pretty bad shape by Nagel's intervention.
Lovely. When I lived in Taiwan, a subtropical country, I found all manner of creatures in and around the often-exposed indoor-outdoor places where I lived. One time there was a huge spider on my bathroom wall that suddenly appeared. It was enormous and basically was built like one of the face huggers from Alien. I started to get something to contemplate squishing it...and then I literally saw it leap from one wall to another. I closed the door and left the room.
My favorite Wittgenstein quote is: "“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
Which also reminds me of the penultimate lines of the Diamond Sutra:
"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space, an illusion,
a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this"
Thanks for following me on Youtube! Not that I have much to post there usually. Since you're a fellow flamenco-ista, maybe you'll appreciate this little guitar recording I did the other day, testing out a new microphone: https://soundcloud.com/chao3nick/guitar-pretend-tape-hi-fi-vibe
What an interesting short story! Though I can't help but wonder if it's apocryphal. Hard to believe the spider could survive for the months Nagel describes. Or that no one would have dealt with it in all that time. But it's interesting to ponder its meaning, especially from the spider's point of view. Was it happy in its perilous environment? Did it even, in some fashion, thrive? Only to quickly die in a "safer" one? It took the proffered rescue, but was it so exhausted by then that surrendered what life it had left? The story raises so many questions!
FWIW, I have Nagels /Mind and Cosmos/ on hold at the library. Should become available in two weeks or so. It was the only book of his they had (in ebook format). I'm looking forward to it. (I think I mentioned I'm reading John Searle's /Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World/. Still enjoying it but not finding his chapter on society as compelling as what he says about mind and language.)
As an aside, I kinda like spiders: https://logosconcarne.com/2020/05/14/spiders/
I wonder what Nagel's larger philosophy has to say about the reduction of suffering.
In preparing my next blog post I've had occasion to think about Nagel's anecdote.
I would have done much the same, only I would have carried the spider, nestled gently in the wadded tissue, somewhere more accommodating to life -- probably outside the building, near the soil, by a crevice or a rock. At least from there it might have had some real opportunities. Perhaps by leaving it on the desert of the washroom tile, surrounded by giant shoes, Nagel crushed its hope that there might be somewhere significantly better in this cruel world than the drain.
The story is meant to persuade us of the hazard of thinking we can understand a spider -- but perhaps Nagel could have understood the spider more fully.