Page 60 - The Irony Board
P. 60
Into the Body
A fish with sliding scales
To judge the current fails,
Nor has it any clue
What its own muscles do.
As antidote to the previous plea for moral relativism, this piece
criticizes flexible standards and values. The focus is on the interface
of individual and environment. We locate ourselves in the stream of
social give-and-take by empirically judging the results of our own
actions; if the means of testing is in flux (a sliding scale), then our
reading of the outside world will not be correct. Similarly, since the
current is not constant, if our own efforts are variable, we cannot
determine which changes in external events are the result of our
own actions. The failure is double.
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