Interacting with the World, and Ciceronianus

This weekend, Ciceronianus, author of a wonderful neo-Stoic blog, posted on epistemology. He wrote: "I'm bemused from time to time by the view that the world (as in "reality" or the universe) is, in part at least, our creation, or perhaps is created by each of us for himself/herself."

He named first Kant and later Wilfred Sellars as examples of the sort of epistemologist he has in mind. Let us use the broad term "constructivism" for the broad PoV that Kant and Sellars share, and that bemuses our Stoic.

Ciceronianus, if I understand him, then proceeds to the assertion that such constructivism is either pointlessly obvious or wildly wrong. The obvious and uninteresting point is that "we are human beings, and as such interact with the world as human beings do." Yet those who are most serious about urging that "they shape the world" seem to want to go much further than this, and that furtherness is what bothers Ciceronianus.

I contributed a thought of my own to his comment section.
 

There is a tee shirt that bears upon some of the issues you raise. It shows somewhat anthropomorphized versions of the Greek letter pi (Π) and of the expression √-1.

Pi is saying to √-1, “Get real.” And√-1is replying, “Be rational!”

I’ll pause now while you slap your knees.

The joke, of course, is that pi is an example of an “irrational” but real number, while √-1 is the definition of i, the foundation of the imaginary numbers.

From Gerard Manley Hopkins

Inspired by fellow blogger cicerionianus, I have been thinking lately about Gerard Manley Hopkins.

My entry today, then, is simply the poemn to which Ciceronianus' blog entry alludes, take from it as you list:

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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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I love that unexpected ending.  The "ah!" makes it work.