“One cannot step into the same river twice.”
Heraklit
The world is constantly changing. We always find new water in the river. The river bed shifts throughout the centuries. Even the current and the level changes with the seasons and is a bit different every year. The world now looks different compared to 50 or 500 years ago. Humanity has also participated in this. However, sometimes it is difficult for a human to handle change. As things are now we can handle them, we make a living, and when something changes, it could potentially be deadly for us. Or for others. In a previous article I mentioned the two extreme points of view regarding the industrialization: Humanity can either succeed in controlling nature with the help of machines in a way that it continues to thrive, or humanity can destroy nature and its own foundation with the ever-increasing interventions. This is the same question that also lies beneath todays debate, even though we have simplified it a lot and only look at CO2 and the feared climate change it might cause. Many people have, possible encouraged by politics and their experts and media, concluded that not as much carbon, which is currently stored in the ground, must be released into the atmosphere, so that said climate change will be as small as possible. The thought behind this is clear: Agriculture shall be possible to continue as it is done today, the coastal cities shall remain where they are now. Some people are even worried that in the future they will be cooked to death in non-climatized areas just as quickly as they would now freeze to death in a minus 50 degrees celsius Siberian winter without heating. The judgement is: When the change becomes to extensive, then not as many people, if any, will be able to live on this planet.
Fear of change, wich is presented as dangerous, guides us to the verdict that we must control the change, or even must preserve the planet the way it is now. Especially prone to this verdict is anyone who believes that the world is nothing more than the fragile product of chance, as natural sciences suggest today. But this verdict is also subject to change. Planet earth and humanity was not always considered a product of chance, and is likely to not be considered this way in the future. Our scientific understanding of the forces that create the planet and the life on it is still very much incomplete. As long as things behave according to the laws of physics, we understand them well. But as soon as something is alive, we can only observe and describe. Individual processes in a living organism we can explain physically – but not the existence of the organism as a whole. Here there are forces at work that we cannot grasp with clear, permanent concepts. With the laws of nature we have found permanent rules that allow as to explain the change of things as long as nothing alive throws over our prediction with an unforeseen action. Our manmade concepts of the lifeless things come very close to reality. We can be creatively productive with them know very well what will happen in advance. This is different for living things. Here, we can also have an active impact, but we must rely on empirical experience or simply be surprised by the result. For anything alive our concepts are only a prejudice. It cannot be captured with a fixed concept. Surely there is some overlap – for example, when we need firewood, we can calculate how much heat we are likely to get out of it. But here we only describe the inanimate particles that the tree is made of, and not the life in this organism. As we take the material of nature to build things, so does life create organisms with the same material. And it is this process that we cannot get to with out reasonable mind and its petrified concepts and prejudices. We do not understand what happens when life reappears renewed again and again, and we try to control death. But with the understanding we have now we are unable to conquer neither death nor change.
When we try to pass judgement on living things as we do it successfully for lifeless objects, we will fail with this approach. We like to stick with our verdicts and build on them, which works well for the inanimate and petrified. But life is in constant movement, always changing. The judgement we passed on a man yesterday may still be valid today, but it does not have to be. And the planet we live on we should also consider to be alive. We believe that we understand planet earth, because we see it as an inanimate, physical object that we describe and treat accordingly. But we do not do it justice this way. We must recognize earth as a living thing, even if that means that we have much more to learn before we can understanding our home planet.