Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Arne Næss was buried today

Arne Næss was truely a Norwegian National Monument, and one of the most special people I have come across in my life. Arne's playfulness and joy stretched the lines of social acceptance, but it was always taken as humorous. Arne's philosophy was ground-breaking, leaving people puzzled with how to react. Regarding his ecophilosophy (Deep Ecology), we must remember that his philosophical guidance was only to give individuals the basic mechanisms to think and explore for themselves their particular relations to their surroundings...giving nature an equal chance is this equation. Prime Ministers Stoltenberg's speach at the funeral today touched eloquontly on this point, drawing lines between the Norwegian socialist tradition, and Arne's equal instrinsic value for all living matter. Most importantly, Arne stressed the need for individuals to be sceptics, the continued questioning of all circumstances - and taking these questions as deep as possible to find true meanings. This characteristic dominated Arne's life, his philosophical success was dominated by the questioning of all (much which is taken for granted), a honest sceptic...but how in the world can one be such a joyous and silly person simultaneously? - this is a near impossible task for me to phanthom, one of the many components which made Arne such a marvel of a human being.