From “The Scratching Post”:Axioms

By Ken Marks

[Originally posted on The Scratching Post, September 18. Republished here by permission of the author.]

Mr. Dinkel taught me all about axioms in my high school geometry class. You begin with a set of self-evident truths – axioms – and from them you derive all the complex postulates of Euclidean geometry! I was astonished that so much knowledge could be derived simply by using logic.
    Much later it occurred to me that each person is a kind of Euclid. Each of us comes to see the world as a set of self-evident truths and, consciously or unconsciously, each of us extrapolates a worldview from them. The difference is only this: when Euclid stated that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line, he was irrefutably correct. Our axioms, however, are different. They are self-evident truths to each of us but not necessarily to our neighbors, who have their own sets of axioms. And here’s the fascinating bit: the lack of a consensus about personal axioms does nothing to weaken our convictions about their truth. That’s one of my axioms – what you might call a “meta-axiom.” It makes coexistence challenging.

[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2021 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.