Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
To most of us in the West, "truth" is a universal concept. The maxim of "there is one truth" seems tautologous to us. Many will deny this of course, but those who believe that the truth we each see is different, will usually end up agreeing that this is merely a matter of perspective. A different lens through which to view the truth. But there remains one truth. Each of us has our own set of prisms we see it through: culture, religion, etc. And just as if you viewed the sun through various prisms, lenses and coloured sheets of cellophane you wouldn't expect it to look the same, we accept that others see truth through the same kaleidoscope. But still the sun remains one truth. We do not have our own, individual suns. But this, I have come to discover, is not a necessary belief. In fact it may be a peculiarly Western belief. Many cultures have different understandings of truth entirely, especially those without influence from the two fountains of Western culture: Classical Greece and Christianity. If you're eager to discover the arcane beliefs of the orient I won't really be expounding much on them here, purely because I don't understand them. But the basic gist seems to be a confusion, or at least lack of innate acknowledgement, of the concept of "one truth", and by viewing the shadow this difference casts on the respective cultures we can try to ascertain its centrality to our own.
What does a singular truth lead to then? I'd say the two fundamental streams from this axiom are one: universal morality, and two: empiricism. The former is slightly more self-evident. One truth implies there is one morality, as the same rules govern all of creation. There is a singular perfect way to live, no matter your background or circumstances. What exactly this morality is is up for debate, we are constantly trying to discover which prisms we see through, and how to avoid their effects after all. This is exemplified through the Greek virtues, but even moreso through the Christian concept of religion. Christians have Jesus as their paragon, the only man to ever live the perfect life. And we see other cultures through this lens also: we imagine Muslims see Muhammad as their paragon, Buddhists the Buddha. Its not for me to say whether this is true or not, but its certainly a very Christian way of viewing them. It also leads to a belief in a common goal for humanity, a paradise that waits for us if we can reach the "truth". For the religious this is heaven, but for many less spiritually-inclined it has always meant an Earthly paradise: be that the Roman restorationists of the 8th century or the Bolsheviks of the 20th. Not all cultures have this belief, no Hindu would say that all men should be aiming to reach the same heaven for example, just as monkeys should not aim to be human. It is a principle that underlies our system of governance: our laws being approximations for morality after all, and our courts working to uncover the "facts": a system which would not work lest a single truth was ubiquitously accepted.
But at its natural end universal morality can be condensed into the so-called "Golden Rule":
For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.This rule, so strong and self-evident as it is to us, rests on the principal that there is one morality. It does not give leeway to, for example, a people that value murder, or indeed value being murdered. To believe the golden rule, one must first take as true that there is one supreme morality.
But such grand statements are well and good, but the question remains: what exactly is this "universal morality". Where is it codified? How can we be sure our justice is true? Some believe they know the truth in full already: Islam has the unchanging Quran, and America has the unchanging constitution. But of course neither of these things are truly unchanging. Shariyah has morphed immensely since even the Ottoman Era, and the American Constitution lasted not even three years before it had to be amended. The real solution is the other stream of our truth: empiricism. Since there is one, universal truth, it makes sense that it is evident throughout the universe and in all things. And so we have toiled to discover each and every minor truth there is to find about our world, culminating (but definitely not beginning) in our current "scientific process": a set of rules by which we can gradually chip away at the marble block that is ignorance to discover the true shape of the world within.
These two principles have been the two pillars upon which Western civilisation has lifted itself up and can be seen emanating throughout our culture, history and mythology. Religion and science, church and state, monarchy and democracy, Christ's godliness and Christ's manliness, Plato and Aristotle. All of these forces work towards the truth, but the latter work upwards while the former work downwards. Plato saw the emanation of the truth onto the world by logic alone, and Aristotle sought to understand its shape by studying its shadow. Its not a case of two incompatible ideologies, but of a tension that is the fountain of our civilisation and come both from that same source: a single truth.
