By C.D. ALLEN
cdavidallen(at)gmail.com

Two weeks ago, before Independence Day, I wrote that I wanted to write more about time but had run out of room. For all you lucky people that have been waiting anxiously for me to continue – Here we go…

All of our ideas about our selves, our environment and also about our ideas fall fairly nicely into two categories; concrete or abstract.

An easy example of a concrete idea is apples. Apples are a particular variety or fruit that grows in a particular variety of manners from a particular variety of trees in a particular variety of climates. I’m using the word variety here because there are different types of this particular fruit that still fall under the general heading of apple. I’m also specifically using the word particular because the main concept of a concrete idea is that is specifically something and not something else. Apples are not oranges, nor bananas, nor, curiously, even crabapples.

A concrete idea is one that can be universally identified as being what it is and also what it is not.

On the flip side we have abstract ideas of which my favorite example is weather (because most people seem to think that weather is something specific.) Weather can be rain or snow or a storm of some kind. It can be sunny, windy or cloudy. It can be part or all of these. Weather can be measured as humidity, barometric pressure or temperature. You can say that the weather is not snowing and, like a concrete idea, not being snow is as much a characteristic of the idea as whatever is happening besides snow falling. The difference between the two is that what the abstract idea is not is never absolute. Because snow is not a characteristic of weather now does not mean it will not be a characteristic later.

Now that I’ve mentioned now and later I should get back to talking about time but first (and this will probably run me into a third week) let me say one more thing for anyone that may have seen the flaw in what I’ve just said.

For this let’s take something easy like happiness and sadness. Everyone knows that happiness is not sadness. Everyone knows that sadness is not happiness. Not being the other is one of the most important characteristics of each one. The problem with each is subjectivity. While you can know and say that you are happy or sad, no one can know and say it for you. All anyone else can say is that you seem happy and everyone also knows that seeming is not the same as being. (If anyone has actually made it this far and understood what I’m saying let me know and I will write more on how being is an altogether different abstract.)

Happiness and sadness are the idea that feeling a particular way is important to us. The same goes for weather. At its essence it is just the idea that what happens with the atmosphere and climate outside is important to us both individually and collectively.

Now with that out of the way I can get to my point but… next week.

Tell me: What changes in the weather make you happy or sad?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under UnNatural Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.