Kleine Welten. Über Leben

Whoever strives to make a useful statement, of whatever kind, about the world needs a model of the earth, a map, a simplification. In short: a view of the world. Because the world in its entirety can barely be grasped with our view of it, and maps on a scale of 1:1 are so hard to read. The philosopher Markus Gabriel was inspired to write an entire book about it: Warum es die Welt nicht gibt – why the world does not exist but everything else does, like plastic waste, shipwrecks, washing machines, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s books and mayflies. Incidentally, those who are troubled by how the world works have always, throughout history, dreamed of islands on which humankind can start over, rebuild from ground zero – and conceive a better society en miniature, or blanket it with dystopian horror, as an exaggeration of all the bad that surrounds us. This perhaps also explains humankind’s odd fascination with theatre: a place to get together to build models, to spread out maps in strange scales, a place for time travel and island spirits, a landing field for alien life, in the middle of nowhere.