The World Our Home: A Meditation

Ralia Maijama’a Abdullahi

 

 Ralia M. Abdullahi

 

 I was in a rather unusual situation recently. In conversation with an elderly matron, the matron said to me, in Hausa language: “The world is a complete totality, to which one can add nothing and from which one can take nothing away”.

 

I was astounded at the old matron’s sudden and unexpected philosophical creativity. Suddenly, I recalled with incredible clarity the fact that those same words were uttered by the greatest astrophysicists of the modern age, namely Galileo and Johannes Kepler in disputes with their medieval detractors. Contemplate, for a moment, the idea of a system to which one can add nothing and from which one can take nothing away, a system which by implication, contains and preserves everything.

 

That, it turns out, is the world body, both as form and as content. Every day, millions of people die and yet the world as such continues. Rulers come and go, while the state-system, that worldly apparatus of power, remains. Every day, the newspapers are full stories of theft, robbery, banditry, stealing, fraud, arson, vandalism and destruction, and yet wealth and productive resources continue to grow, at least in some quarters.

 

The Earth is daily plundered for its treasure, the oceans polluted with deadly chemicals, the forests ravaged, etc. but nature, in most cases, renews itself, in spite of the possibility that it would one day take its revenge on us. Dictators and tyrants daily break and annihilate the human spirit. Daily, the human spirit lives on, invents, blossoms, and diffuses.  Thus the world, both as existence and as a contingent fact, is the greatest threat to human greed (emphasis on the latter word). In effect, the world thwarts our worldly dispositions. Yet it is not the world as such that is enclosed or limited by human beings, especially  those humans who want to overstep  the bounds of the world negatively by destroying it or by decreeing for it or by imposing on the world principles external to the world.

 

This, indeed, is why the world is an open context, where space, time, and motion as Galileo would say, are nothing, where knowledge (of nature, society, etc.) and possession of happiness are identical. The world, in a word, is a formula of liberation rather than justification or resignation or unwoldliness.  That is why the world is a question to our answers, rather than the finished answer to a perplexing question.  For the world can exist, without our cooperation and consent, directly determine our acts of perception and thus bring about error, fear and ignorance without any lapses on our part.

 

Here lies the human burden of self-assertion. For the undesirable aspects of the world are not metaphysical signs of the quality of the world principle but rather signs of the facticity of reality, which cannot be wished away, dissolved or exiled. The world-natural order is indifferent to human beings, but it is this which appears to them as opposition, denial and contingency.  And because the natural world is indifferent to us, it will not on its own furnish us an existential programme in which we would posit our own existence. Rather, it is in our own understanding of the world and acting upon it, that we produce an existential programme which we can take for granted and which, in its turn, determines our horizon of possible experiences.

 

And because the natural world is indifferent to us, it will not on its own furnish us an existential programme in which we would posit our own existence. Rather, it is in our own understanding of the world and acting upon it, that we produce an existential programme which we can take for granted and which, in its turn, determines our horizon of possible experiences.

 

That is why the world cannot be “finished” but is ranged against us and is, at the same time deficient.  And it is this very “deficiency” of the world which humans have to keep in view as the motive of their activity. However, life, which is lived in the world, and which has human significance, must not, and cannot, be indifferent in regards to reality. Life is ceaseless self-construction before a world which is indifferent and in reality requires self-assertion.

 

There is no human history which is free of history, or which only endorses the present without questions. This is the burden of history, which cannot be forgotten. This is where our story— my encounter with the old Matron— begins. If we can add, or take away, nothing from the world, if the world is a provocation, then its absolute dependability is contradictory.

 

On the one hand, the world is an absolute Will, a metaphysical principle whose dependability, even though cannot be proved in advance, is a realistic possibility, achievable through radical and epochal human action. Thus the world, that region of absolute indifference, is also one of motivation, for it is that in which what is historical becomes hypothetical. The never-ending pressure of confirming a relation to the world which modern science inaugurates for the first time destroys the old idea that we must resign all interest in truth so as not to risk error, pain, and punishment.

 

The world itself is an absolute worldliness just because it is the world, just because it cannot be escaped, and just because it is.  What else is reality but the world, that region of stress and strife, beauty and ugliness, hope and misery? It is wonderful to be alive and to be in the world, that blue ball which moves with majesty among the great citadel of the stars. The World— our sweet home.

*Dr. Ralia M. Abdullahi,

Department of English and Literary Studies, BUK

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