“I think, therefore I am.” The words
first attributed to Renée Descartes are often repeated when someone wants to
re-assert that there must be some sort of intelligence somewhere in the
universe. Not long ago someone told me that they find the sentence
“inspirational.” I somewhat cynically challenged them to how it was inspirational,
since if it was to pass that test, it would have had to push them to do
something that they would not otherwise do. To my smug glee, they didn’t tell
me about how Descartes re-lit, inside of them, a flame of hope in existential
being which convinced them to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for some reason. Nor did
they tell me of how it helped them reach their epiphany of realising their
profound curiosity with the universe and the nature of life and how that, in
turn, caused them to become a scientist. No, no, to my smug glee, they replied
to my challenge “I don’t know… It just is, y’know?”
No. I don’t know.
Inspiration refers to something which
sets into action another thing of great magnitude. That is why inspiration does
not come in the form of logging on to Tumblr, viewing an image where the pixels
have been arranged into the shape of letters to for words to form sentences which
clearly are not true. Yet they still
provoke the response of “OMG so true!” and maybe a “#deep” and a share on
Facebook.
Many things are still inspired. 2000
years of mainstream European thought was inspired largely by Aristotle and the
last few hundred years largely by Galileo. The first moon landing was inspired
by the combination of thousands of years of curiosity and awe and then a real American
desire to beat the Russians. Being inspired does not mean liking or enjoying
something, it means that that thing has changed you.
