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     Recently I was reminded of the composition
that marks the beginning of my efforts to
clarify my thinking. In 1959 I wrote an essay:
"Ethical and esthetic consciousness as
Sources of Doubt about the Conceptual World."
Ever since I  wrote that tract, I have wondered
to what extent it was valid, if at all.  If I
have hesitated ever to reread that treatise,
that was largely because I feared that I would
feel compelled to an extensive revision, and
would thereby be distracted from potentially
more important work.

     I think I remember postulating ethical
consciousness as awareness of myself in time,
while esthetic consciousness was awareness of
myself in space. This pair of equations
immediately suggests that the mathematical
theory of relativity may shed light no only on
the contradictions in which we experience the
world outside, but also on the contradictions
in terms of which we experience ourselves
inwardly.  This consideration immediately
raises the issues whether it is possible,
desirable, or ultimately necessary to reconcile
what the novelists, the poets, the historians,
the painters, the photographers mean by time
and space with the meaning of these words to
the mathematician or physicist.  As a practical
matter it is not. Just as the mathematician or
physicist need not to account for the meaning
of space in photography or for the meaning of
time, for example in music. But the logician,
the word specialist, the lexicographer, the
compiler of dictionaries, the translator, who
ultimately turns out to be the philosopher must
explain how a single word, time or space, comes
to be used in such disparate mays, and what the
disparity means.

     I am inclined to argue that we have
attached undue importance and validity to the
Galilean-Newtonian view of space and time; and
that Einstein's reformulation of Galilean-
Newtonian physics is a rejection of the
scientific "world-historical" which corresponds
quite persuasively to Kierkegaard's rejection
of the "world-historical."  And just as
Kierkegaard "discovered", made us aware of the
insoluble incongruities of the "moral"
sciences, so Einstein made us aware of the
insoluble incongruities at the foundation of
the "natural" sciences.  Kierkegaard and
Einstein, each in his own professional and
literary realm, not so much revised the meaning
of space and time, but showed that our uses of
these terms is beset with insoluble
perplexities.

     To my mind, at least, the Galilei-
Newtonian definitions of time and space seem to
correspond rather well with my intuition of
what is natural, - and I wonder whether that is
the consequence of a process of learning and
accommodation I ask whether with sufficient
mental practice, Einsteins constructions might
come to seem similarly obvious and native.
Only time, - I mean experience, - will tell.
or whether it is the manifestation of native
identity and affinity.

                     * * * * *
Copyright 2007, Ernst Jochen Meyer
