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     Our inability to come to terms with, or, for that
matter, even to recognize the boundaries of our knowledge, to
distinguish between what we know and what we do not know, has
far reaching implications and profound consequences.  Of
these we are also unaware.

     For evidence, one need merely glance at the history of
medicine, and understand it not as a triumphal procession,
but as a chronicle of errors, each of which had its day as
truth, and has been fervently espoused by those who believed
in it.  I can remember when radical mastectomy was considered
mandatory to "cure" breast cancer, when sympathectomy was
promoted as a "cure" for malignant hypertension...  Today's
newspaper admits that low fat diets may not prevent heart
disease after all.

     The resort to statistical validation is conclusive
evidence of not knowing.  It corroborates the fact that in
the specific instance, we cannot know; it conceals the
circumstance that knowledge of the specific instance is
indispensable to our apprehension and to our experience.
Consider the opprobrium that Socrates attached to the denial
of ones ignorance, to the pretence to know what one in fact
does not know.  This is the reason, I cannot become
evangelical about the dogmata of contemporary science, about
global warming, for example. I simply don't know; and I
am convinced that, no matter what his academic or political
credentials, no one else knows either.

     Nonetheless, I wish to act meaningfully even concerning
issues about which I am admittedly ignorant.  Such action is
obviously impervious to primary, immediate rationalization.
One is incapable of explaining ones action with a reason that
can be integrated into a chain of causes.  Under such
circumstances, one can explain ones actions only with
reference to an intuitive awareness.  But there is a
sensitivity to the harmony and balance of nature where the
individuals awareness of himself as a creature (animal) in
nature merges with his awareness of (all) (environmental)
nature.  Where the restraint and conservatism with which he
protects and preserves his own life  (core existence) merges
with (overflows) into a restraint and conservatism with which
he protects and preserves environmental nature.  It is in
fact the region where ethics and esthetics truly overlap or
merge.

     [The other such region of the merger between ethics and
esthetics is reflected in the classical idealistic premise of
the identity the good and the beautiful. Beauty is what is
pleasing to the senses, to the eye and to the ear; and cannot
therefore be divorced from art on the one hand, and
sensuousness on the other.  In popular parlance, a beauty is
a beautiful, i.e.  sexually attractive woman, the physical
relationship to whom is the core concern of popular
morality.]

     To the extent that morality has an esthetic source, it
must remain intuitive, compelling to the individual; but
subject to communication only with difficulty, if at all.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
