by nirlep on Thu Sep 19, 2019 1:58 pm
A thought provoking thread Ganesh. beginning with the quote of Spinoza used by you "Good and bad are relative to human and have no validity for a universe in which individuals are ephemera" would suggest that being ephemera individuals are also insignificant. The logic could extend to everything. But aren't the universal time scale and the local time scale different? For example within one life span of humans a dog may live ten times over, a butterfly thousand times and so on. With this logic butterfly or a still smaller organism would appear as ephemera to us but consciousness has evolved to have compassion. So our heart goes out for all things carnate, it feels for them, it is able to comprehend the tugs, sometimes ambivalent, of the universal and the local. While good or bad in universal time scale would appear just as "acts" driven by impulses, but in relative human terms they have ethical considerations requiring action, duly "compassioned" by the universals, in the form of speaking, writing, arts, photography, music..... In my view compassion transcends time scales and enables us to treat everything as valid life deserving careful attention.
The very act of picking up the camera in my opinion is a decision to speak or express. Subjectivity is bound to come in but that's how images speak to each other. While becoming irrelevant in the course of time, new relevance is created in the future by their having existed in the past. An artist creates his own critique, Is my work relevant? She knocks at the door of the world and contributes his/her mite. That's a demand placed by subjective time. While seeking relevance, artist also has the universal in mind. That makes him/her submit to the larger design. That aspect to me is humility. Expressing with humility is both local and universal in which you my friend abound.