Kanokwan asked:

Do you mind if I would like to know your opinion about the words, 'The bird don't see the sky...The
fish don't see the water...and The Human don't see the Earth.' I think it's a kind of philosophy and I
want another opinion, please.

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The words, 'The bird don't see the sky, the fish don't see the water and the Human don't see the
Earth' do suggest to me deeply philosophical ideas.

What I see are in fact two fundamentally different approaches to the branch of philosophy that
Aristotle called 'First Philosophy', which came to be known as Metaphysics.(The term derives from
the title given to Aristotle's treatise on First Philosophy which the librarians at Alexandria classified
'after the Physics' or 'meta ta Phusica'.)

What does it mean to say that the fish doesn't see the water? We know that water is only a part of the
world. For the fish, however, the world IS the water it swims in. The analogy suggested here is that
human beings believe that the world in which they live, the world of Earth, water and air - or planets,
solar systems and galaxies - is 'all there is'. Metaphysicians from Parmenides and Plato onwards
have argued that this belief is wrong. There is another 'world', outside space and time, which is in
some sense the 'ultimate reality'. A well known example of this view is the belief that there exists a
God who views the universe 'under the aspect of eternity'.

However, I believe that there is another, strikingly different way of understanding the remark about
the bird, the fish and the human.

What the fish doesn't see is the water, because water is everywhere. What the bird doesn't see is the
sky, because its freedom of movement is not restricted in the way ours is. The sky is a problem for
human beings, and that is what makes us aware that there is such a thing as 'the sky'. According to
this interpretation, what human beings fail to see is the world asa world. By contrast with the
transcendentmetaphysics of Plato and traditional theology, metaphysicians in the twentieth century
such as Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger have sought an understanding of the universal
features of experience, or logical structure of the universe, which we do not perceive just because
they never fail to be present.

According to this second view, there is no second, ultimate, reality. There is only this reality, this
world. What human beings ignorant of metaphysics fail to see is the world as an articulated totality, a
meaningful whole.

Geoffrey Klempner